teaching yoga

I taught a yoga class last night at IYI. Teaching yoga is so peculiar. It is a form of meditation, I am present and focused, with intense ability to concentrate only on what is immediately occurring. Maybe I'll say a word here about what I think meditation is, if you don't mind (thinking out loud through my fingers here). The most general, universal meditation seems to be picking something to focus the mind on (observing the breath, an image, a word). The mind wanders, stops paying attention to the object of concentration, and when some aspect of yourself realizes that your mind has wandered, you say, "Hey, over here, remember?" and go back with your attention on the picture, the breath, whatever. Repeat ad infinitum. What you get, after a long time, is the ability to concentrate on something for several minutes at a stretch without the mind wandering. So simple, but in actuality its mindblowing. Why? Because if your mind is occupied with only one thing, it means it isn't thinking in rapid fire about five trillion other things, which is the 'normal' state of the mind. Once you can hold your chattering mind's attention, you begin to realize all the other things that are always present in your life, but are too quiet and subtle to be noticed when the mind is running rampant. Its as if in the room of your mind there are thousands (in reality, there are many many more than thousands) of monkeys or cats or dogs or babies running around interested in EVERYTHING, and the central control of the mind is busy getting the house cleaned and organized amidst the chaos. And meditation is training everybody to take a nap, or watch tv, or stare at their navel. Anything to get them to shut up and stop moving. Its a breath of quiet and you get to sit on the couch and relax for a minute, or even better, step out onto the porch, sit in your rocking chair and watch the garden grow. This is peace, and this is your true self. Then of course the monkeys get excited about something again, and its back to the grind. Your true self is always there, the couch, the rocking chair is always there in the room, its just that there so much to do that sometimes its hard to sit in it.

The task then becomes to integrate the training technique into daily life, not just when you have time to sit and concentrate. With regular training of the monkeys, during the day while walking down the street or doing the dishes, cooking, taking a shower, everywhere, anywhere, you can think of your object of concentration (say its the breath) and because you have trained your monkeys, they will see that you are noticing your breath and that is a signal for them to sit down and stare at their navels and shut up for a few minutes. And then you start getting one minute at a time during the daily life where things are peaceful. It doesn't matter what the object of concentration is, because this is exactly like training a pet. Repeat repeat repeat. The key here is that it isn't observing your breath that makes you feel peaceful. Its that having well-trained monkeys makes you feel peaceful, and training takes some time.

Now, the reason I like the meditation retreat is that its like sending your mind to doggy training school. With the tight schedule and rules about what is ok and not ok, you put your mind under someone else's discipline. For many many hours at a time. And gradually, slowly, the monkeys settle down for like an entire hour. A whole hour of blissful quiet. Real quiet. Quiet like I've never experienced anywhere on earth or in my life. The quiet peaceful part of yourself gets to come out of its shell and feel the sun and it is such a perfect self you love it so much and you feel so sorry that it doesn't get more attention. And at the 10 day retreat, you start to get days at a stretch of this quiet. and that is where serious healing begins to occur. Healing of your sweet, innocent self, all the little pains that life deals us, and all the big ones too. The hurt comes out of its cave because suddenly its quiet and safe. The hurts are loved and kissed and get to be heard, and often times, they just dissolve into the air like in the Golden Compass (by Philip Pullman) when the souls get released from hell into the air by Lyra and Will.

This whole experience happens in yoga too, but in slightly different and important ways. Basically, in yoga, the object of concentration is the body. Yoga is easier to do than sitting meditation because in yoga the monkeys start doing yoga with you, which is generally more interesting to them than sitting down. Rather than sitting very still, the monkeys are at least all doing the same thing together, so its still very peaceful, but perhaps slightly less intense than what sitting meditation can do. And ultimately, the idea of yoga is to get all the monkeys to do the same exercises together and once they are in sinc and feeling groovy from the stretches, you can gently ask them to sit down and rest for a moment, and perhaps they'd like to inspect their navels? And then you get to sit in your rocking chair. Its a more seductive approach to meditation.

So for me, the more often I do yoga or meditation, the more trained my monkeys get to be quiet for a minute at a time, throughout the day. And the wonderful thing about taking the teacher training for four months, and then continuing my own yoga practice for at least 10 minutes a day (sun salutations when I get out of the shower), is that I am now able to get the monkeys to sit down pretty quickly when I ask them to (I ask them to sit down by noticing my breath as I inhale and exhale). I can't get them to sit for very long, but it allows me to at least tap into a peaceful place (which I consider my 'true self' for lack of a better word) with regularity. Then the task becomes about reminding myself to notice my breath. I try to set up habits of when to notice. So far, I'm aiming for absolutely any time, but I seem to notice my breath regularly (if only for a moment) while I do the dishes, when I'm walking down the street, waiting for the subway/train, and curiously, when I'm waiting for a webpage to upload. This last is funny to me, but very useful since I'm online for work doing research and I have to upload pages all the time.

Anyway, getting very familiar with the quiet space is what I think qualifies yoga teachers to teach. Before class, as I walk to the center or to Melissa's, I observe my breath and get kind of comfortable in the quiet. I let the monkeys snuggle down for a nap. When I am in this quiet space there are two important things that happen for teaching. First is that I can communicate spontaneously and directly what students should do, how to move. I have concentration so I'm not distracted by anything other than the pose we're working on. The second, much more important, is that I own the classroom. When people (me included - I try to attend a yoga class once a week) attend a yoga class, all they are doing is giving another person authority to tell them what to do, and at a deeper level, how to feel. Its far less often about learning the poses or how to do something new. I can see it in my students and I know it in myself. Firstly, I feel that I am telling students that it is ok to take this time and focus on themselves. This is so hard for people to do, to set aside all these daily and worldly concerns and to do something only for themselves. Its the first step towards the peaceful place. Second, students get to give up control. They surrender to a good teacher. I know for myself that a good teacher makes me feel profoundly grateful that for one hour or more, I don't have to manage anything. Of course, all this requires trust, trust that the teacher won't hurt you, physically or emotionally. This trust builds continuously on itself, so you can release more and more the more you attend classes. Thirdly, since I hold the classroom, I get to shape the atmosphere. Students also impact the atmosphere of the class, absolutely, but the more they trust the teacher, the more the teacher gets to define the space. And when I am in a peaceful place, I feel so tender and loving towards this true self of mine, that I am incapable of harming another person, and other people's true selves come out a little bit, because they want to communicate with my true self. It's radical. Its a little party for our inner selves.

Aside from this lovely experience of getting to give people the opportunity to be themselves, last night I realized something peculiar I get out of teaching for my own self. I'm not quite sure if I can articulate it yet, but I'm going to try a little bit. Teaching a yoga class is another form of meditation, like the sitting and yoga forms, in that I get all the same benefits of concentration, clarity, and some sort of peace. But the extremely profound difference is that other people are in this place with me. Meditation is inherently personal, and inherently only experienced alone. No one else can feel what you feel, no one. Everyone feels their own thing, this is an ultimate truth. But teaching somehow is a fissure in this truth. I have to think about it more. Teaching yoga is an entirely new thing from doing yoga, but it is still the same ultimately, which I think means that I am getting to experience the deepest reality of existence (which is what meditation and yoga are about) in a new way, and it's once again blowing my mind.