Email to My Yoga Teacher

Tammy,

I think I know why I go to your yoga class.

Your classes remind me of being in preschool.

We arrive with our own blankets, or in yoga terms, a mat. You greet us with a warm smile and some encouraging words.   We know that you will take care of us.

You then ask us to get down onto our mats for child’s pose.
Immediately my mind harkens back to the warm blankets I had in preschool when I was 4 years old.  I start to believe my mat is actually a magic carpet and that it will take me away into dream land.  In fact, you instruct us to do ujjayi breathing (some sort of back-of-the throat yoga breathing) and we are supposed to sound a little like Darth Vader.  Wow, I am supposed to be a character in Star Wars.

Actually I’m on an adult journey and I don’t know it.

You then ask us to put our bodies into various postures or poses; downward dog, upward dog, cobra, cat tilt, triangle pose, warrior I, etc.  You even come around to each one of us to make sure we are doing things right; in the parlance of yoga, you adjust us.

As we are moving our bodies, you tell us not to judge ourselves and that everybody is okay, exactly as they are.  We don’t need to look at our neighbors because everybody is different.  This is what we learned at the wee young age.

You gauge the class and see how well we are adapting to this new language; kind of like in preschool when we are being taught to tie shoes or beginning to read.  Little do we know that besides the opening up of our hip joints, you are opening up our minds to patience, to forgiveness, and to be in the present.  Of course you are teaching us lessons on how to be good people and succeed without us even knowing it.

As we go into pigeon pose you tell us that the feeling in our hips is good for us.  In the most sweetest of ways you tell us that this feeling is just an unused body part saying hello.  The more we visit again, the more friendly the feeling will be.  You whisper to us that if we practice every day, the pigeon will be a great friend and we will have lots of fun together.  Sounds like practice makes things easier to me, and even a lesson from Sun Tzu (keep your friends close and your enemies closer).  Also, if the pigeon is befriended, his/her kind may never make droppings on our heads.

After we’ve extended and contorted the body and stimulated the cortex, it is time for shavasana.  You smoothly say we should take this time to float into space.  Sounds to me like lay down on our mats, I mean carpets, and go to sleep.  You even come around and massage each one of our little heads.  The only thing missing is the milk and cookies.

We then hear a bell signaling the end.  Our last remnants of innocence is ending. You say Namaste, release us into the big bad world and tell us we’re on our own for life’s real problems.

Gary Kahn