Vasisthasana All Crazy-Like

Class: 4-5:45pm, "Cosmic Play", Edward

If you think I can do this pose as pictured...well, I'm flattered. Because, if you think that...you would be very, very wrooong-o. There was only one person in class (and mind you, this is super-crazy-advanced class) who could really execute this pose. She was next to me (I think her name was Renee) and all I could do was fall on to my butt with my toe still in my hand and watch her wrap her leg behind her head and fan out into what I have now deemed "Vasisthasana-all-crazy-like" (see above). I think I even said "you are awesome" as she came out of the pose, like her one-woman yoga fan club.

This is actually one of my favorite things about the aforementioned super-crazy-advanced classes--how I am forced to check my ego at the door in the face of so much unattainable work and so many far superior practicioners. It is not only a kind of call-to-arms for my own practice (someday I will get where she is) it's also an opportunity for me to practice humility, to use my beginners-mind, instead of being a big fat show-off (as I can be in some of the open-level classes). Not to mention Favorite Teacher Edward. Who rocks my world.

Edward's classes are always very free-form and creative, and often he gives lots of time for a choose-your-own-adventure practice (i.e. "you've got a few minutes, do some standing poses"), and though I love this aspect of his teaching, it also kind of freaks me out. My audition muscles kick-in when I hear him tell us to "make it your own" or "be creative" and I begin to size-up not only my own "best moves" but everyone's around me. Am I being wild enough? Risky enough? Graceful enough? If Edward happens to walk past me during this "play time" there is a good chance I will fall over or do something backwards or almost kick somebody, and I find myself longing for instruction. I also almost always feel like a downright schlubby yogi, what with all my darting glances and wobbly half-committed poses. Why can't I look like she looks? I think, stealing more glances at graceful creative Renee to the side of me. She may as well be underwater for all the effect gravity seems to have on her. And all I can do is cringe at how much earlier I return to downdog than everyone else and hold my breath until Edward starts calling out poses again.

It's humiliating to me, having been a performer all my life, that I would get such amateur-y stage-fright IN MY YOGA CLASS. However, it is also a great teacher, all this uptight-ness, as I know (smarty-pants that I am) that this self-consciousness comes from the same place as does my vanity--and that it nets the same effect: a separation from myself and from my practice. Because, see, here's the other thing that I know (did I mention I'm a smarty-pants?), graceful Renee is not graceful because she's over there thinking about how graceful she is, she's graceful because she is involved in her practice...I daresay she is graceful because she is so involved with her practice she is actually one with her practice. She is, as they say in some circles, in the flow. I, sitting on my butt with my toe in my hand, gawking at her as she pretzels herself, I am most definitely not in the flow. My body is on the floor and my brain is sitting at the front of the room, running a minute-to-minute compare and contrast of me v. the rest of the class.

But then, something lovely happens: we continue to play with Vasisthasana variations, moving back and forth between standing poses and inversions and Vasisthasana+ and at a certain point, without thinking about it, I am suddenly WITH MYSELF. It's nothing outwardly too obvious--perhaps I'm moving a bit more slowly, more fluidly, perhaps I'm looking around a little less, but inside it is like a whole new world, and it clicks--how simple it is!--it is my practice, I suddenly realize, it is my practice and all that I can really pay attention to is how it is going for me. It's the difference between walking into an audition room to do what you think the director wants and going into an audition room to do what you want--it's a subtle shift, but it means absolutely everything. It is why you return to the mat in the first place. It is the thing you fell in love with and the thing you keep working to return to. It is the thing that makes the whole world drop away, that says fuck-all to what everyone else is doing, and that allows you the space to see and hear and feel your own body, even when you're trying to put your feet behind your freakin' head. Suddenly there I am, breathing, paying attention, shifting and adjusting to fit my own bodies quiet little desires and aversions...the simplest hardest thing in the world: to pay attention.

And do you want to know something? Later that same class...I caught Renee watching my practice out of the corner of her eye...(not that I pay attention to that kind of thing...)