365 Days of Yoga - Day 8

Early morning class with Ashleigh.

Ashleigh is dreamy. She is one of those people who just beams. You know the kind of person I'm talking about? I can't help but grin at her, all the time. And when she mentioned off-handedly this morning that she is originally from Boulder, Colorado...it all started to make sense. There must be something in the water out there in Boulder...

Before class Ashleigh let slip that she was going to be trying something "new" today, and was glad that I was going to be in class. Which made me feel, well...super cool. I'm going to love this new thing, I thought, I don't care what it is! I am going to make. Ashleigh. Proud.

The "new thing" ended up being this great Atlas-holding-the-world-on-his-shoulders Kundalini inspired pose, which we sort of dipped into and out of (and which I did, in fact, love--I highly recommend just standing with your feet wide, throwing your arms open, leaning your head back, and tell me if you don't immediately feel like a superstar) and which, she told us, she had to hold for 8 minutes straight in the Kundalini class where she learned it. Which would be...rough. And possibly amazing. It definitely made me want to take a Kundalini class. (I used to have this fantasy that if I took a Kundalini class I would just turn into this wild haired woman who walks with my pelvis out and rides around on rollerskates, listening to Ani Difranco, but now I think maybe it would just kick my ass.)

But in addition to the whole 'holding up the world' thing, what I walked away from class remembering was the repeated reminder from Ashleigh that, "All stress is caused by the resistance to what is". All stress is caused by the resistance to what is. She talked about being next to people on the subway cursing under their breath, people walking down the street, shaking their head, and how it made her think of this little idiom. "I don't know," she said, "they might be happy...but I have a feeling there might be a little resistance there to what is."

Later that day I found myself in Macy's...trying to return some shirts I'd ordered online (that was a mistake...) and as I was descending on an escalator I saw a woman on the floor above me, walking down the aisle between clothing sections, shrieking and smacking herself on the head. Another woman, a shirt in her hand, watched this with her mouth literally agape. As if she had never seen, nor imagined that such a thing was possible--such outward and unabashed misery, and I could not help but think about Ashleigh, and resistance to what is, and what, if anything, that woman in Macy's might have to teach me about that.