It's Learnin' Time

I leave in two days for my first weekend of yoga teacher training (there are eight three-day weekends total, all four hours away in Chicago). I’m a little afraid of being a student again. I went to an info session for the teacher training in November and got a little taste of the nerves I’ll be encountering. One part of the class is “looking at bodies,” where each student models the poses of the day so that we can see how proper alignment looks on different people.

A woman volunteered to model downward-facing dog pose. The trainer asked what could change to make it a fuller expression of the pose. Her hands and feet are too close together, I thought. Any past professor or classmate of mine would say that I’m always a willing participant in class, but instead of speaking up I choked down the words.

“Could she move her hands and feet farther apart?” someone asked.

The answer was yes. When the woman stepped her feet back we watched her back lengthen out just as it should.

I hope that I can remember that moment the next time I’m too terrified to speak.

**

The fear of being wrong isn’t my only problem with “looking at bodies.” I love it when a yoga teacher comes around and taps my foot a little to the left or encourages me to bend a little further into a pose. But a whole class of people looking at me? Again, terror.

I realize this is an odd sentiment coming from someone who regularly stands in front of a room full of twenty-five college freshmen for seventy-five minutes at a time. In that situation I have everything planned out and I know a lot about the subject. In this case, I’m the student, and I’m not thrilled about the scrutiny. My hope is that I can muster up some bravery the first few times and it won’t seem so bad after that. Failing that, I will remember that sometimes it hurts to learn. One of the best parts of yoga is learning to accept yourself wherever you are. It seems easy when it's just me. Now I'll have to learn to make it easy while under the gaze of others.