So last week I went to yoga on Monday night at a local place that definitely appears to be the main center of happ-nin yoga around here, and took a Jivamukti class. Jivamukti is a type of yoga that two Manhattanite folks started in the ‘80s that focuses a lot on ahimsa, or nonviolence (very much in the form of vegan living), and has a pretty vigorous post-Ashtanga vinyasa-flow approach. Anyway. From what I understand, in order to call oneself a Jivamukti teacher, as opposed to someone who teaches yoga and was trained and certified by Jivamukti teachers, one must adhere to a certain kind of class structure and style. And I get this in one sense – Jivamukti needs to protect its brand, and it can’t have way off-base teachings with its name attached to it happening all over the place. So, sure. It was in the back of my head, though, at this class, that this teacher couldn’t fully be himself within the parameters of this method. It’s probably not true – there’s certainly lee-way available – but that was one distraction about the class for me. It felt so very by-the-book in terms of the little snippets of yoga wisdom that came out that I wondered if the teacher really felt it. Well, it’s also that he rambled a bit – like he knew what he should be offering up but didn’t really know how to say what he was trying to say. His chattiness ran a little long, which to me indicated a level of searching as he was talking, which meant his vision wasn’t concrete to him yet.
This is something I want to keep in mind for my own teaching. Sincerity is important. Lack of sincerity is extremely obvious, no matter how well you can “say” the words. And I’ve noticed this in the classes that I’ve been teaching – part of me feels like I need to hand out some kind of peace/love guidance thing to give to the class, and it’s pretty tough to articulate peace/love feelings genuinely. First of all, it’s hard to articulate them at all. “You know, peace and stuff.” Second, communicating one’s feelings genuinely and succinctly enough in a class context requires serious choice of words and clarity of thought, so you have to know and mean what you say. Third, hell to muffins I am no beacon of successful peace/love for someone to model and I don’t want to suggest that any yoga information I have to offer represents my confidence or achievement of something great.
Which leads to me to the fourth, which is that peace/love isn’t the primary thing for me in yoga right now. The teacher last week, in spite of my feelings about his convictions and his teaching, said something that really rang in my mind – he said that if you are doing yoga postures in a checklist kind of way to feel accomplishment then you are missing the point of yoga. And this is something I do. I am pretty caught up in the athleticism of yoga. I love feeling myself progress in postures that have been eluding me because they require more strength than I have, and I feel pretty pleased with myself when I notice I have gained the strength to do something. I am mostly motivated to do yoga by my desire to exert my energy and expand my vocabulary of movements so that I can really get sweaty. The sheer exertion feels like a huge relief, and I can purge some anxiety and shed the day away, but this mostly happens because of the physical fatigue, not because I connect with the Universal like a champ. Well, actually, I have usually considered my exertion to BE my connection with the Universal, but there is definitely an element of the inner world that is lacking right now, something I’m just not going for. I can feel transcendent etc. when I am doing my postures, and I do my final relaxation on the floor, and I sit still and try to focus on my breathing, but I’m not as gung-ho about it as I am the pure work-out part of it. So I’d like to up the ante a little bit on my spiritual hocus-pocus, so that maybe I’ll have something more genuine to offer to future classes about the inner-world aspect of yoga practice.
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