Grumpy Yogi - Part I

I saw a woman during my yoga practice today.

That sounds creepy. I didn't actually "see" her. But the image of this stranger has kept flashing back to me. Each time, my chest would burn.

I saw her a few months earlier at a yoga class. It was an "all level" flow class but the teacher was famous for challenging sequences. That day, the lesson aimed for serious upper body strengthening. For about 50% of the 90-minute class, we were either doing press-ups or holding different variations of plank. Halfway through the class, my shoulders were already giving out and I could barely think straight, or look straight with all the sweat rolling into my eyes. Then I saw her, among the loud grunts and pantings in the room, holding a perfect side-plank at the back of the room.

Her eyes were half-closed and she was smiling. Her trunk was as steady as a rock and she reached one arm gracefully over her head. There was such a meditative serenity around her and she looked not bothered at all with the current physical intensity. At this beautiful sight, in addition to all the aches and soreness i was experiencing in my body, my chest started to burn.

It was anger.

I never went back to that class. But when I was practicing by myself or in other less-demanding classes, I kept remembering the image of that woman. Every time I saw her peaceful, straight as-a-board side-plank, my chest would burn and I would immediately brush the image off my mind. But by avoiding my anger at her, I became angry at yoga. I became frustrated at the slow pace I was making progress. I was so obsessed with getting certain advanced poses that I hurt myself from repetitive rash attempts. I became truly, a woeful and grumpy person carrying around a yoga mat.

But today, with the same image came a new perspective. I once read in a novel about a group of people obsessed with filling up on berries. They spent all day sitting on hard rocks in the woods, consuming berries, and constantly worried about obtaining more. But the impeding shortage of berries wasn't the real problem. Their discomfort, in actuality, came from the hard rocks that dug into their butts. For reasons unfathomable to observers, these people would rather insist on getting even more berries than take a look at their seat and move to somewhere nicer. In a similar case, I would rather obsess myself with acquiring certain advanced yoga poses, even by constantly putting my body through pain and strain, than mentally muscle up and take a look at the seat I am sitting on. The uncomfortable seat that has tormented me all this time, I now realized, was the way I perceived my own imperfect body.