More homily grits, anyone?

I was saying a few posts back that one of the things I enjoy about yoga is the anecdotal method of many teachers. Weekends are when I indulge in an orgy of yoga, and going to yoga is sort of like going to services at the Unitarian church, with its uplifting messages and absence of outright religious references (indeed, the church I attended as a child had a giant branch of driftwood instead of a cross over the altar). The yoga homilies are simple and thoroughly spelled out, usually inoffensive if occasionally a little saccharine or New Agey. Still, pleasant to mull over when you're holding a gruelingly prolonged Viribadrasana 2 (Warrior 2) or attempting the nearly impossible Tittibhasana (Firefly pose).

In my Saturday class, scene of the attempted Tittibhasana, S brought real-life experience into the studio by telling us about how she discovered several amputees among her competitors in a recent foot race. It got her to thinking that our minds, not our bodies, are what set limits for us. So in our yoga practice, she asked us to investigate what exactly was holding us back, our genuine physical limitations or our mental limitations. Uplifting but not enough to lift me up into Tittibhasana (a pose in which the weight of the body is balanced on the palms of the hands and the legs are extended over the upper arms).

And on Sunday, G urged us to take our yoga out of the studio and into our real lives, telling us about having spent hours with her daughter making flowers (Or was it fliers? My hearing is poor) for an event she was hosting and placing them in a common area of her building. When she returned to the area, they had disappeared, presumably removed by her super. She freaked out and in her disturbed state stumbled into a bench, gashing her shin. It turned out that the flowers (fliers?) had merely been placed in another area of the building, and all was well. The moral: to take some slow deep breaths and assess a situation before taking action.

Good ideas, no?

Yogis bearing the gift of gab

I suppose all good teachers are natural-born storytellers, but I'm impressed by the deftness with which some of my yoga teachers spin a simple yarn of sometimes pedestrian events into golden themes. Three examples of everyday patter from my last three classes:

On Saturday, to fulfill part of my in-service requirement for Yoga Alliance, I assisted a senior teacher, J, in a restorative workshop pegged to the equinox. She opened with a brief history of traditions associated with the two times of year when day and night are equal in length. She identified several common fall rituals, like thanksgiving and resolution-making, and then structured her subsequent teaching around those themes.

On Sunday, G began her "virgin yoga" class by recounting a psychology experiment in which newborn kittens were reared in an environment containing only horizontal lines or only vertical lines. By the age of four months, those raised in a horizontal-lines-only environment were unable to perceive vertical lines and would blunder into, say, chair legs, whereas those raised in a vertical-lines-only environment were unable to perceive horizontal lines. She cleverly turned this into an instruction about consciously enhancing our receptiveness to challenging postures. In a sense, she said, the horizontally raised kittens didn't believe in the possibility of vertical lines and thus couldn't see them. Similarly, you cannot move into an asana if you don't believe you can, so achieving a physical posture starts with forming a mental image of yourself in the pose.

On Monday, B opened her power-yoga class with an anecdote about being approached on the street by a man with his hands raised. Naturally, she tried to detour around him, but he pursued her. To her relief, rather than mug her, he high-fived her. She turned and watched him make his way down the block, high-fiving everyone he encountered. It made her day, she said. The point: to strive for an attitude of openness and refrain from letting our expectations limit our experience.

These aren't particularly brilliant—they're just a random sample—but they point to a few of the things I love about yoga: the resourceful use of language, the striving to unite the formal practice of yoga with the rest of life, and the infusion of meaning into physical processes.