A Curious Practice

Last weekend I taught my first in-person yoga class….well, at least to people who I didn’t know.  I mean, I’ve been roping my family and friends into taking classes from me for months.  But this time, I was teaching strangers.  And honestly, it didn’t go as planned.

I drove up to the small coffee shop and parked my car.  It was really an old house from the 1930’s that had been renovated so it lay nestled in a leafy, quiet, neighborhood.  As I walked up to the door I thought that it looked like it had been repainted but it was just still wet from the rainy morning.  Inside it was warm and smelled of coffee, chai, vanilla, & cinnamon.  I walked around the bustling customers who were waiting in line to place their orders, toting my yoga mat.  The class was to be held outside in the old backyard of this home turned caffeine peddler.  It was a beautiful, quiet space with slick grass, covering the bumpy roots of the old pine trees. As I walked under the canopy of branches raindrops trickled from cones and needles and landed softly on my forehead.  The clouds were moving again overhead like they were conversing with one another and deciding what shapes to form.  I sighed and thought to myself, no one is going to show up for this.

But right at 9am, one student opened the door from the inside of the shop and popped her head out.  I could tell that she was wondering if we were still holding class.  I motioned for her to come out and with a big grin she bounced out the door and across the grass, placing her mat down on the damp earth.

The theme of the class was Ishvara Pranidhana.  It means surrendering to the unknown or the divine.  In this context, surrender isn’t about giving up.  It’s not passive.  Instead it’s about courage, pliability, and self trust.  It’s about the intentional action of surrender.  Fact is,  we are really not in control of much of our life.  There will always be circumstances that we don’t want to have happen, happen.  We will get surprised when we experience things that we never saw coming.  We are surrounded by humans who live their own free will and who do things that we might not like or we wish that they wouldn’t.  We grow old, people change, beliefs shift. 

Ishvara Pranidhana is about learning to accept the path that your life is offering to you, instead of longing for things to be different.

If we hold on too tightly to our vision of how we think things should turn out, we may find ourselves in a constant state of disappointment because nothing ever turns out exactly the way our mind has been spinning the story.  

I started the class with breathwork and theme, some small movements to begin warming up the body.  Connecting breath to movement with less rigidity than we normally would, we tapped into the fluidity of it. During the second sun salutation the rain started to drizzle.  We could see the clouds darkening and hear distant thunder.  I looked at her with a smile to gauge if she was worried about the sprinkling.  She kept moving and going on with her sun salutation, so I continued with the cues. 

Breath, rain, movement. Movement, breath, rain.

It was soft at first, the rain. Like it wanted to learn the postures and feel the warmth of the breath.  But then it went from sprinkles to sheets too steady and slick for us to continue.  Quickly we rolled up our mats and ran for shelter under the big pine tree laughing all the way.

The funny thing is, I’ve realized I was practicing my personal Ishvara Pranidhana that day.  I mean, the situation was less than ideal.  I could have just said I wasn’t going to teach – say it was too risky with the weather.  I could have been upset that things weren’t going along with my grand plans but I eased into it.  I accepted the situation as it was instead of trying to change it or giving up on it.  I was curious.  I wanted to see what would happen and who, if anyone, might show up.  By choosing to stay – to wait and see – to experience my life – I was able to accept what was given to me that day.

Even if the outcome was not what I had envisioned.

I went with the flow that my life was offering and didn’t change course until it was necessary.  If I had jumped ship I would never have felt that warm rain on my face and experienced the ironic joy of the situation.

Such is life, right?  Ups and downs constantly chase us, especially in midlife.  The truth is, human experience is built to throw us around a bit.  We can’t control all of it, hell we can’t control most of it.  Things are going to fall apart, & some of it is going to really suck.  But that doesn’t mean that we have to go down with the wind when it tries to swipe us off our feet.  Maybe we learn to throw open our umbrellas and float for a while, steeping into the practice of surrender, and becoming a bit bendy so that the wind can carry us through.