Please, let me stay forever a student
And I promise to never take that role for granted.
I was teaching yoga in Thailand this past winter, and although this was not my first time teaching at this retreat center or abroad in general, it was a unique and challenging experience- one that has transformed the way I look at teaching yoga or other mindfulness practices. I had been here before in this same role, blending my living and working situation into one, and to be honest, for the most part, it was magical. I woke up with a “pinch me” attitude most days, greeting the jungle, or the island, or wherever it was my teachings had taken me. But this past winter was different for me- there were new lessons, and I was well, different this time around too.
Full disclosure, my Dad had recently passed away just 5 months prior to my arrival back in Thailand. I had hit a new part of my grief journey, one where the pain had really set in and I was realizing that there was no escaping my new reality. I needed to push through though, I was living my dream life after all, right? Why should I have an excuse to not do my absolute best and give my all during this time? It wouldn’t be fair to the others I was working with, and mostly, it wouldn’t be fair to the students.
I hit a place where I didn’t know how to teach anymore- I felt like every word I spoke was a mistake and something within me started to cry out, “Why are you so inadequate?!”, and it did so often. Some days, I could barely stand the way I felt inside. I was scared, but only of myself and of letting others down. I turned to my practice, again and again in the refuge of my own room, and still, I would leave that space and go back to teaching only to find the same issues of judgment coming from myself and others. There was a lot of critique of teaching styles being thrown about, and frankly, it hurt. I could feel myself collecting resentments, and I knew it wasn’t good.
Ultimately, I disapproved of me.
I felt a certain pressure I hadn’t felt before, and I see now that I was placing expectations on myself to be the teacher my peers wanted me to be. Particularly, I felt a sense of anxiety come over me when it came time to introduce ourselves to the next batch of eager yogis at the start of each week. It was an exciting time but one that made me feel very uncomfortable. In this introduction, I had to somehow introduce who I was as a teacher and put my experience into a time frame or in some fashion list my accolades as a teacher. And when I did this, I felt dirty and conflicted. There was also the fact that I had more years of experience teaching asana than my peers, and that quite early on in the season one of my fellow teachers confided in me that she felt “insecure” about this fact.
I wanted to remove that insecurity all together, to navigate this discomfort with grace, and I certainly didn’t want to let people down by not being as much of a teacher that they expected of me. My every effort to mold myself into who I thought they needed me to be made things worse; it added to the tensions, and went further against the grain of who I am. But the truth, at least as I see it here, is that none of this fear was relevant to what we were there to do. Hell, I don’t even have that much experience in the grand scheme of things anyways. It felt to some degree, disrespectful to this tradition that we should quantify our years of experience as some sort of measure at how adequate we will be when guiding people through these ancient wisdoms.
Krishnamacharya himself, a true scholar of this tradition and hero of reviving modern yoga as we know it today, did not refer to himself as a teacher, or master of any kind, and by all means, he was one, but this was not worn by him as a badge of merit or honor. I feel there is something potent in his lessons, especially as it pertains to being a teacher of yoga.
It really hit me when reading the following passage in “Health, Healing and Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya”, by T.K.V. Desikachar, the son and pupil of Krishnamacharya:
“To begin with, to live a life of yoga is about continuous practice and self-study. This is not a question of style. Like all individuals, teachers of yoga will exhibit every conceivable kind of personality, temperament, and human problems. They experience failed marriages, personal suffering, and stress. They do not all go around in Indian dress. Nor — despite what Europeans, in particular, seem to expect — are they all calm and serene.”
We are all always going to be students in this life, and that is a unifying force to be reckoned with. Many of us do our best to recognize this fact, but the judgment and insecurities still arise from expectations both self-imposed and otherwise. I’d like to seize the ever-rising opportunities in each passing moment to re-commit myself to being a student, and to very simply, start again. To give ones’ self the permission to begin again where you’re at, in the mess of whatever is being experienced at the moment, for that is really a courageous act of resourcing the fundamental tools of this practice.
I look back at this past winter and observe with more grace now that I was not the best teacher I could be, but I was very much a student, and I was struggling. There was a very visceral sensation of being judged, and even unworthy of my position there, but this is it- the very crux of this practice- for there is no greater yoga shala in the world then the little world we create within our own consciousness’.
It all seems very timely now; these points of reflection are serving to be invaluable during all the strangeness of a global pandemic in which none of us are completely certain of our futures. It is in this sentiment that I prioritize and honor my role as a student before my role as a teacher but also recognizing that they are inevitably on the same path home- to harmony, unity, and the all-pervading truths of The Divine.
