Learnin' n' Unlearnin'

...it’s been...good gawd...over six months since the two hundred hour certification...during which I’ve kinda taught yoga five times...groups of one to three people...only one of whom insisted on drinking a beer while practicing...(as well as assisting with that class of, I’m told, two-hundred and fifty people)....meaning, ya could say, I’ve not been overly ambitious...perhaps lazy....or, maybe, to take a more positive view, simply humble...egoless...just too damned enlightened...

...at Kripalu, they said what we were doing was less about learning than un-learning...and I most certainly did that....still confused about those esoteric fancy-schmancy Sanskrit-derived terms...particularly that pesky pair: right and left....used, generally, in reference to something even more confusing: the human body...its anatomy, physiology, alignment...

...over a series of weekends, beginning tomorrow, I’m gonna be continuing my yogic education through a fifty hour Align and Flow training...based in principles of anusara...a Sanskrit term which, as I understand it, means something like don’t care how long you’ve been practicing yoga, your alignment’s waaaaaaay off...
...this time, it's only a twenty-minute drive away...(maybe a forty-five minute bike ride, if I could figure a route that wouldn’t likely leave me sprawled out on the blacktop with alignment off in ways all the king’s yoga teachers might never put back together)...with a great teacher I’ve known a few years, and at least one fellow student I know...who's an advanced teacher, too, actually....raising suspicions I could be one of the more unlearned persons in the room...the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel of yoga...Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yogi...sittin' on my mat muttering downward facin’ dawg?! whut th’ heck’s that?!....I'm looking forward to it...

Two Reasons to Practice Yoga

...gorgeous afternoons...rumbling Wissahickon and gently rippling Schuylkill reflecting vibrant greens and blues as the bike floats past with minimal effort, beyond sculpture garden and gilded greco-roman art museum, all the way to the studio...cheerful vinyasa and laughter with teachers and students, all friends...then fueling up at the Indian buffet place with samosas and malai kofta for the ride home...

...and those other times...grey and cloudy outside, but even moreso in....roll out the mat for lack of any better idea, thinking maybe just maybe this’ll get me through the day...and, somehow, it does....not so much providing an esoteric heightened state that can only be described in Sanskrit or with reference to something some semi-mythic incredibly enlightened person wrote in India or Tibet three thousand years ago....and not a spiritual orgasm to be translated into new age positive affirmations or old time religion or a marketing campaign for the latest Yoga for Rich People With Big Houses and Nice Butts© DVD series....but revealing at least a window...some little bit of space...not much, maybe, but enough...that didn’t appear to be there before...