Yoga Adventure

This is my office:

Or part of it. I’m settling into the different aspect of my work, and today my focus was yoga. 

I’m a Kundalini yoga teacher. I started my teacher training in my first week of college and I’ve been teaching on and off ever since. When I studied abroad in Scotland and France, I taught my classmates. This continued in France until I picked a set with too much jumping and the director had to come in to tell us we had broken the one rule in this old building, no dancing and no jumping! No more yoga after that.

While I’ve been teaching for a few weeks now, today was a particularly special day. Outside of my usual Tuesday-Thursday teaching routine, I made the trek into town on a Monday to teach the first class of the morning. Pati and Hector, the owners of the yoga studio were encouraging me, “Are you ready for today? It’s going to be a really big class!” I was excited. Once a month, yogis from neighboring cities, traveling an hour or more, to practice at Karuna Yoga, and today, I was the highlighted teacher.

Kundalini yoga is a rigorous yoga that stretches you to your physical limits so that you can move beyond them. Practice to become limitless. With a new group, I often catch myself wondering about the experience of my students - will be too hard, will they be irritated that it’s not the traditional flow yoga they were expecting, or will they be weirded out by the strange chanting and the white fabric on my head? I prepared the room with excitement and anxiety. 

Curiosities and doubts traveled easily through my mind as I sat down on my yoga mat. Everything was in place. There was my harp. There was my flute and my new ocarina.

Mexico is known for creating the most exquisite clay flutes shaped like animals called ocarinas. I bought two on my trip to Atlisco and I was ready to play it for the first time in public today!

It was 8:30, the start time for my class, and the room was empty except for me. By 8:35, a few students began to trickle in.

“Don’t panic,” I told myself. This would be like my fourth birthday. I turned four in Nicaragua and planned a big party for my preschool friends. The house was ready, the piñata in place and the cake in the back. I sat on the front stoop waiting for my first guests to arrive. I waited there for an hour. No one arrived. 

Exactly one hour past the party’s start time, my first guest appeared. A few minutes later, my second. Soon the house was full of little friends, all acting as if arriving an hour late to a children’s party was the most reasonable thing in the world. This class would be like that, I concluded. Only not an hour late, more like 15 minutes. 

No problem! I had planned ahead for that. I always design an hour and fifteen minute class here even though the classes are an hour and a half, because I’m in another culture and it’s reasonable to assume we will start a little late.

By 8:45 the same seven students sat looking at me. No one moved and I began to wonder if maybe there had been some confusion – perhaps this wasn’t the special day and I wasn’t the highlighted teacher. Seven seems like a good number for a yoga class, but when you’re expecting 25, it’s a let down.

I had to start. There was no point in spending my brain waves revisiting unmet expectations; better to meet the students in front of me and give them the best that I had. I explained a bit about Kundalini yoga, we tuned in with our beginning prayer “Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo”. We were off!

At 9:05, in the midst of a neck stretching exercise, the door from the street burst open. Students came flowing in, hugging the people present that they knew, gathering their blankets and bolsters, waving hello to Pati, the owner. 35 minutes into my class, I had 28 faces beaming back at me. It was just like my birthday party! My little friends had not forgotten my birthday party and now I had a studio filled with loving, late energy.

We made up for the lost 35 minutes in the 55 we had left! The students from Cordoba and Fortin had come just in time for the fun stuff. Three minutes of chanting, five minutes of crazy arm shaking, and 7 minutes of holding one posture without moving a muscle. I had picked a wacky set for the class and the students met me with stamina, courage and enthusiasm! To me, yoga is the place to safely meet adversity and laugh at it, stay with it and celebrate what it can teach.

The class ended with 20 minutes of relaxation and meditation to my celtic harp, flute and ocarina. Adding music to the class cleansed the space. The students let the music carry them – in a journey, in their state of rest, in their heart. They opened their eyes with a bit of a glow.

My class was truly a community event. From the studio, we rejoined each other at the weekly organic market and restaurant for brunch. We talked of yoga, vegetarianism, native trees that are going extinct, and how to teach kids about mindfulness. One of the things I so admire about the people here is their access to play. The amount of laughter here is astonishing and so joyful! Surrounded by yogis, I didn’t get all the jokes, but I still had a good time! The yoga class was complete and it was a special day!