oh, samskara…

I took a class recently where, I felt, the teacher was heavily egoic and focused on creating distance between herself and the students. I read it in the way she spoke and the way she gave adjustments- she adjusted me in ways where, if I were to respond verbally, I would have said, “No, actually, I’ve checked with alignment experts and read Iyengar and am currently listening to my body and am 99% sure that this is the correct expression of the pose for my body right now.” Instead, I tried her adjustments although my body was not loving the idea- and, sure enough, the practice was uncomfortable and definitely not meditative. It felt like her adjustments, to me and others, and her verbal instructions, were all centered around her saying “I know more about yoga than you.”
Whether this was true is, of course, pretty irrelevant. How would I know, empirically, that she had ego issues? And how would that knowledge benefit me? No, this was all about my experience with it. I perceived a certain dynamic. Wanting to both preserve my own ego (I’d also like to think I know quite a bit about hatha yoga) and have an enjoyable class, I constructed certain defenses.
I didn’t realize this at the time. The next morning, I had a discussion with a friend and, of course, felt like they were trying to assert some kind of intellectual status over me and reacted. Slowly, I realized I was mindlessly repeating the pattern from the night before, softened up a bit, and we were both able to learn a lot from the conversation.
I’m bringing this up as a reminder that yoga doesn’t necessarily happen on the mat. In class, it had just been calisthenics, and not letting go of that reaction was definitely not yoga. The next day, with that sudden spark of awareness- that was yoga.
Maybe that teacher, through no merit of her own, wasn’t such a terrible teacher after all.