Yep. Yogi a mat over from me proclaimed me a show off, with a hint of disdain, no less.
My first class back after another pain and fatigue related outage and I was actually feeling alive with the fullness of breath in motion.
The instructor cued crow pose and instead of drawing my knees up to seal with the outsides of my arms, I drew them in toward center and sent them straight up. While suspended in handstand, my focus was on trust and my gaze between my hands but I was peripherally aware of praise from the instructor, followed in tandem by the quip, “Show off!”
Discomfort.
I am pretty comfortable with physical discomfort, especially when I am expecting it and am choosing to engage to my threshold.
Praise during practice prompts squeamishness in me, but the discomfort is typically fleeting.
The words SHOW OFF though, they had definitely captured my attention. Woke up the part in me who spies guilt in every thought and interaction and bears the heavy of my shame. The part who says it is bad to feel good, to need, to stand out, to disobey…. Ok… there may be a gang of parts living in that region of me.
Fortunately, camp had already been set up and flow was in motion on my faithful black Manduka mat. And today’s camp had the feel good of vigorous exertion; alongside the calm of joining mind, breath and movement... Perfect setting to watch the meanderings of mind and the meanings I attach to me, to her and to it.
At the close of practice I felt intensely present, tender, grateful, guilty, somehow bad, alive and hurt. I couldn’t decide whether it’d be more empowering for me to allow my practice without explanation, or to approach the yogi whose words I’d been watching my mind follow onto in so many directions.
Since my M-O is not to speak or confront, I decided to approach her. She didn’t look at me until I was practically squared off to her and it was clear that I was seeking to engage. I looked her in the eyes and very genuinely said, “Thank you. [Pause. Look down and then meet eyes again.] For putting to words what I had most feared… being thought of as a show off… because now I see that this fear is not so scary.”
I told her that I had just come back to my early AM support, sunrise yoga classes, after some time away due to “physical limitations.”
And of course tears began to well up in my eyes. The tears of all of the invisibles; how much of a struggle it is to get out of bed and live every day and how ashamed I am of that… because there’s “no reason,” beyond depression and anxiety (and fellow conglomerates, including pain and fatigue).
She seemed stunned at first, but when the initial hardness and awkwardness softened, and she told me that she had [after her comment] seen me taking many modifications (for “simple” poses like Warrior II, and virtually any sustained posture, engaging deep/lower core/legs) and that she herself had started the AM classes because she lost her job and it helped her to get her day going.
If you saw my other post about craziness and our essential sameness, you can probably see how this again points to us coming from the same place. A place of hurt and in search of Home.
I am lucky she brought to my attention that I care so much about something so little—another person’s perception of my practice, another’s perception of me, at a glance. How lucky I am that it was during practice, when it’s easier to stay with awareness, easier to remember that we all have our own shit and that hers is about her and mine is about me. [I have lots of stories about the continual learning of that lesson ;)] So though we all intersect, overlap and join, we do so within the framework of our individual experiences and knowing… In my mind, set up so perfectly. Our individual expressions of consciousness all so different in presentation and yet there are these always-available undercurrents of sameness. The differences meant to tweak us and teach us… remind of us of the Heart of our hearts.
*yogi – A yogi is a yogi to me, so I don’t use the word yogini for females
*guilty –yes, as though I did something wrong (though Brené Brown’s ‘I am wrong’ shame is present as well)