Just Keep Moving


Wherein Our Heroine Goes On.
I am a big baby when I don't feel well, and yesterday Spring got me good. I have never really suffered from allergies, but we have not had rain in quite a while and I had itchy eyes and a sore throat yesterday. Worst of all, I felt like I was stuck in a mental fog that made writing and editing very, very difficult. Considering the fact that I had to write a press release and an internal communications memorandum for my favorite client, this was not good. I try very hard to be 100% and give 100% with what I am doing in my freelance work. I managed to get things done, and the client seemed to think that things were up to speed, but I felt mired in misery.

Then I got to take my fog and my misery and teach an evening Yoga class with it. When I arrived at the studio, the temperature was over 80 degrees. Yuck. We don't teach "hot" Yoga at our studio, so I am not sure why it was so warm in there, but at least I had arrived early enough to bring the temperature down to a reasonable level. I had never taught this particular class before (I really don't like teaching in the evening), and it was a funny group of personalities - lots of flat affect, lots of facial non-response. Professor Z wrote yesterday about wanting her students to like her - I definitely suffer from that in the beginning of a class. New personalities and new faces I can't read conspire to make me feel insecure. By the end of class, though, I don't care if they like me. I want them to understand.

Since I teach beginners, I see so many hunched and rounded shoulders, I tend to spend a lot of time working on people's shoulders and upper backs. I use tricks that I have known for more than seven years to get people's shoulder blades from splaying out and their upper backs from rounding. It is such old news to me that it is always a bit surprising to see the lights go on with people when they really get it. Surprising, but also fun - I believe that the shoulder blades, while they don't contain the secrets to the universe, somehow unlock potential and make a bunch of things possible. Getting there is not easy, though. You can't see your back, so you have to rely on how things feel. You have to go on trust. You have to be brave: moving your shoulders back to where they should be has a flip side - many people rise to stand upright and suddenly feel like they are sticking their chests out. This feels provocative and aggressive to some of my students - I can see the cognitive dissonance rising up in them. Yoga does not equal provocative, Yoga does not equal aggressive.

I kept them moving though, and the concern in some faces transformed to gentle comprehension. Movement helps a lot of things.
Posted: Wednesday - April 20, 2005 at 08:24 AM         | |

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