For months I've pondered writing on Devotion To A Harsh Guru (other working titles: Getting Off On Bottom, The Infinite Strength Of Selflessness, or A Southern Woman's Marriage Handbook), but kept getting hung up in realizing that I do not, in fact, have anything like a clear understanding on this.  I can't write about it - the merits and dangers of unconditional devotion to something or someone in the face of what appears to most everyone else as an insanely ill-fated path - because I'm too tangled up to see it, but not tangled enough to forget that the essence of being deceived is ignorance of the fact*.  However, I will say a few things about finding a teacher.  We can just wander on down that road, since I don't pretend to have any authority on any of this. Sometimes I resist saying I'm a "teacher" because it implies that I actually "teach" when I just set up opportunities.  Making time and space for practice is the long and the short of what I do.  Less of a president, more of a community organizer.

Even so, I honor the fact of others' trust in me, and try to find teachers of my own so that I can be more helpful to the people in my life.  Looking for a teacher is like choosing a personal trainer.  The one I like will probably not give me the most profound results.  The one I dread will.  Many of you may have just assumed that the one I like is a softy, and the one I dread a Nazi, but allow me to point out that even if my preference is the Nazi, I'm not going to grow as deeply if I'm simply getting what i want, be it 6 pack abs or naptime in the steam room.

I teach 2 kinds of yoga, basically.  Vinyasa and Restorative.  Yang and Yin.  Vinyasa is active, vigorous, builds heat, strength and endurance.  Restorative is passive, gentle, cools, releases and soothes.  I love them both, but most of my students prefer one or the other.  Here's an impolite example: Type A stress freaks with jobs and kids and frequent flier miles like vinyasa.  Laid back, unemployed, out of shape stoners like restorative**  These stereotypes are typically true because we typically like the familiar.  What we need, however, is often a bit of the opposite.  Workaholics need restorative yoga more than anyone, and, I can assure you, it is excruciating for them.  I have a few students who regularly challenge themselves to take the medicine and get through an hour or so of the very last thing on Earth they would want to be doing, and I applaud them.  They are practicing balance.  Or they enjoy torturing themselves.  Which could mean, if that's what is comfortable, they should maybe try the opposite, which would, in this case, be the thing of similar constitution (hair-of-the-dog-related), unless taken in too large a portion, and so on.

Which is it?  I have no freaking idea, not about you and not about me, so I practice both, and watch my response to each practice shift from Hooray to Oh God Help Me and back again.  I'm wiggly that way.  It's how balance works.  Stand on one foot, notice the shifting.  I like to assure myself that teetering back and forth isn't an indication that one is failing to balance, but that one is defining the center by process of elimination.  The way we do with our beliefs***.  One day we believe one thing, the next day it seems we need contradiction, the following day yet another belief may prove helpful, and so it goes.  If this metaphor holds, what we will briefly glimpse, and ultimately rest with, is none of the above.  All beliefs, all practices are tiny nudges of propulsion, pushing and pulling us into and out of the poles.  In the center, none are needed.

If moving, believing and feeling become unnecessary, what will we do with our time, you ask?  Well, you'll have to ask someone else.  I've never been in the center for longer than a few seconds.  But if you are having trouble filling your schedule due to extreme equanimity, please consider attending yoga class and I'll be sure to knock you around some. 


GRATUITOUS SOLICITATION: Yoga sessions would make a very nice holiday gift for your dearly beloved workaholics or couchpotatoes.  As always, rates are flexible.  Email me.


*Try to sleep at night, pondering this.
**Let it also be made clear that I am fully aware that workaholics experience periods of couchpotato, and stoners have an inner type A.
***Presto change-o!  Physical body translates to mental body!  I'll let you do the emo body as a take home quiz.