Monthly Archives: June 2010

Taught My First Yoga Class


Jade, the owner of the yoga studio I frequent and my teacher, asked me if I would take her Wednesday drop-in class this week.

I hesitated not.

This coming weekend will be my final teacher training session. Tests, demo teaching, Sutra presentations – the works. Teaching for real was just the thing I needed to prepare.

Over the course of training weekends, we practice teach on each other. It’s not the same as having real students and reminds me of practicing on my fellow students back in university. During the run up to student teaching (I was an English major), we’d craft lessons that we’d present to each other as though we were actual kids in a classroom.

Yes, that’s just as empty of substance as it sounds.

In yoga training, practice teacher of other yoga teachers usually devolves into workshopping as we pull poses apart and share our perspectives with each other. Not that this isn’t valuable. It has value – just not as a way to gain teaching experience for the “real” world.

Yoga studios are so not the real world.

The drop-in class is 45 minutes of what is basically an abbreviated Ashtanga practice. Surya A and B, Standing, a wee bit of seated, maybe Bridge, possibly a twist or two and Savasana.

I started on time and ended on time. Forgot to start Surya B in Utkatasana the first time and got turned around on my left vs right a couple of times, but no one fell over, everyone sweated (people who come to Ashtanga expect sweat in an oddly Bikram sort of way) and at the end, some were smiling and everyone said “thank you”.

There was an older woman, who’d never been to the class before – and who only studied Hatha previously – who might not come back.

But otherwise?

Great success.

Why?

I was teaching. Like teaching for real. I didn’t hesitate. It felt homey and I slipped right into the role as though it was crafted just for me.

But I am a teacher and always have been and that’s a hard instinct to put aside. It was only a matter of time before I found my way back to it.

I don’t know that it prepared me in any way for this weekend’s testing. I feel over-full of yoga at the moment and am not certain I can access anything specifically or consciously, but I am not worried about whether or not I am a yoga teacher.

The photo is urdhva dhanurasana or wheel pose. I totally pulled my left levator muscle and irritated the hell out of my trapezoid at the same time coming up into that earlier in the week. I hurt as I demo’d in class despite having gotten there 40 mins early to warm up. Consequently, I won’t be doing the arm balance practice on Friday – which I could use because my arm balances suck (a very un-yoga but entirely accurate, in my case, term). But, I was psyched to get up into the pose on my own. I haven’t come up into a wheel since I was ten – at least.

What Kind of Dining Set Defines Me as a Person?


The unknown narrator, or is he Tyler Durden, ponders an IKEA catalog, wondering what his stuff says about him. But it’s not just stuff, it’s attitude about/identification with things and how what we wear, listen to, read and watch comes to represent us in the world.

Programmed from near birth, we come to view externals as part of ourselves and believe that they lift us or damn us according to society’s ranking of them and hence us.

Our musical tastes, for example, allow the majority to rule us. We are cool or not so much depending on our earworm preferences. Liking Nickelback and Taylor Swift earns scorn while pretending to get the deep meaning of Tool rates high social marks.

I like Nickelback by the way. Just plain old pop/rock and occasional boy band ballad-e-ness with a bit of growl. Pretentious? Perhaps. Lyrically challenged? Most definitely. Fun? In my opinion, yes.

I listen to Tool as well though I prefer Perfect Circle. It’s also pretentious, but it’s angsty in a discomforting way that allows people to pretend it’s more meaningful than Daughtry and therefore elevates the listener to some level the masses just “wouldn’t understand”. Forgetting all the while that music is poetry and poetry’s meaning is subjective and totally relative.

What kind of music defines me as a person?

And what does it say about me that I need external definition?

Yesterday was “cheer up, Keanu day”. Generated by a viral paparazzi shot of the actor morosely munching a sandwich on a park bench in a decidedly homeless guy sort of way, people with a soft spot of maligned movie stars decided to dedicate a day – and a Facebook page – to share their fond memories of his movies, music and their actual encounters with Reeves.

It reminded me of a memorial service.

For a man who’s not dead in case anyone missed that. Although maybe in a world obsessed with whatever one has done lately, a career not in full throttle is akin to a death of sorts. Even middle-aged men are put to pasture in Hollywood, however, but if I had Reeves resources, I doubt that I would be pushing myself very hard either.

Oh, wait. I am not pushing myself. Nevermind

What kind of movies define me as a person?

Can I be defined by the fact that I sometimes watch films just because the actors are pleasantly attractive? Or that I am sufficiently imaginative to be able to immerse myself in a story regardless of the quality of the acting and the CGI?

The latter perhaps is the more admirable quality but the former is nothing to hang one’s head shamefully over.

My fondness for Virgo men aside, I like Reeves the actor. I never have difficulty believing he is his character in a way that “better” actors like Tom Hanks, for instance, can never not be “Tom Hanks” regardless of the film.

Because I prefer to not wear make up, live in my yoga togs and forsake underwear, am I bohemian? Does being a yoga teacher/blogger make me trendy or edgy? Or does the fact that I’ve blogged for money blogs rob me of “cool” cred?

I’ve viewed people from way atop the bridge of my nose, but that vantage point didn’t put me above anyone as much as it revealed my own pettiness and superficiality.

What defines you as a person? Music? Movies? A dining set?

I’m still trying to find my true self. Excavate her, really.

But in the meantime, I like Nickelback and Keanu Reeves’ movies and buying my yoga duds at Sears.

Sins of the Mother (or why my child isn’t popular)


One thing I didn’t factor in to my decision to procreate was the fact that my child’s early socialization would be largely dependent on my own ability to make friends. And I just don’t make friends. Not really and not easily.

My life has mostly been barren where close relationships are concerned. Growing up, I never had a best friend. I flitted from crowd to crowd. Jockettes. Band geeks. Newspaper nerds.

A college friend, who also went to high school with me, once commented,

“I never could figure out why you hung out with us (band geeks) when you could have been friends with anyone.”

And that’s the heart of the problem. I could be friends with anyone and so I am friends with very few. My personality is not calibrated to crowds, in or out. And friends were work. Work with dubious pay-off. On those occasions that I did put in the time and effort, my reward was second-rate. I seldom made the top-tier friend status with those who I was really attracted to as people.

Some of this, I know now, relates to my life’s mission. But some of it gets back to my distinct lack of “follower” DNA.

How does this relate then to motherhood?

Come to discover that my daughter’s popularity, or lack thereof, is directly proportional to my standing in the eyes of her friends’ mothers.

At the moment, I am a down arrow in terms of stock value.

It’s been coming. I saw it. The dance moms noses have actually gotten longer looking down at me this year for my indifferent regard for protocol. A few of them are in danger of becoming cross-eyed from all the askance looks they’ve shot my way.

I don’t care what other women – or people in general – think of me, and that is a statement I haven’t always been able to lay claim to over the years, but it bothers me that my lack of popularity reflects on Dee, who should be judged (well, she shouldn’t be judged ever really) on her own merit. She is a person in her own right after all and not just an appendage of me. Unlike many of the mothers I have met since becoming one, I didn’t have Dee to fulfill any thwarted childhood dreams of my own.

Recently, there was an “incident” with a ballet teacher that prompted me to pull Dee from the school just a week before the year-end performance. My doing this was based on Dee’s emotional well-being. I didn’t want to force her to continue when it was clear that the teacher had no regard for her as a person and saw her as merely a backdrop for her more talented students. This wasn’t the first problem with this particular teacher and forcing Dee to gut it out would have  – in my opinion – taught her that taking abuse from people is what “good girls” do for the greater good of her friends. Being female is enough of a trial in this world without reinforcing the ridiculous notion of “sucking it up” as a virtue.*

I earned a bit of scorn for this from the mothers of Dee’s dancemates. One in particular demonstrated her ire when she forbade her daughter – Dee’s school classmate – from dancing with Dee at the school talent show.

Dee has wanted to perform in the school performance since kindergarten. Her friend agreed to do the ballet number they’d learned together, but her mother won’t allow it. Retribution.

Only it’s directed at me through Dee. Which stinks. I have no patience with people who use children to prove points to adults.

Fortunately, Dee really doesn’t understand what has occurred. I sent a note to her teacher to let her know what happened and to keep her on the alert for anything that might come up.

Dee’s friend and her twin sister host an end of the year day long party and sleep-over the weekend after school gets out. Dee has always been invited. This year I doubt she will be. Another social conformity lesson for me that my daughter will have to pay for and won’t understand. The sad thing is that it won’t change me. I am unlikely, at my age, to bend to the will of people who I wouldn’t have chosen to make friends with in the first place.

It’s not that I dislike these women. They are nice. I’ve had pleasant conversations and passed time in their company. I am just not … I don’t know … someone who feels the need to run my life by committee or needs a lot of outside approval or validation? It’s hard to explain.

I made the right decision for Dee. I am her mother first and the children who were in her dance groups are not my primary concern. I find it hard to fathom that any of them were greatly affected by Dee’s absence anyway. The attrition rate at the end of the year performances (there are two) is high because they fall on weekend evenings and in this neck of Alberta – in June – that’s RV and lake lot season. People bugger off on the weekends. We don’t have a long summer season and no one squanders the tiny bit of time we get.

*There are times and places for sticking things out but not when you are being used or treated badly.