For years, the little piece of paper that confirms my certification as a yoga teacher has done little more than gather dust in the drawer of my nightstand. Now that I am permanently "in the system" at Lululemon, my fifteen per cent teacher discount unquestioned as long as they are too polite to ask whether those size 4 shorts are really for me, I could not imagine why the little certificate would ever again see the light of day.
Sure, I have taught some yoga over the years, but I never really intended to turn it into a career. For me, a very reluctant and skeptical latecomer to the practice, yoga always seemed more of a vocation than a vocation. Teacher training, in fact, almost ruined it for me, blurring the line between the mercenary and the passionate. Not only did I resist teaching, but I abandoned yoga entirely, for a while, anyway.
A couple of years ago, when it came time to dust off my law degree and my various lapsed bar memberships, I included my yoga teaching credentials on my resume. I kept the email address that identifies me as a "yogi," willing to take the chance -- insisting on it really -- that some prospective attorney/employer would not find it off-putting. Whether by design or by accident, it's worked out, and I've landed on the four corners of my wide yoga feet, balancing my renewed law practice with all the other pieces of me, even the ones that don't come with diplomas or certificates or any additional letters of distinction to to include on my resume. The things that really define me.
Yesterday, at an untimely funeral (are they ever really timely) for the wife of an old friend, I saw several people I had not seen in about twenty-five years. Some had been in their early forties back then when I was in my late twenties, and they had seemed so old and so wise. What struck me as most odd was that I am now much older than they were the last time I saw them, when I was just a young lawyer thinking they had all the answers. After a moment they were all recognizable to me, their faces the same except for some tightening around the lips, some webbing around the eyes, and lots of gray. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear it generally took them an extra few moments to recognize me. My metamorphosis, to them at least, is probably far more drastic -- as if I had gone from babyhood to adulthood over night. I have decided to go with other theories though -- their bad eyesight? their dementia? The alternative is too demoralizing, and the funeral was demoralizing enough.
As tangential as I felt -- I had drifted away in the past few years, even from those with whom I had initially remained in touch -- I stayed after the service -- went to the actual burial, went to the "shiva." We stuck together, the group of old work colleagues, making idle conversation. For the most part, we avoided asking each other what we had been doing for twenty-five years. I extracted myself to spend some time with the aggrieved -- my old dear friend and his grown-up children, married with kids of their own. I think it was more for my comfort than for theirs. They were mourning something concrete, something easy to identify. I was trying to figure out how twenty-five years went by so damn fast.
Dusting off the yoga teaching certificate after all, I am teaching yoga this afternoon to teenagers. Though they are students in a "special" high school, they seem no more or less "special" than any of the teenagers I have known over the years. I approach teaching teenagers the way I approach teaching anybody. I assume they can learn whatever it is I have been hired to teach them on line, or from a book or DVD. I might be able to give some of them some extra tips on how to achieve a perfect downward facing dog, but that's not really the point.
Today, while I guide them through some physical contortions, I hope I will teach them something about santosha -- my favorite of the basic tenets of yoga. Santosha. Total contentment. Not to be confused with unadulterated happiness, certainly not with perfection. When one of my old (and older) colleagues asked me the dreaded question about what I'd been up to for twenty-five years, my response was, I'm sure, excruciatingly vague, except for the part about liking where I've landed, and not wanting to change a thing. Santosha. It took a while, but maybe that's because nobody told me about it when I was a teenager.
No comments:
Post a Comment