Perhaps a margarita is not the ideal beverage to imbibe on the eve of mysore practice with a special teacher.

Perhaps following said margarita with a beer, when the imbiber is a known light-weight, is, again, not the best idea either.

Perhaps, too, the practice of feeling all in all a bit buzzed the night before practice is not likely to make it into the next edition of Angela Jamison’s “House Recommendations” –indeed, I recall reading a prescription for a hung-over practice as a self-inflicted hazing ritual, the creation of your own personal memory deterrent to any future pre-practice alcohol consumption.

Welcome to the internal dialogue swimming in my brain as I woke Saturday morning in beautiful Charlottesville (obviously, the internal dialogue of the night before could be summarized with “fuck it”). After a large mug of coffee I begin telling myself that practice will suck: (A.) I’m out of ashtanga shape (I’m in vacation, summer, pool, beach, not much childcare, doubting the practice-shape); (B.) I consumed the libations listed above; (C.) I also ingested cheese-y, gluten-full, fried, as well as non-vegetarian food.

But I feel fine. Better than fine. Perhaps alcohol, gluten and cheese do well for my half Irish, half Italian self. I feel chilled out. I feel like I shouldn’t be heading off to mysore practice bur out for a greasy breakfast “a la life in the city in your single twenties”- style.

I tell myself that I can just struggle through a little primary. I tell myself that once upon a time I went to a bar at night and made it to Bikram the next day. I tell myself that it’s a 9:45am practice. I tell myself it was just one margarita. “A weak margarita” assures my husband.

The heat rushes to greet me as I open the door to Ashtanga Yoga Charlottesville. Warmth crushes me with a strong embrace as I place my red shoes among the throng of flip flops. Sweat surrounds me as I hunt for a place in the crammed room. I look up. I see lots of hard-core, 6-days a week, vegetarian, no-coffee-no-prana, practice-and-all-is-coming- mysore looking ashtangis. They do not appear to have devoured margaritas last night.

My desire to eke out a satisfactory primary is quickly replaced by the bottomless egoic want for a virtuosic practice, the kind that will impress some of these people who have never seen me before in real life, only in my online (i.e., presentable) state–the girl in a deep backbend; the girl who never takes shit out on her husband; the mother who never gets impatient with her child–you know, the girl who doesn’t actually exist .

Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have had that margarita maybe i should have told my husband we’d need to stop at some vegetarian spot  — so what if this is our first weekend away without our child in ages, and so what if it was our favorite Mexican place during school? And maybe I shouldn’t have ridden my bike so much yesterday maybe I shouldn’t have slacked so much with my practice this summer.

Shoulda woulda coulda aside, there’s only one thing I can do — practice. My muscles are gooey with the heat– it’s like I never touched my bike at all. It only takes a few standing postures for the sweat to rush so fast that I begin to wonder, with a little trepidation, how the hell am I going to make it through this practice?

In other words, I’m in heaven. Worries about what I ate and drank last night and the possibility that I achieved some level of intoxication fall away as I enter a sweltering tunnel, with inhales and exhales guiding me. I feel so happy to be here, especially as a mostly home practitioner. There is nothing like being in a room swelling with late Summer humidity, teeming with energy of devoted practitioners — all masterfully conducted by the jedi-like teacher that is David Keil. What the hell!– the euphoria of sweat and glistening people pumping with energy, not to mention great teacher– prompt me to break out my second series for the first time in weeks.

But not everything falls away. Apparently, I’m still trying to be more like other people than me, even when it comes to wrenching a leg behind my head.

DK: You don’t need to bring your leg all the way over like that. You’re doing this like someone with a long torso would (for the record, I have perhaps the world’s smallest torso)

ME: Well, funny you should say that, but I did copy get some of these leg-bheind the head moves by watching another ashtangi (her name as Amy and she was so inspiring, but come to think of it, she did have a much longer torso)

DK: How ’bout you be you?

Imagine that. So DK helped me feel what it is like to have some space between the angle of my bent knee and the side of my torso:

Liberating.

The beauty of an anatomy-focused mysore teacher is that you get a hyper-dose of the inherently individual-catered Mysore style of teaching– the teaching is always tailored to me, but now it’s tailored to me by an expert in the range of possibilities of the human body. Finally someone who understands what it is like to have really long arms and legs and no torso!

His simple teaching –“how ’bout you be you” —  is a reminder for both eka pada sirsasana and how I go about this practice as a whole. Just as I have gotten sidetracked by what the poses look like for others, I’ve also gotten lost in what the practice looks like and exists as for others. Sneaking glances and ripping off moves in the mysore room is not much different from drowning my identity out with phantasms of what the identity of an “ashtangi” should be.

And even if you don’t know what mysore is, you might have a sense of what it is like to have your yoga crowded out by an outside vision of what it is supposed to be– that same weekend, a friend emailed me demoralized after attending a handstand-o-tastic, backbend-o-rama, instagramarific class of mediagenic yogi types. She didn’t see the beautiful practice in her that I see.

Could I be making the same mistake? With my legs now comfortably (well, getting there) behind my head, clarity dawns on me–I’ve not been struggling so much with the ashtanga system but with myself, the parts of me that don’t fit into the ascetic vision of ashtanga that is also me — because it is an ashtanga policed delusion that I authored, outlined and pushed on myself. The reality is I am a mother, a wife, a yoga teacher, a wanna-be climber, a wanna-be ski bum, a joy-chaser, a sweat junkie, a nerd, a lover of reading and writing the kinds of words you need to look up, a not-living-up-to-her potential-er, a watching-the-wheels-go-round-er, a writer of blogs, a professional mistake-maker, and a sometimes consumer of margaritas, oh –and American Ninja Warrior aspirant.

I’m not saying with false bravado that margaritas are the best thing to consume before practice, or purporting to flout any of the Ashtanga principles I have learned with an irreverent sense of machismo. I’m just finding that if I’m going to let me be me (and what other choice do I have, really?), I cannot lose my identity to an envisioned system of ashtanga (something David Garrigues warned me about a long time ago!), while recognizing that at a different point in my life (when the kids are older, when a trip to Mysore itself becomes possible) I might play with taking on more of that system. But for now, for this past weekend —

Perhaps a margarita wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

____

2019 Update, joyful add of this link to Ashtanga Dispatch Podcast Episode 48, with David Keil. And a reminder to self, to find a way to practice with him again

Yoga Podcast Episode 48: David Keil || The Puzzle of Pain