Let me nip this in the bud: I’m not a crier, ok? Sure, maybe when I was pregnant and some sweet video of baby goats hugging a rainbow came rolling around on the internet, but overall, not a crier (not in my recent life, at least). I can’t think of when I’ve cried in the mysore room, though I’ve seen others teary — not even the deepest ashtanga backbends bring me to sobs. Sweat, yes; tears, no. Flat on my back in savasana after a kick-ass led primary, these strange, liquid pearls unleashed by my tear ducts puzzle me.

Perhaps I should back up a bit.

I navigated through a Bermuda triangle of mental drama to get to this class. I relocated to an area without an ashtanga community over a year ago, a move which thrust me overnight into local ashtanga mascot status– even though for a “life-long practice” I’m basically still in diapers. So when an authorized ashtanga teacher heads to town, my FB timeline and message box fill with iterations of the same question: Are you going?

I have at least ten reasons not to go. (1) I already have too many teacher influences on my practice–do I need to meet another teacher? (2) my husband can only take so much weekend three-year-old duty; (3)  the practice is at a studio where I used to teach; (4) it’s for Saturday at 7AM, my usual day off to sleep in.

I’ll spare you the rest save for the finale: that people here know me as an ashtangi, so if I go, everyone’s going to be looking at me. They’re going to want to see if I have the goods. Hey, I’m not competitive about my practice. Am I? That part of me hangs in the closet with old pointe shoes, litigator heels, overachiever accolades and one obscure video of my appearance in a Bikram Yoga Competition. In the mysore room, however, I am just ME.  And every practitioner in the room, from the third series starlet to the struggling marichyasana binder, is me too. When someone reaches a dynamite high, I am born again; when someone struggles, I can feel the fire. In that same moment of high or hurdle, many in the room are experiencing the same, just at a different posture or place within the ashtanga series. I’ve never felt so together with other people by being exactly where and who I personally am. So forgive me this hokey yoga moment, but the mysore room brings the usual cliche words, “We are One” into vivid actuality.

“Maybe I should go,” I tell myself, puffing up an imaginary chest, and “show ’em I got the goods.” (Rest assured, the un-yogic-ness of this thought was not lost on me, either. Welcome to my “yogic uglies“).

But sometimes my goods are tired and stiff; sometimes (a lot of times, actually) my goods produce a navasana masterpiece in what David Garrigues calls “artful dodging“; and sometimes — no, all the time– no matter how much I practice, I am still not perfect. That’s just it: In a daily, life-long practice, one cannot be. The sheer idyllic nature of “correct” vinyasa in the primary series seems to underscore that fact. As David Robson so fittingly put it, “Correct vinyasa is really f*cking hard.” My primary may be nothing to sneeze at, sure, but a led primary strips you naked for the world to see.

Disturbing un-yogic mental gymnastics aside, the opportunity to attend a led primary is a rare delicacy for a mostly home practitioner. So I’m going, and I’m taking this foreign anxiety with me.

Saturday I awake in Samastithi. By 6AM my veins writhe with the caffeine bouncing the blood through them. Note to self: you just drank too much coffee. At 6:35AM my body twitters to the car, where The Notorious B.I.G. provides an appropriately inappropriate theme song for the morning. I jump into the studio, but cannot decide where to put my mat: I don’t want to be next to a student or another teacher, or ANYONE! I place it, then move again. I must look and sound crazy as I dance about the space. God, I’m like a blown-up balloon that just got released, whooshing and whizzing through the room as the air expels, making the loud unattractive sound of strung together farts.

Self-conscious and nervous, I console myself –surely, this feeling that everyone is looking at me is all in my narcissistic head. Someone jockeys into position beside me as I finish that thought. “I want to watch you practice” she says.

Before I despair, Michael Gannon enters and reconfigures the room set up. Saved! Gannon, who looks like the most popular boy in seventh grade grew up and became an ashtanga yogi, does me a big favor by beginning with pranayama — given my buzzing body (and mind) I need it. Unfortunately, the exercise doesn’t fix everything: by the time Gannon says “Ekam!” it’s as if I’m up for the finals at America Ninja Warrior.

Jesus, Jean. Are you really comparing your yoga practice to a reality TV athletic event?

Crazy unyogic-ness aside, the pressure I’m feeling, oddly enough, pushes me deeper into the tunnel of focus primary series invites, and hell yes this led primary is awesome. Gannon showers me with a host of assists, which I f*cking love– it keeps me present, and yeah, I may have a touch of third-child attention-whore syndrome (I already covered the “yogic uglies,” didn’t I)? His cues sing to me. If there is a yoga version of a pig in shit, I’m it. But something else is present in the tunnel: my inner judge and executioner, watching me practice. I can’t stick kukkutasana or the roll forwards in the last few primary postures and God does this utthita hasta padangusthasana feel like a never-ending cheerleading tryout. (My inner judge makes a note.) In the first seated forward folds, my left foot is visibly twitching. “STOP” I silently scream to my disobedient foot. It doesn’t. I’m half expecting the teacher to expel me from the room for abuse of performance enhancing drugs.

Maybe I want to be punished. I’m embarrassed to be having all these ugly, narcisstic, competitive, small-self bullshit thoughts and making obvious mistakes like too much coffee before yoga. This practice is my hallowed home, but it feels like someone toilet-papered my house. Someone? The roll of tissue is in my hand.

After a really long headstand that had me saying silent “thank yous” to David Garrigues for his “set a timer for one-minute” sirsasana exercises, we make our way into final rest. Before drifting off I force myself to look into the “terrible mirror” and face the small self “uglies” that haven’t left my side since I first thought about coming to this class. What the f–k happened here?

Every time I think this practice has challenged me to the core it finds another way. I realize that coming to this led primary was good for me, not just because it was a wonderful class, but because it challenged my habitual seeking of mental comfort zones. You see, I have a protocol of avoiding my triggers– for anxiety, negative body image, insecurity– you name it. I’ll face my fear of heights at the climbing gym, but I don’t court the things that provoke my uglies. On some level, this is a good protocol. But on another, it’s denial. This class, given the setting and the people– it provoked the uglies alright, in a way the mysore rooms I practice in simply do not. I needed to see that I could find the line– find my internal samastitihi–even in the Bermuda Triangle.

I think I can start.

I look the storm of uglies in the eye: I see all these years of trying to be the smartest, cutest, thinnest and a host of other “ests” reflected back at me; I see all these years of never feeling enough. Then I watch the swarm of small thoughts float away. The’yre Not Me. It’s one of those rare moments where I’m aware as the layers peel away. I feel released; the enormity of the weight I’ve been staggering under clear only now that it’s stripped away.

And this, of course, is when I notice the tears.