(Not So) #Shittygymnastics: What I learned from a Gymnastics Coach

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a grown woman at a children’s gymnastics center must be in want of a job (or a kid to pick up).

Then there’s me.

“You’re not here for an interview?” asks the woman at the front desk, incredulously.

“Um, no, I’m doing a private session with Coach Joe.” Yes, that me: the grown human female, here in the land of glittery children’s leotards because (a) there’s a yoga move called “tic tocs” (handstand into wheel and then jump pack back over into downard dog; it’s the jump back over I haven’t done yet) which I’m trying to practice by myself at home but I’m scared of falling and dying so (b) I’m practicing not practicing — and that brings me to (c) I gotta fix that.

Yes, I tried to obtain some foam padding to work up to full “tocs” on a site called “house of foam” and it broke my computer screen out into a kaleidoscope of porn-ish sites and I had a lot of explaining to do to my husband and well, if I ever write a novel I’m calling it house of foam and maybe it will be about a girl who meets her demise doing weird yoga handstand jump over things alone in her bedroom but now I’m getting ahead of myself:

Where were we?

Yeah, I need some freakin help.

Because I have gotten a little too good at practicing not practicing: I do my “tics” falling from handstand into wheel pose, take three pathetic little excuses for hops that I know, absolutely know, would never generate enough force to get me back over. That is what I have been practicing. I practice tic and not doing toc.

I need regular help. Someone to spot me. Mats. Foam pits. Wings. Prayers. Voodoo. The force. Hypnosis. Or perhaps just some balls. It doesn’t help that my usual teacher is in Lebanon and that’s a rather inconvenient commute. Even with Mysore in SLC, I need someone I can see a few times in one week closer to my house.

So I steal my six-year-old’s gymnastics coach.

Ahem, allow me to take a moment to address the Ganesh-sized elephants in the room.

First, do I think this is yoga? 

Not really in my mind, no. This is me working on a physical maneuver in a room with lots of cushy padding, mats, ramp shaped mats, and an experienced coach who can spot me. It’s taking a move I hope to do within my yoga practice out of my practice and into a gym. The funny, er, not so funny thing, is how much harder everything (jumping into handstand, wheel) felt outside my practice than within it. During my practice I get overtaken by the flow of breath and the sequence. In the coaching sessions I was instead painfully awake to everything outside that zone.

Second: do I think it is all about the physical poses?

Nope. What I learn from physical poses and transitions is always greater in terms of the nonphysical than the physical. It’s not so much a problem physically whether I do or do not do tic tocs. Who cares? But what is a problem is how much patterns in my mind won’t evolve without really attempting to do this.

I show Coach Joe a video of Kino (who else?) effortlessly performing this maneuver.  He takes me to a mat ingeniously shaped like a ramp. On my first day, I jump back over by myself.

Here’s what this gave me:

CONFIDENCE. A whole new world.

The next day at home I finally begin to jump back over by myself using a bench. Before this gymnastics session, I was too afraid to even do that. Nothing else is preventing me from doing this, as Coach Joe makes clear– I have the flexibility and the strength. What I need is to fillet the fear and normalize this movement pattern.

IMG_3653.TRIM

Coach Joe says a few things my yoga friends might find familiar:

–“Breathe. You are holding your breath, you need to breathe to do this.”

–“Repetition is the key”

He also challenges me to not be content to just get back over.  For me, getting back over means an almost immediately tuck in the pelvis. But he wants me to work on jumping back up into that backbend handstand and then straight handstand, then over. Like Kino does.

Breath. Repetition. Upleveling and evolving. I feel like I’m in ashtangaland. The movement never done. Nothing ever done. Breath paramount. So much for #shittygymnastics. Maybe I should look at myself and say #shittyyoga instead.

At the Ashtanga Yoga Confluence, Richard Freeman said:

“our practice is to get off pedestals.”

We put teachers on pedestals, hell I even put myself on a pedestal early in my ashtanga life, as if I was some better, holier-than-thou yogi because I “did” this kind of yoga. What sense does it make as a yoga practitioner or teacher, to set yourself above and apart from gymnasts, dancers, other movement disciplines? Maybe other movement disciplines aren’t “yoga” but that doesn’t make them “less.”

I love this yoga. I love charging through boundaries in myself. I jumped back over and it was a jump into a new world of possibility. A pivot. The kind of barrier break that begs me to ask, what else is possible? What else am I practicing not practicing? Where else is fear grabbing me by the scruff of the neck to shield me from possibilities?

The yoga, this gymnastics session, is less about the pose or the movement and more about the connection and relationship I have to this life and to others. I love to practice.

But that practice doesn’t make me better than anyone else.

It just makes me better for everyone —

(And that’s #notshitty at all).

**** I stole this hastag from David Robson, who has said that asana without breath, without commitment is just “shitty gymnastics.” I’ve learned so much from David Robson, who I was fortunate to meet in Washington D.C.  I love the cuteness and sense of humor and play he brought to Instagram with this hashtag and I’m not judging that at all here (my paragraph about setting ourselves apart from other movement disciplines is not a comment on the spirit of that Insta challenge at all, just my own observations from my yoga life).
This entry was posted in Blog.

2 thoughts on “(Not So) #Shittygymnastics: What I learned from a Gymnastics Coach

  1. I learned tic tocs at school in gymnastics and now that I’ve been doing ashtanga for a few years I always find it surprising how scary people find kicking the feet back over. To me, standing up from a dropback is much more scary because you don’t have the support of your hands…
    All in the mind isn’t it!!!

    • Ellen that is so interesting!! I had trouble with learning to stand up from drop backs too.I was scared of dropping back, but once i got that it was more of a leap of faith to stand up. I actually did so of the first time on command the weekend I met david garrigues. did you do gymnastics as a kid? and thanks for writing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *