Perhaps, like me, you’ve gotten the message that everything in yoga is sacred, unassailable, and immune to light humor. I love yoga, I practice yoga, and I teach yoga, yet I’ve seen plenty in various yoga rooms that seemed, at first glance — or maybe the first 20 — downright silly. I’ve still got friends who do the hottest of hot yogas, standing in the hottest corner of the room, known as the POD, or “Pit of Despair” where they undertake a series of postures and simultaneously try to stay alive. In other styles of yoga, you may be asked to hold a certain hip-opening posture so long you might imagine bolting from the room screaming about two dozen times before the teacher finally cues you out of it. In another class, a strange teacher at the front of the room may instruct you to “squeeze” your unmentionable parts, chant in a foreign language you do not understand, and bend over backwards and grab your ankles– not necessarily in that order.

Personally, I have laughed and yes, I confess, even belittled, a number of yogic practices along my way. When first asked to chant in this strange language I now know as Sanskrit, I meanly joked that I could have been singing “I hate puppies” for all I knew. And in my earliest experience with mysore-style ashtanga, I got on a bus to arrive at the crack of dawn for my newly-found practice in New York City, so early that the city that never sleeps was in fact, sleeping, only to find the place CLOSED. I learned later that morning that the mysore room was closed in observance of a “moon day,” as if that explained everything.

“A “f—ing” moon day”! I exclaimed to my then boyfriend. “What the f&*k is a moon day?”

I did not stick around long enough to find out. I decided to flee this likely cult, and take refuge in the “no moon-day” sweat culture of Bikram, where I joined my friends in the Pit of Despair. I enjoyed suffering. Nothing stupid about that.

Years later, I came back to ashtanga, and left and came back and dabbled and then dabbled some more and then gave it a real go, which is still going, with some stupid-seeming things popping up along the way. A friend of a friend once referred to some of the postures in the ashtanga primary series as the “stupid poses.” Once I returned for real to the world for ashtanga, I stole this joke when talking with someone new-ish to ashtanga about some poses which, yeah, at first glance, or even after 100 glances, seem kinda stupid — janu sirsasana C and supta kurmasana, for example.

To give you some context, janu sirsasana C looks like what happens when the innocent, sweet forward fold that is janu sirsasana A goes out on the town, drinks way too much– maybe even partakes in a few questionable substances — and then while taking a drunken walk of shame home, trips over a fence and lands in this messed-up position with a heel in the navel and a knee twerked down to the floor. And supta kurmasana, my nemesis pose for longer than I wanted it to be, involves laying on your belly with your legs behind your head and your arms bound behind your back. Enough said there. trim.A460E01F-2037-4C8B-91BB-BA2338A47DEA

Of course, once the “stupid poses” joke slipped from my lips, a wave of guilt and anxiety crashed over me…would I be excommunicated from the land of ashtanga for such blasphemy?

Here’s the thing. I made the joke because I am close enough to my beginnings to remember how stupid all this sh*t — the breathing control, the unmentionable parts squeezing, let alone some of those not-very-Facebook-profile-photo-friendly poses –once seemed. It is only with practice and time and dedicated study with a teacher that I saw the wisdom and beauty of all these stupid things. The best teachers I have encountered rarely ask me to take things at face value. Instead, they say “you do it, you try it, and you see for yourself.” When I decided it was time to delve deeper into ashtanga, I wrote my teacher. Even though I was practicing fairly regularly, I told him I’d never given the six-days-a-week practice a chance. Even though he’d once told me sternly, “Practice six days! Not four, six!” I’d never given the system as it was meant to be practiced a chance. My teacher didn’t respond with criticism. He encouraged me to try practicing six days, to give it thirty days, and to be kind to myself.

Thirty days and then some later, the world looks different. Sure, having a life, a child and snow days and moon days sometimes reduces six days to less, but still I can now say that I get the f*&king moon days– the need for rest when you practice intensely regularly, the way the body connects with the cycles of the moon. I get the genius of the sequence and those stupid janu sirsasana C and supta kurmasana postures. But I didn’t “get it” because someone told me; I got it because I practiced.

Whatever yoga class you find yourself in, don’t be ashamed if something you are asked to do strikes you as “stupid.” It is only through my own regular practice and careful investigation that I have come come to see the wisdom behind those yoga class staples that initially (or for a while) struck me as weird, laughable, and yeah, even kind of silly. Perhaps it is self-serving of me to say so, but if you’ve felt this way, then maybe you are the kind of potentially inquisitive yogi who just might be a true student — the kind who really wants to learn. And when you reach that knowledge for yourself, then, well, now that’s something sacred.

I made the “stupid poses” joke for another reason: because I remember being afraid to ask what the deal was with the chanting, the Darth-Vader-esque breathing, and the f*&ing moon days. I don’t ever want to get so far down the path of yoga that I forget what it is like to see it with new eyes. I hope I continue to to find and re-find my new eyes and more stupid poses and practices as I go about my exploration. I don’t want to assume people can understand what I understand when they haven’t yet had any personal experience with it. Sure, there is a place for faith here– my thirty-day experiment took a big helping of that — but I still don’t want to make anyone ever feel like it is inappropriate to have doubts or questions, or a sense of humor.

Because that would be really stupid.