My DC Mysore teacher once offered me a sweet compliment:

“You’re so humble about your practice.”

“Well,” I laughed, “you just wait till I can stick a forearm stand in the middle of the room.”

Wait? Um, no waiting necessary. I was not and am not humble about my practice. Nope, not at all. Maybe I thought I was, because yes, regardless of what my primary series looks like I still believe the work will never end; I believe there is so much room to grow in everything– in the transitions, in the maintenance of the breath, bandhas, and dristi. As David Robson recently underscored, staying with the vinyasa (breath and movement) in primary is almost an impossible ideal. So yes, perhaps at times I can sound humble.

But I’m not. I realized this the other day when I headed to the Mysore room and found myself mat to mat with someone I knew from the ubiquitous facebook yoga world but who had never actually seen me practice. And he was someone, for whom, I admit, I wanted to show I had the goods. I was a bit scared. Would he see me modifying navasana or mucking my way through a jumback and call the ashtanga police out on me? And heaven forbid I fall out of utthita hasta padangusthasana today, of all days!

Stop this line of thinking at once! I scolded myself. Do your practice. And of course, all of the above happened. My jumpbacks were tougher than usual, I bobbled and faltered here and there, and then I came to the backbend section of my practice, where I stole a glance and noticed this guy was almost done.

Suddenly, there it was. That voice inside me, that so-not-humble-voice– the one that is so, so incredibly embarrasing to own up to– and it said, “oh please, let him at least stick around till you do kapotasana.”

Oh yes, kapotasana, the backbend of all backbends, “the wicked queen of all heart-openers”, the one that stops so many in their tracks, exiles countless yogis to the wall with a parade of blocks between their feet and straps ensnaring their shoulders, Inspires even some of the most diehard ashtangis to just up and quit ashtanga, and causes countless others to lay on the floor like crumpled toddlers silently (or not so much) screaming “No” as their teachers urge them “Again!”

I want him to see it, because I can rock kapotasana. I love kapotasana. I was born to do kapotasana. Sure, I’ve had to learn how to use my legs and work my upper back in this and other backbends, and I’m lucky to have a teacher who has pushed me to evolve the pose further (a.k.a., he’s made the pose harder for me) but I could do kapo before I even knew it was kapo. Kapotasana is the pose I am apt to hold more than five breaths, the pose I (and this is again embarrassing to admit) sometimes hope someone in the room is watching, just so my silent, not so humble voice can say:

“This is my kapo, B*tchez.”

It doesn’t hurt that I’ve gotten one deep, juicy taste after taste of just how much others– including some sick-ass yogis– hunger for kapo. Some advanced series ashtangis I know can do sh*t that looks like a cross between the cirque de soleil and x-games feats — and for sure, they can do kapo — well even they cannot do kapo the way I can do it.

Ashtanga strikes me as beautifully challenging for everyone. It’s the practice that has everyone’s number. Hamstrings, hips, strength, inversions, backbends, it’s all in there. So for all the stuff ashtanga throws at me and makes me work through — my tighter right hip, my challenged core, my lacking strength, and my lifetime supply of fear, fear and more fear — for all the stuff that I can do but can’t do in a way that I would want to video and post for the world to see, well, for all of that, ashtanga, at least I have this. I can really do this.

And so, there I am, hoping that he will be there to see.

He is.

And nothing.

A wonderful teacher once referred to ashtanga’s second series practitioners as the “crazies” because this series stirs up such intense emotions. I am not immune. As my would-be audience exits, the glaring realization slowly takes shape– that no matter how many times I try to teach myself otherwise, I still feel lacking. I still want something to show that hey, I really belong here. That’s why I do this posture, and I really hold it, I stay there for a genuine five breaths and beyond—why, aw hell, I milk it.

Because I remember not being enough. I remember suffering daily, relentless public humiliation at the hands of a boy in the seventh-grade. I remember when my dearest ballet teacher pointed her finger at my hips in the middle of class and shouted in her thick Russian accent that she wanted to “cut” my butt off with “scissor.” I remember all the people I allowed to use me when they wouldn’t love me. I remember beating myself up with obsessive-compulsive behavior, thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I check [fill-in-the-blank] again and again and again and again and again, maybe I won’t ruin everything. I remember all the people who, no matter how hard I tried, would not like me. I remember exploiting my own brainpower, my own talents, just to prove something, just to prove, well, anything.

Perhaps I milk kapotasana not because I am full of myself, but to fill me where I believe I am empty. Kapotasana, “easy” though it may be for me, still represents my fear of insufficiency.

Is it any surprise, that I started working kapotasana tighter and deeper, as the poses that came after it became more difficult, more daunting, more damn hard?

It is a wonderful thing to have this gift for backbends. But more wonderful that I have a practice and a teacher that work with this gift and beyond it. Because it would a shame to let my gift for backbends obscure the gifts I have yet to uncover, to allow what I can do now limit what I can become. As I begin to move into this world were I am doing poses that require strength and serious upside-down time, poses I can barely believe someone like me is doing, I’m beginning to discover that maybe I’m not just a heart-wide-open-backbender.

I am strong, too.

During a recent semi-private Mysore session with David Garrigues, he gave me some feedback on my exit out of kapotasana. As I happily prepared to execute the entire posture again, he stopped me.

“No,” he says, “move on.”

So I do.