Throwback Thursday: Ashtanga Yoga Confluence Day Two– The Newbie Is Me

Sometimes in life you gain or suffer something just by luck or misfortune to be in the right or wrong position at the right or wrong time. I think of taking the PSATs in school, sitting alphabetically just in front of a boy with a last name beginning with “G” who had the most annoying habit of loudly sniffing every five seconds. Sniff.

At the Ashtanga Yoga Confluence I heard a different kind of breath but received a similar, hmm….gift by proximity. It’s Day 2 of mysore and I’m here for the late shift.

Translation: I slept well, and my opening day jitters seem to have scattered into the waves of the nearby Pacific Ocean. I unfurl my mat and soon notice, just behind me– is that an ashtanga newbie? I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Yes, so did the master teachers in the room: Tim F, Dina, David, Richard, Mary. Can you imagine being new to this Ashtanga dance and learning from the likes of these giants? They took seemingly seamless turns leading him through the basics of breath and vinyasa choreography. He was never alone; someone was always there, eyes on him, guiding him.

Which meant, ahem, that all these teachers got an eyeful of–

Me.

So there you have this sweaty, labored, breathing mess — oh, I’m talking about me here, not the newbie guy– and of course, this guy, clearly in the throws of newfound love with this experience he is having. I wish you could have seen him: he looked like God (probably smelled like it too– Anne Lamott gets credit for that line). He was knee deep in the Richard Freemanian “nectar” of awe and wonder. And even if you weren’t there you probably know what I mean — that moment in your practice whether it be at home, Mysore, hot yoga class, on the crest of a hill in that 10K race. You’ve felt that sense of incredible height in your soul that both sets you apart as an individual at the same time as it imprints your multitudinous connection with everything and everyone else. I felt it that day, too.

What I mean is, I got worked.

For real, each teacher walked a direct nectar-strewn path from his mat to mine. Dena shifted me in krounchasana, David Swenson changed my perspective in Vatayanasana. Kiran Kennedy for the save with karandavasana. Richard and Mary in my early second backbends and what am I missing? Tim F from the minute I started third on! I worked hard and it’s no surprise that later that evening I almost fell out of the shower.

True story (shower shuffle, I mean and I thank yoga for the balance to avoid falling. By the end of that glorious practice, I felt like I’d been through a meat grinder, my place on the time-space continuum up for debate– I swear at one point my teeth relocated inside my mouth. I had to out a hand to my face to make sure it — I — was all….still there. 

Oh, Tim Feldman.

Have I mentioned him? When I first walked into the hotel registration station on Day One who did I see but “OH MY GOD THAT”S TIM FELDMANN.” It was similar in the mysore room. Just kidding, I didn’t scream, internally or otherwise. Here, we were just student and teacher, among other students and teachers. If Dena’s voice worked voodoo on my chakras, then Tim’s instruction and purposeful touch rearranged the cells bumping along the lazy river of my veins. Perhaps it’s the shared dancer thing, but his teaching spoke to me. I remember his indicating precisely when and how to turn my head, now that he had lengthened me out and repositioned the leg behind my neck (if that sounds weird, welcome to ashtanga third series, where all the poses are WeirdAsF). It was visceral yet gentle and it worked.

He helped me through third series, then boom he’s back for tic tocs (turns out we both think about Kino when doing these); he cued me up for vrikshasana, dips, a final backbend and customary squish. As a mostly home practitioner, none of this hands-on stuff is regular for me, not in these postures which are more recent additions to my repertoire, not mention the teacher here, new to me.

Maybe the newbie is me.

In more ways than one I had the same thing my neighbor was having.

The exact same thing. It doesn’t matter that it’s his first day or week or month or year, and that it’s my six hundredth, just like it doesn’t matter that when i walk into the mysore room in SLC half the people there look like it’s their day off from the Cirque de Soleil and there always seems to be an equal cadre of people brand new. Just like when I walked into mysore in DC in 2012, still struggling to get my arms through my legs in garbha pindasana, and I’d see Amy a row away working her leg behind her head. In those moments, we are the same: I’ve been where you are, you know where I am and you’ll be where I am and I’ll be where you are and maybe its just in the breath, in the moment, it’s just– the same.

I had the same kick-ass practice that newbie had that saturday. I don’t have a word for it. I just don’t. they all miss the mark, too cheesy (kick-ass, really?), too airy fairy, too platitude-y. It was that thing, that feeling, that Sharath final backbend catching yesness, you can feel it all over fingers on the pulse of the divine thread, or,

let’s just call it– i don’t know, maybe…

Yoga?

 

 

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