She has a personality that can blow out a sparkler. She hates her job, but signed a contract committing herself to another two years of service. She hates her boss and co-workers, but denied an offer to transfer to different department. She hates her commute, but hates sharing rides even more. She hates her apartment manager, her husband’s family, her life and now, she hates me too. I cancelled her yoga class and, in so doing, have taken away her one coping mechanism for a terminally dismal existence. This is my story: I am a yoga teacher, not a magic cure for bad decisions and I cannot fix you.
She takes one last long inhale through a lip gloss stained Virginia Slim and then crushes the butt into an ashtray next to several other butts in a similar condition, victims taking the fall-out for frustrating week, no doubt. She glares at me; jaw set, and tells me that this yoga class is the only thing she looks forward to in her dreadful life and without it she will surely lose her will to live.
I don’t budge. I know that I need to leave teaching for a while and no guilt trip in the world has a grip strong enough to make me change my mind. I would empathize, I’m not an uncompassionate person after all, but all my empathy was used up, along with my patience, about four months and 50,000 repetitions of the same 10 complaints ago. I am done. I have nothing let to give, not to her and not to any of my other students. My sparkler is soaked to its metal core with the spittle of malignant negativity.
Alright, let’s leave this cheerless story for a second and talk about something else: yoga teachers. When I read the profiles and biographies of yoga instructors of all types, and I often do read these, I hear a story similar to mine. The circumstances that guidied us to begin our yoga practice differ, but our motivations to teach are often similar. We teach yoga because we want to help people. Yoga helped us be better at life and we want to show our gratitude by helping others with their journey. We know we don’t have all the answers; we still get tired and struggle with frustrations big and small. We sometimes eat too much or too little, or drink too much and sleep too little, but we give our time and share our experiences with honesty and humor, hoping that someone else’s day might be a little better for it.
On my own yoga journey I have come to believe that one of the most important things the practice teaches us is how to make better decisions. At the core of things, our choices will either obstruct or release the flow of energy in our lives. With patience and practice we learn to recognize which alternative will lead to which result. Then, after more practice the choices become clearer and making the best decision becomes simple instead of nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching agony of weighing pros and cons. Our lives become simpler, list of things that makes us smile becomes longer and, one by one, the number of things that totally stress us out drops down to just a few real doozies. (I’m still working on this one, but I’ve seen the spark and I’m running towards it with gusto.)
With this in mind, let’s go back to my student, the one diagnosed with a chronic in-frustration of complaining. What is she doing wrong? Besides smoking before a yoga class and besides infecting me and the other students with an aggressive case of negativity, coupled with the “my-life-is-worse-because” syndrome. Yeah, other than that – those were the obvious ones. She is committing, what I like to call, “yoga abuse.”
Yes, yoga can change your life. Yes, yoga can sustain your energy and possibly even help you to see the good in your in-laws, but it isn’t a bottomless trust fund bank account of karmic debt relief. It’s like a regular bank account, but with an excellent high-return interest rate. You have to deposit thoughtful introspection and good decisions before you can withdraw abundance, peace and vitality.
When a person makes conscious choices that are detrimental to their mental, spiritual or physical health they will suffer the retaliation of those actions. Using yoga to cope with the repercussions of their “sins” without fixing the behavior is sort of like robbing a bank every time cash is short and then repenting after the deed is done. Sure, forgiveness is real, but they’re exploiting the system. Using yoga to survive their own little self-destructive cycle will cut them off from receiving the much more beneficial lessons yoga teaches about loving oneself, living in simplicity and, duh, making better choices.
As a compassionate teacher with a suspected yoga-abuser in your class, what do you do? Our instinct is to care for and nature them, at the very least, while they are in our class if not outside of the classroom as well. They are obviously unhappy and we hope that with enough time and meditation they will break their cycle and decelerate the spin of their downward spiral. My advice: do not step lightly around this cancer. For the lack of a better expression; drop the mo f*kin’ hammer.
As an instructor it is your duty to make the classroom a welcoming and neutral space, free from the tangles that bind us in the regular world. It is not your job to fix everyone who rolls out their mat in your healing place. Love, care, encourage, advise if you feel you can, but do not let yoga abuse go untreated in your classroom. Weed through the overgrowth of spiritual irresponsibility and nip that negativity in the bud before it spreads to you and your students like an organic-biological-weapon from M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening.
Maybe you can learn from my mistakes before your sparkler sputters out.
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