A few months ago, I saw a man in a construction-logoed pick-up truck stopped at a red light in my village. His arm dangled out the driver's side window, and from his hand waved a long string of what I was pretty sure were mala beads. He looked like he was actively engaged in japa yoga--the repetition of mantra with mala beads, working each bead with the fingers as the mantra is repeated 108 times.
This was not an Indian construction worker; it was a older white guy. I was astonished and pleased to see an act of devotion being performed in an everyday locale, and by an unlikely demographic. How wonderful to have some evidence that any unlikely driver passing through might be repeating the name of the divine or counting blessings or giving thanks as s/he waits at the stoplight!
As I drove on, though, the suspicious part of my mind took over... it DID seem a little ostentatious, hanging the beads out the window like that...perhaps he WANTED someone to see his mala beads. Perhaps he was really just trying to pick up yoga chicks!
Well, yes. Maybe. Maybe not. Once you've been practicing yoga in America for some time, you realize you will find a good amount of ordinary humanity in each yoga community, just as you find it in yourself. It is easy to hold yogis--students, teachers, dabblers--in some higher regard, and then become jaded and disillusioned when they do not all turn out to be already enlightened. Or even just already teaching exactly the way you want them to.
Maybe the hardest thing we are confronting right now as a loosely interwoven aggregate of yoga communities in America is the sense that we each have the "right" way to teach/practice yoga. This sense is supported by the late-capitalist imperative to emphasize what makes each school or style of yoga unique, and for each teacher to "brand" him- or herself in a distinct way. The sheer number of teachers in most places provides each of us with an incredible array of CHOICES in how to practice yoga, which is wonderful--there is a method for everyone, right where there are, right now. Gentle, vigorous, therapeutic, chatty, spartan, juicy, intellectual, emotional, filled with metaphor, anatomically precise, visually demonstrated, verbally cued, set to a soundtrack, basking in silence, prop-heavy, prop-free, paced quickly, paced slowly...you name it.
Find a teacher who can teach you as you are, right now--it may take many trial classes to find him or her! And then, once you are well established in your practice, branch out, try the ones that are maybe SO NOT RIGHT FOR YOU, because they will sometimes teach you even more.
And here's the hard part, for me, at least: let go of needing to evaluate why they are so not right for you. Let go of wanting to warn people away from them (unless you feel you need to give a gentle warning because you fear for people's safety in those classes....see, I told you it was hard for me). Let go of yoga-jadedness...the way we think we can tell so much about a person just from observing him or her from the outside. How s/he will teach, what his or her intentions are, what style of yoga s/he prefers. Why the mala beads are hanging out in full view.
This intention is for the next time we each take class: Assume the best about each person you encounter. Assume they have the highest intentions towards you and everyone else around you. The teacher, the students, the fly on the wall.
I'll be right there with you. Go, mala man, go!
