YogaStrange

I had the best YogaDay today. 

There was a woman making sex noises in my 10am Hot Power Yoga class, which kinda cracked me up.

But also got me to thinking: could yoga be *better than sex*?  I've been reading the Yoga Sutras lately and so I wonder...

I know the immediate answer: depends what yoga, depends what sex. :) 

She was really enjoying her poses though, let me tell you and I had to admire (on some level), her enjoyment and lack of inhibitions.

But there was a guy there for his very first yoga class...I also wonder what the hell HE thought?!  Fortunately, he was there with his girlfriend who is going through a new session of the same Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) I did last summer.  So, I assume she explained it to him later.  I would like to have heard that conversation though.  

Then I stuck around after class to talk to the teacher who also assists in the YTT program and has become my friend.  I love this woman, she is my hero largely because she makes a full-time living teaching yoga and working at the studio.  She was a literature major in college, and I love talking to her because I feel we have so much in common.

Not just yoga and books but also some life experiences and strengths/weaknesses.  And, maybe because she loves to read, she also tells great stories! 

Today she told me about how this past week she had a disgruntled student in one of her yoga classes.  This man was large in size (think tall, not necessarily rotund), and walked in with an attitude, asking for - or rather demanding - free yoga classes because he had shown up for class earlier in the week and the doors to the studio were locked, for some reason.

He was very sure something was owed to him for some affront, and so he came into the class with a certain energy, let's say, that didn't really work for anyone around him. 

It went from there...she told me about how she tried to handle the situation, talking reasonably to this gentleman, and when it spiraled out of control & he wouldn't leave the safe space of the yoga sanctuary that he was threatening, she finally had to call the cops. 

The cops at a yoga studio!

God, that's strange.  And kinda funny, unless you were in the midst of the altercation as my yoga-teacher-friend was.  I think (from what I heard, second-hand), that she handled it beautifully.  I can't imagine what I would have done.

I can barely handle just figuring out how to teach with confidence when I have sweet students who tell me afterwards what a great class it was!  (This happened just yesterday, and bless that one student, for I am still so uncertain and want very badly to be a good yoga teacher but have so little time and energy to give to it...)

She and I talked about what it must be like to be a yoga teacher in a real city (which Sarasota just, isn't), where you never know what problems can walk off the street and plop down onto a mat in your class and you have to handle it.  It made me think that YTT might need to include some sessions on how to handle *the general public* who can show up in your classes, which can include the one-off strange person who doesn't seem to get it.

That we are all there to experience some peace & calm & stillness...not have a bizarre fight about free classes.  All I have to say to someone like that is ~ with incredible loving-kindness and sympathy ~ get some help, and Namaste MotherFucker, but stay out of my yoga classes!  :)