Becoming a Yogi: Part 2
“Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”
– Tom Stoppard
Dance Like No one is Looking
A week through my Yoga teacher training class in Tzununa, Guatemala.
Honestly, it’s been great. Better than great. I hate to be cliché, but it’s life changing. It’s like three weeks of physical workouts, intensive emotional therapy, career and life counseling, friend making, and new experiences.
Saturday mornings we do Zen Dance for an hour and a half in lieu of a morning meditation. It’s 90 minutes of music, and dancing like a liquored up soccer mom let loose on a cruise ship dance floor. A.K.A., like no one is looking. Limbs are flailing, and there’s lots of jumping, kicking, chest beating, and whatever other crazy moves you want to bust out. You can dance to the beat of the music in the room, or the music in your head. Whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. No one cares.
If I went to a Zen dance two years ago, on some Tuesday night after work in DC, I might stand around awkwardly, shifting my weight from side to side to the music until I could quietly slip out the back. I’d leave and tell all my friends about this crazy hippie dance class I found for weirdos.
But here, I’m flailing and jumping with the best of them. Because, why the hell not? Why come all the way to the mountains of Guatemala, why quit my job and career of 13 years (not to mention 4 years of business school), if I’m just going to get here a year later and stand in the corner?
And for the most part, we all bought in. The neurologist danced, as did the civil engineer, and the former nurse, and the yoga teacher. We’re all eating clean, sleeping eight hours a night, and starting each day with a mediation to clear the mind and a yoga practice to wake the body. And now we’re dancing like maniacs. It feels amazing.
I need to take some cooking ideas with me when I leave. Breakfast is an alternate between oatmeal and fresh fruit, and eggs with black beans and a fruit/veggie smoothie. Lunch and dinner vary between tostadas, pureed veggie soup, gluten free pizza, potatoes with veggies, chick pea stew, and is always paired with a salad. It’s always healthy, easy, simple, and fresh food. The bread here is fantastic and there are always veggies on the table. I’m a happy camper.
I feel a lot better now than I ever did, sitting in my office in that GREAT stable job I had so I could buy that NICE house and NICE car. Better than I did when I was exhausted, and staring at Youtube videos and my Instagram feed until midnight instead of sleeping. Why was I doing that to myself, when this is an option?
That about sums up how I feel these days. Am I going to start carrying around healing crystals when I get home, doing chanting meditations, talking about which dosha is asserting itself in my body today? Maybe not. Or maybe some of that. Or shit what, maybe all of it. If it makes me happy, then why not. WHO CARES WHAT YOU THINK.
It’s Not all Sunshine and Rainbows
Two weeks into Yoga school.
There is a sickness going around. Sunday was a day off from school, and also curry night. Several students have not been the same since. There was a midnight run on the bathroom facilities Sunday night, and now yogis are dropping like flies.
Was it the curry? Something in the water, or that glass of wine you had in San Marco on your day off? Or just exhaustion from a week of intense physical and psychological practice?
It’s hard to pinpoint the cause, but by Wednesday of Week Two, the class is looking rough.
This week is also intense for other reasons. We are starting to learn and practice various sequences to teach our own classes. Our morning and afternoon classroom sessions have gotten more interactive and physical. Instead of listening to a lecture on the history of Yoga theory, we’re now teaching small sequences in front of the entire class and learning how to do physical adjustments.
Then there was inversion day, where we focused on our headstands, handstands, arm balances, and whatever other crazy yoga poses Doron could think up that day.
I’m happy to say I’m holding up better than most (or at least my stomach is), but my body still feels the pangs of yogic intensity. I’m learning and deciding on a yoga sequence to teach my very own class. I’ve practiced it a few times with other students now, and it’s gone pretty much alright. I still have trouble remembering what comes next how to do certain transitions. I’m still timid with hands on adjustments. A decade in bank examining, and it’s not in my comfort zone to go around touching strangers and moving their hips around. But I’ll gain more confidence with experience.
I’m getting there.
Who’s With Me
I really love the people in this school with me. My roommates are Linda, Nicky, and Catherine. Linda and Nicky are in the teacher training with me and are both from Germany. Katherine is from the US and is here working as a volunteer. They’re all in their early 30’s.
Katherine is a nurse at home, but has a history of working on organic farms. She learned Spanish in her 20’s, first as a way to communicate with restaurant staff where she was working, and later she practiced and got better as she’s been traveling. She had no real reason to learn except because she really wanted to learn. I’m so impressed with that. I also love how most of her stories start with some love affair, and I will always remember the night she stayed up late to give each of us a tarot card reading.
Katherine giving Linda a reading 
Linda was a construction manager from Hamburg, and has this soft confidence with a tendency to overthink things that makes her very relatable and likable. She can often be found singing or humming to herself in seeming happiness, and frequently laughs at her own jokes. We got to be friends right away. She listened like a true friend to my life complaining and understood when I felt tired and needed a minute alone.
Nicky is the kind of person you want to be around because you hope her personality rubs off on you in some way. She’s hilarious, even in her second language, and is a great story teller. She told me the story of how she met her boyfriend outside of a salsa dancing club and it sounded like a movie script. We had a fire circle last night and she never shied away from suggesting a new song, and belting out a new set of lyrics.
All these ladies have heard my stories about life and love struggles and shared plenty of their own. It’s been like going back to college and having lady friends to stay up late talking in your dorm room. Except late night chatting here means we stayed up past 9:30 pm. These days, I’m pretty happy with that.
