Finding the Divine

I’d like all of my yoga teacher training posts to be filled with positivity and light of course. To be contain great nuggets of growth and hard won wisdom that I will document to remind my future self. However, it was only the third weekend. And I am a particularly flawed human being. And sometimes one is so tired that if not allowed to rest, there is no growth to be had. 

Or maybe those are excuses.

But after the morning of the beautiful moment, we had an afternoon of anatomy with a long distance instructor. We were set up in a room with a projector and a zoom while a thin bald man stared at his computer camera with great intensity. Stared at us with great intensity.  The reading we’d done to prepare was about the muscles of the trunk and breathing.  What we got was three hours of explanation of concentric, eccentric and isometric action and the phrase “muscles only pull” thrown at us on refrain throughout the time.  

If you have any idea already of concentric, eccentric and isometric, three hours is a lot. If you don’t, well, it’s still a lot. I became loopy. My neighbor became loopy. We stared back at him although he could not see us, both of us having had some experience with exercise and muscles in the past and both of us wishing we were learning about breathing and trunk muscles.  He became a cartoon to us. We wanted to make T-shirts, muscles only pull. He took off his shirt to show us his muscles, he rolled up his shorts, he posed and bent in front of the camera. He pointed at himself, at his muscles, thrust his fingers at his skin. Look at me he screamed silently.

All the while I thought, there are other ways to show this and I don’t need to watch this man’s naked torso for three hours to learn this concept. I left the room for a minute, I slid across polished floors in my sock-clad feet to stay awake, I came back, he was still talking.

I was not my best self.

Then the next morning, we started again. Not with anatomy, but with the other main teacher, I should name them I suppose, we’ll call this one the Voice because of his opera training, resonant chanting and haunting singing at the end of a class. Now, the Voice started out with a dharma talk and in his very first words, he told us to look around and to remember that in every single person we meet, the divine exists. If we approach people and the world that way, he told us, we would be more likely to  find kindness and compassion as a starting point for our interactions.  I thought of Mr. Anatomy. Next time I’ll do better. Maybe.

We sat on bolsters in a semi-circle, the one I’ll call Sass to my right, the one I’ll call Girlfriend to my left, in a room with high ceilings, light fixtures dangling like stars and planets, the smell of cedar resting lightly in the air, large front window looking out onto rolling prairieland, while the Voice told us about Hanuman and how he forgot that he was divine only to rediscover it later.  

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the relationship between yoga and Hinduism is. I learned that there are 10 avatars of Vishnu. Up until now, I’ve seen repeats of the numbers 3 and 5 – even in the 8 limbs of yoga, when one does the math. Ten was a new number and I wondered briefly if there was another world faith or philosophy in which I could find a symbolic ten. Or maybe I should think of it as two 5s.  Threes, for example, abound, though, in the faiths of the world. Or perhaps it’s just the Trinity in Christianity and the three part Godhead in Hinduism I’m thinking of.

The day continues with an intense and off-balance practice, a storytelling practice. Someday they will not be off-balance, when the Voice demonstrates, everything becomes a dance, the movement of a toe, punctuation, the turn from front to back, grammar, the pose the words. It’s a poem. 

The divine is in each person and in the movement that connects us.