by Jackie Block
There is always an origin story. There is always a describable journey into the depth of something profound, or a pathway that’s been forged or followed. Many journeys exist, but not all are worthy of the effort of bringing them to life by way of pen and paper. Or in this case, fingers to a keyboard.
I believe that this origin story is fundamental to my development as a yoga teacher, and it’s an interesting story to tell. Moreover, it’s relatable. It started an indeterminate number of years ago – a random yin yoga class lies within my history as a student more than 10 years ago. It’s so fuzzy in my memory, that all that remains is a smudge of a mildly unpleasant class.
My initial experience with Yin Yoga wasn’t a ground breaking one but somehow, I still managed to make this style of yoga the cornerstone of my own practice and my teaching. It’s funny how the universe takes things that we do not particularly enjoy and makes them the object of our affection – much to our own surprise.
So then fast forward to December of 2020. I had enrolled in my second teacher training. We were 9 months post announcement of the global pandemic, and the yoga world was vastly different than it was prior to the world being turned on its head. I had made my exit from healthcare – somewhat involuntarily – and I was faced with the huge task of completely changing the topography of my life by exploring the possibility of a new career in yoga. I indeed felt the need for a break after the years of craziness and burnout of a healthcare career. I’ll let you make assumptions about what happened to my career in healthcare post-pandemic – I think it goes without saying that it was time to let that mess go. The universe set it up, and I executed without hesitation.
As I was skipping through my teacher training with what I felt were golden boots, the muscle memory that lives in the body was quick to remind me of that unpleasant smudge that still existed in my logged history of yoga classes. In my then arrogant approach to learning I was convinced that I would be a better yoga teacher if I mastered the myriad of things that yoga has to offer. And it is quite the spectrum I found out. In a manner of speaking, yin yoga took me down a peg. So, in my wildly stubborn way of just trying to bend the universe to my will, I told myself that it would only take 4-5 classes of yin yoga for me to conquer it, love it and essentially add that to my quiver of yoga arrows. I would take this smudge, and turn it into a Jackson Pollock. And the yoga deal was made, and sealed into my golden yoga boots.
Suffice it to say that I did not see rainbows and unicorns on my first go. My golden yoga boots were relinquished back to the yoga gods with a swiftness, and my yoga deal was hanging in the balance. Class one was a wakeup call – a loud battle cry of “what in the world is this malarky?!” Class two wasn’t much better. The screaming my body and mind were doing was not quite as loud, but still just as angry – and kind of bitey. Class three it began to kind of coalesce into a kind of ugly surrender – an admittance of defeat more or less. It was in this moment that the idea of 2 more yin yoga classes to conquer this yoga mountain was becoming less and less appealing. I had to ask myself if this is really something worth the time, effort and suffering. In yoga we talk a lot about loosening the grip on things, allowing space, and also giving yourself permission to let something go that no longer serves you. Could I give myself permission to just let go? Nope. Dad didn’t raise a quitter. Clearly, I was going to learn this lesson whether I liked it or not.
Class four I quit. You read that right. I quit. But, this is where the story turns.
I still showed up, rolled out my mat like I always did in the spot at the front of the class. At this point, I had no idea what I was trying to prove by being dead smack in the middle, at the front of class. I felt dejected because my plan was falling apart – yin yoga and I were NOT in a committed relationship like I had envisioned. In the moment that I was going to surrender myself to the yoga gods for not holding up my end of the deal, my inner knowing said NOPE! And in that instant, I had a reason to come back for class five. It was a seated forward fold. I was rolling my eyes. I wasn’t best friends with this posture even before the yoga deal was made, and since I was in the front of the class, I was feigning enthusiasm. But…something magical happened. My nose was the closest it’s ever been to my knee in 20 years of practice. Cue the rainbows and unicorns! To this day I still haven’t been able to count the threads of my leggings the way I did that day – and this my friends, was the reason I came back to class five.
Class five was monumental! Alright, so I’m embellishing a bit – but it still felt like I learned something worth learning. I got my golden boots back in a manner of speaking – and it felt really great. I wasn’t singing love songs to my knee in a forward fold, but there was a deeper knowing. A kind of grace that was granted in class four that told me that I had to keep going back. There was so much more to learn about yin yoga as a practice, and I was really ready. I was hungry to learn all there was to learn about the practice that humbled me.
So that’s it – yin yoga taught me to be graceful in my practice. Not like a swan, but more along the lines of giving myself grace to be just who I am at that moment. Class five sealed in that permission I gave myself to just be a student on a mat. That spaciousness in my practice has grown so much since then, and it’s expanded into my teaching. I teach yin yoga so passionately because I am desperate to share that space with students – and to allow them to cultivate their own relationship with the space that exists within themselves.
So, here we are. It seems like an anticlimactic ending – those 4 classes are all it took. Maybe I could have described the journey with a little more color, but yoga really doesn’t need all of that. Yoga is the greatest teacher. Despite the screaming, biting and yelling involved in my descent into yin yoga, the end result is simple. Spaciousness and grace. And that is profound ending worthy of a colorful journey.
