An observation on my yoga practice:
When I first moved from Boston to the (unnamed!) town where I live now, I hated the yoga studio here. It suffered SO badly in comparison to my old studio. In my opinion, Boston just has phenomenal Bikram yoga studios, by-the-book, dialogue driven, brilliant teachers, beautiful practice rooms, huge community - I really had it all there. I was close to all the instructors, especially the studio owners, and I think I kinda broke their hearts when I told them I was leaving cause they'd had visions of me going to teacher training and coming back to teach for them full time. Anyway... my new studio drove me NUTS. I thought the instructors were TERRIBLE. I thought their dialogue was ALL WRONG. I basically couldn't focus on my own practice for months cause I would get so distracted by my own back seat driving, spending half of the class thinking about all the things I thought the teacher should be doing/saying differently and leaving in a lousy mood.
I knew I had to get over this.
What I just realized is that I pretty much HAVE gotten over it.
I realized this after class last night when a yoga acquaintance of mine from out of town came and took class with me. It was fun. I had a great practice. I loved the teacher, I appreciated a ton of the things that she said, and I pretty much just tuned out the few technical points that I didn't agree with, because that's not my problem. Was totally happy with the class. After the class, my visiting yoga buddy wrote to me saying it was one of the worst classes he'd ever taken and he was never coming back.
Huh.
Back in September, that might have been my reaction too.
So what's changed? Have I (*gasp!*) lost my standards?
No. That's not it at all. I just gradually, finally, let it go. I still hear when things are off, I still notice the problems, and I still would like to do something about them, but now it flows off me and around. Like oil off a duck!! Hah. But seriously. Not all the time, but most of the time, I am unperturbed. Unperturable. Nobody steals my peace. My practice is my practice, and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's a hot mess, and sometimes it's just ok, but it's MINE.
Cool.
