School of Hard Knocks

Oh happy days…

Today, I was awarded my Hatha Yoga Teacher Certificate, after passing both my practical and theory exams with flying colours. Pretty miraculous for a 40-year old klutz with the coordination of a baby elephant.  Stepping up to ceremoniously receive my certificate in front of all the people I’d sweated blood with this last month felt like winning an Oscar. So naturally I marked the occasion in grand, Gwyneth Paltrow style, complete with gushing speech and uncontrollable sobbing; which I then chased down with an irrational outbreak of perspiration. It was a highly charged moment. And although my teaching style may be more barmy than swami, I have to say I’m bloody proud of what I’ve achieved.

But if the road to success is paved with failures then mine has been peppered with more belly flops than overweight diving contest. Firstly, it took me a good few weeks to get up to speed on all the practical stuff. And I know yoga isn’t meant to be competitive, but there’s nothing more disconcerting than seeing your fellow classmates painlessly contorting themselves in to various shapes of pretzel while you continue to lose consciousness every time you so much as attempt a simple forward bend.

And if it wasn’t my body being pummelled then it was my brain, thanks to all the Sanskrit, mantras and sutras we were being force-fed. How I ever got my head around this little gem, for instance, is beyond me:

"Om purna mada purna midam, Purnaat purnam udachyate, Purnasya purnam adaaya, Purnam eva vasishyate”

…but I did and I even managed to memorise the translation:

"That is the whole, this is the whole; from the whole, the whole arises; taking away the whole from the whole, the whole remains"

…just don’t ask me to tell you what all that actually means.

On the plus side, I can now confidently instruct you to “Siras Moola Aswina Bandha” (stick your head up your arse and engage the sphincter lock), so every cloud has a silver lining.

However, the toughest part of it all for me wasn’t so much the punishing schedule as the playground politics and tacit power struggles that are common with being at school. Not that my classmates were a bad bunch, in fact I like pretty much liked all of them. But the little cabal of overly keen yoga bores who’d meet in secret to perfect their practice and swot up on all the theory – I knew about them. They were annoying. And then there was the outright lick-arse who had just two words to her vocabulary: “wooooooow” and “uh-maaaaazzzzzzinngggg” which she’d purr at our teachers with whenever she felt the need to score a few brownie points. Infuriating. But the one student who really made my blood boil was a bloke called “Xenius”. Or “X” as he liked to be known. Quite.

What made X particularly odious was that he really believed that he was some kind of enlightened guru. Which is fine if you can keep that kind of thing to yourself. But no. X liked to share his wisdom. Liberally. He would constantly interrupt our philosophy classes with insights and observations that he genuinely believed were prophetic and profound. But they weren’t. They were either idiotic, obnoxious or just downright pointless. The other day, for example he felt the need to pose this little scholarly nugget: “why is it that nice guys finish last?” I shit you not. I mean, he may as well have gone the whole hog and asked if “absence makes the heart grow fonder?” or whether “silence really is golden?” The truth is most of us have had hot baths deeper than him.

And while X made me want to punch myself in the face every time he so much as opened his mouth, even I could appreciate he was a fairly benign character.  Which is more than I can say for my philosophy and meditation teacher, Mahesh. Now that man was scarier than Stalin. Mahesh presided over our afternoon classes like an enlightened despot. And for a spiritual man, who is supposedly a lot further down the yogic path than most of us, he seemed to have one colossal ego. If you were an unquestioning, obsequious lick-arse, then he might be go easy on you; otherwise, he would be downright abusive. 

Except to me. Apparently I was so insignificant I didn’t actually register on his radar. In fact I don’t think he addressed me directly once during the entire course. If I had the temerity to ask him a question in class, he would look straight through me, like I wasn’t there. To him, I just didn’t exist. And I found this really unsettling. I mean, you can like me or loathe me – but regard me with stone cold indifference? Now that’s just cruel.

But while I’ve had my fair share of hard knocks these last four weeks, I have to say I’ve relished every second. I’ve seen myself grow and change in so many wonderful ways – I’m happier in my own skin, more at one with my body and I generally feel a lot more at peace. Sure, I may never be able to perform a “crow” without seriously hurting myself, or meditate for more than ten minutes without falling asleep; but I can now execute a perfect back flip from standing, touch my head with my feet while upside down in a headstand and have a fairly superficial conversation with you in Sanskrit.

So move over Madonna, there’s a new yoga babe on the block…