Yoga and the Crow: Excising that which does not serve.

I went to a yoga class today that was way out of my league. Silly me, I thought “Yoga Basics” was a beginners class! It was hard. I felt foolish. But something happened that makes me think I was supposed to be there.

The studio’s pretty big, don’t ask me the dimensions but 25 of us fit in there pretty well. Mirrors all along one wall, picture windows all along the other. I really like this studio as it is where I take Bellydance and used to take a Shake Your Soul ® class. The point is, I’m comfortable in there with my body, my skills and my self. Or so I thought.

Twenty minutes into the class we’re all hanging out in Downward Dog and the teacher comes up to me. I expect and accept corrections in my yoga practice, just as I do in my dance. How else is one to learn? But she walks up to me, wrenches my pinky finger away from the others in a way that its twisted, probably-broken-at one-point bones just don’t want to go and says, “That’s a bad habit. Spread your fingers.” What could I do? I took the note. “Have you ever done yoga before?”

*****SCREECH******

Suddenly I’m back on stage at the high school auditorium, warbling out my best rendition of Who Knows What as an audition piece for Hello, Dolly! The director (who had cast me previously in half a dozen straight plays) stops me mid-bar and asks, loudly, “Are you even in the school chorus?” I was. I had been for years.

******SCREECH******

Wow! A flashback within a flashback. This had better be good, right? About a year prior to that fateful audition I had turned up dutifully for my voice lesson with Mrs. P, the school chorus teacher. I know now that she had probably just been drunk and grumpy. But at the time her words were like a punch to the gut. “Oh, it’s you. This is a waste of time. You should go back to study hall.”

I have to confess, that I had a moment there when I nearly picked up my mat and left. I don’t know what stopped me. Instead I answered quietly, because I was still upside-down after all, “Yes, I have.”

She walked away. The class returned to standing and I saw in the mirror a reflection of a crow, sitting on a rock in the parking lot rubbing his beak against the stone. He looked calm, purposeful, and much like a chef honing his knife on a steel.

If Mrs. P’s words had been a punch to the gut, this instant was the dent she left finally popping out after 18 years. Those old feelings of inadequacy, the fear of being found out for a fraud, the idea that this teacher’s time was better spend helping someone more deserving? Gone. Don’t get me wrong - I mean, it still hurt. But more like a paper cut than a skinned knee. It was a clean cut.

I do not want to dub this bird an Otherworldly messenger. To me, this is the world that matters. But symbolism and association can be powerful magic and if a carrion-crow wants to excise something dead and rotten within me, who am I to stop it?

All in all, I left the class the way I like to leave yoga practice, feeling a little lighter, a little looser and ready to observe without criticism and simply to trust.