I’ve been taking yoga classes for around 10 years, off and on. One of the consistent messages in yoga, whether you take it in a private studio or a rec. center, is that you need to be present in the moment.
Your body, all twisted up and shaking because you’re losing your balance, there on the floor? Yeah, it needs your brain to come back. Before something bad happens, m’kay? Yes, it is important in yoga and in life to be present in the moment.
For me it is tough, because when I am there, in the moment, my brain goes, “OK? Everyone all right? OK. I’ll be right back.” And it jogs off to some past moment, when I was there in the moment. They are the strangest moments. One winter day when I walked out of the student center at college. A sunny day when I just finished a favorite book as a kid. Not necessarily significant moments, but moments when I wasn’t planning or pining.
Now, I’ve noticed lately that the location of the classes means a great deal. I’ve taken some fantastic classes in an elementary school auditorium and commercial gyms, even a private yoga studio or two. It’s not the status of the place, or even the facilities it contains. When I slow down and actually notice things around me, it’s hard to keep my mind in that moment.
My most focused yogi time was spent in an elementary school auditorium in Fremont, California. Although it wasn’t the school I had attended, it was in the same town. And twice a week for nearly two years, when I walked into that space, I walked in and felt like a child. New to the world, ready to try something different. The familiar, cool and lonely smell of old linoleum. The somehow energy-filled emptiness, of a now darkened space normally inhabited by children. All of their brightness and keen interest abounding in that room, contagious.
It certainly didn’t hurt that the instructor might as well have been Maude from Harold and Maude. Definitely the most agile 80 year old I’ve ever met. Here I was, not yet 30 and after 2 years, I still couldn’t do a lot of the things she could. But that movie-strange-familiarity also supported the quality of timelessness the class inspired in me.
Now I am taking a yoga class that is held in a middle school in Minnesota. Not at the middle school (Junior High for you Californians) I attended in Minnesota, but certainly evocative of it. As if there is a certain cleaning product line, or carpet quality that has been standardized across the region, across decades of time. I find myself back at the beginner stage again (and again, and again). As always, an eager student. Somehow though, I am not the child-like enthusiast I once was.
Memories from this time are more complicated. Tween angst, first kisses. One day walking into the school for class I momentarily felt the giddy excitement I used to feel walking into some far away school in the darkness of an early Saturday morning, to compete in Speech. Another day the looming cinderblock walls, smell of a far off swimming pool or perhaps just the seeping damp of perpetually leaking locker room showers were rather oppressive.
I’m not sure why the past pulls at me so strongly when I’m actually working at focusing in the here and now. Maybe I’m not the only one. You tell me.
Jan
30