It’s been a rollercoaster week in terms of numbers at the studio where I teach. From the start, the two 6:15 pm, 90-minute classes I pushed to have on the schedule and teach have always been quiet, maybe reaching a peak of eight people, once. Usually there are three to four, but last week just two students showed one night, one on the other.
I’m happy to teach a class of one as much as a class of 25—I really believe it only takes one class at the right time to change someone’s life—but in terms of energy, it takes a lot more from me to teach just a few people. A school teacher friend said it’s the same in a classroom: If you have 30 students, most are happily humming along, and as a teacher your attention is going to wherever you need to put out fires. If you have three students, it’s less exciting because there’s fewer fires, and maybe those students came wanting to be left to their own devices, not the centre of attention.
When I had the single student show up—a holiday drop-in with a seasoned practice—we had a somewhat stilted conversation in the reception. He brought up the idea of doing a silent class when he realised he was the only student. I said it was up to him: A dialogue class was on the schedule and that’s what he showed up for, so I was expecting and happy to do that. He went for the silent. (And phew, I had not eaten dinner.)
It was such a lovely practice! The beauty of practising yoga alongside someone is that you don’t need to be, well, conversing and dealing with all the anxiety that comes with that (or is that just me?). Like when you’re meditating (even alone), it feels like you’re tapping into something larger and more universal, and that feeling is only amplified when you’re doing it with someone else. As the saying goes, the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts.
(Separately but related: How nice would it be to wear one of those “In silence” badges you get at silent retreats in the real world, all of the time? Separately but related: I fell a little in love with a stranger practising next to me once, just because of the way he was breathing in class.)
A couple of days later, I practised in a packed class. Normally I love riding the energy of a busy class as much as I love teaching one. But for this class, a person within my vision at the front endlessly fidgeted and it drove me nuts; another student nearby was breathing out through their mouth, and I spent half the class willing the teacher to tell them to stop it. This monkey mind was nothing more than a variation, seven years into practising, of the horrors of the heat, dripping sweat and silence that first-time students have. It was up to me to not be distracted no matter who was doing what in the room. Yeah, yeah.
I learned forever ago that it never does any good to hold expectations about your own practice beyond the next breath. The classes where you feel good at the start can be the worst; the classes where you feel terrible at the outset are often the best. (But once you know that, you can play with it in your head in a twisted version of rock, scissors, paper till you really, really need to stop thinking about it altogether.)
This week was a lesson that you can’t hold any expectations of a class based on how many (or who) is in the room, whether you’re teaching it or practising it.
Still, if you could make it to a 6:15 pm class, I’d be grateful.
What I’m reading
Serendipitously, this week a friend gave me Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to it.