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OPEN MIND OPEN BODY Teaching Reflections |
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The
Sick Yoga Teacher [A
special thanks to my Thursday evening yoga class for giving me the idea to
write this essay, and for showing compassion for their sick yoga teacher!] I
don’t get sick often, but when I do, I feel guilty: What kind of yoga
teacher gets sick? Shouldn’t I have transcended my weakness to lowly cold
and flu germs? Shouldn’t I always be a model of radiant health and
well-being? How can I inspire my student’s confidence in the healing power
of yoga to heal, if I cannot overcome the most basic of daily illnesses? Last
week, I came down with a summer flu. Today, it lingered just enough to make me
cough every now and then, but not enough to keep me from teaching. I felt
fine, but the evidence of my recent illness came out – ironically – just
about every time I told my students to inhale:
“Take a deep breath,” – hack, hack. “I
hate teaching with a cough,” I said to my class. “It shows…” “That
you’re mortal?” a student said. I laughed, and said yes. That I’m mortal; that yoga does not erase our vulnerability. Of
course, yoga does not guarantee us perfect physical health. But even if we
know this intellectually, it can still feel like a failure or disappointment
when we fall ill. Watching
one of our own teachers grow sick can be a powerful challenge to our ideas of
what yoga promises us. Students of great teachers - like yoga teacher B.K.S.
Iyengar and Zen teacher Katagiri Roshi - have written about the disorienting
experience of watching their beloved teachers suffer major illness. How could
it happen to them? Surely, they would be spared. Not heart disease. Not
cancer. Not the ordinary act of dying. It
can be hard to separate our ideas of enlightenment and physical immortality.
If it is not liberation from the humbling experience of physical pain and
deterioration, than what does Hatha yoga promise us? Why spend so much time
working with body, if the body can still betray us? Yoga,
meditation, and all spiritual practices offer the hope of ending suffering.
But suffering is not the same as physical pain or sickness. Suffering is
created by the belief that what we are experiencing is unjust, unnatural, and
somehow separate from the universal experience of others. We can experience
pain and illness, and be at peace with our experience. We can experience the
natural transformation from youth to age to death, and understand that this
experience connects all living things. It
is ego that tells us we will be spared from physical pain while we are alive,
and the inevitable physical changes of leaving this human form. When
a student in class was diagnosed with cancer, my meditation teacher told us,
“We’re all terminal cases.” And this was comforting, not frightening. There
is a Buddhist practice of meditating on your own death. Most people are
frightened by the idea – and spend much energy trying to deny their own
mortality. But how liberating it is to not run. When I was sick last week, I was in no real danger of dying. But it did cross my mind that it was an opportunity to practice letting go, to face the vulnerability of my physical form, and to embrace the energetic stillness of physical illness. Ironically, it was only as my health re-emerged and my energy lifted that my ego returned. It said, “What kind of yoga teacher are you anyway, getting sick?” And I thank my students profoundly for reminding me that is OK to be mortal. Return to Teaching Reflections
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