Tonight’s yoga lesson: Backbends! Energizing! Heart opening!
The teacher’s confession: She hates backbends. And she’s not good at them. In practice. She can give you plenty of theory and information about your anatomy, but that doesn’t get her hands back to her heels in camel or her hips off the ground in upward bow. She’ll skip bow, then. Maybe offer it up as an option for those “who regularly use it in their practice.” And she’ll teach half camel, which she can actually do, though she rarely enjoys it. And so the class plan comes together, a gumbo of knowledge and reality, seasoned with a pinch of shame.
And so the teacher learns: Not the poses, though god knows she tries. She learns it doesn’t matter. She stands at the door of the classroom, all limitation and insecurity, and she loves her students. Casually, while shaking their hands, she slips them the gift of happy imperfection.
Small Poems de Terre 