107 days ago, I started teaching yoga, at the ripe old age of 49 2/3.

I had not planned on doing this.

In fact, when I was doing yoga teacher training, I was vehement: I’m not doing this to become a teacher. I loved the teacher, and I wanted to do more than a drop-in class, for once, and I wanted to do something for myself that wasn’t about being more productive as an economic unit, that blended the physical and the spiritual, with the mental, the underserved, neglected parts of myself. Midlife crisis etc etc.

And here I am, about to take a pause to go celebrate being 50 with my family, and enjoy summer vacation together, about to teach my 20th class.

It’s been so intense, and just like the first few months with a baby, you think you’ll never ever forget it and you don’t really have words for what it’s been like nor do you have the time to sit down with the thoughts and try and tease them out of the lumpen knotted mess they show up as… but if you don’t, you’ll never get close to it again. Because it changes, becomes something else, so soon, so fast…

So, although I’m supposed to be doing a bunch of other (paid, legitimate, “important”) things right now, I’m going to write this down. 

1. I only did it because I said yes to Shelley, my friend, to sub for her in her restorative yoga class when she was away, but then I had $250 worth of insurance cover to justify. (Tricked! by Late Stage Capitalism!)
2. Teaching restorative yoga seemed doable because it’s only about 8 shapes, people are lying down, it’s dark, and you don’t have to cue the whole time. But when I arrived to teach Shelley’s class that night, the key stashed in the secret safety box had disappeared, it took me ages to rouse anyone from the studio on the text thread, it was really hard to open the door, people who are used to coming early and the room being ready for them were lining up outside, I couldn’t find the dongle to plug my playlist in, so it was kind of a high-test fire-baptism. But I had to get my shit together fast to hold space for other people to relax, and I feel weirdly fierce and feisty about people’s right to relax, to breathe, to slow down, to feel safe, and to do it in community. So I think I pulled it off. But it was a massive whiplash-inducing vibe-shift.
3. I’ve taught classes with one single student, with four, with almost 20. Every room the energy is different, and completely changes depending on who is there and how they are. They matter. (You contribute. Your contribution matters. Even when you think you’re going for a ride, you’re helping craft the energy wave.)
4. Teaching to a full room, where everyone follows what you’re doing, even if it’s something weird like tapping your collarbones and humming or breathing into your cupped hands, carries a little flush of power with it. I glimpsed it momentarily, when I subbed a busy evening class for Julia, and I had this tiny peek at the rush, what it must be like to be on stage, commanding a crowd. I could see how that carries a charge, is addictive. I have no training for this.
5. I am wildly underqualified for all of it. And I do not like that feeling.
6. But I have $250 worth of insurance cover to justify. At 20 classes, it’s costing me $12.85 a lesson just for the privilege of being there, for the chance to possibly damage someone, doing gentle yoga, which is a lot of cat cow shapes.
7. I’ve had to adapt every single time from my game-plan – when you have yoga teachers, strong athletes, pregnant women, older folk, yoga newbies, all in the room, it’s challenging, to find the shapes that will serve everyone. And I don’t have a really deep repertoire. I write a sequence, I practice it, at first five times in the week before I delivered it, and then, in the heat of the moment, I’d dump entire sections, shift gears, forget shapes. I am adaptable. More than I realized.
8. The teachers at the Village Yoga studio are amazing teachers for me, as a baby teacher, just to practice with them and absorb what they’re doing, I’m soaking it up from the very best. They cue so precisely, they’re so good at what they do. We’re really really lucky here.  I want to be as good as them. And that is a wonderful ambition. But it would be an insult to those teachers who inspire me to think I could possibly do that, in a 200 hour teacher training and a few classes.
9. The beloved community is a thing. I am doing this to be part of the beloved community, to give to something that gives so much to me. I sat in David’s class on Sunday and was surrounded by people I love, some who I know only through this studio, others who I know from beyond it and am so happy to practice with, fellow teachers… it made me emotional.
10. My teacher said, yes, it’s always nerve-wracking and that never gets easier, but I think she was lying. Already, it’s easier than it was. I don’t know why she said that, or why it helped me so much, that she said. For the record, she makes it look SO easy. 

I pitched a column or book of essays a bunch of years ago, called Old Dog New Tricks. The idea was that the columnist slash guinea pig slash me would go and learn to do completely new and scary things and track not just their skill acquisition and experience but maybe also their overall brain health. The assumption was that learning new things is good for us, no matter how much we suck. The irony was that I wasn’t old. Not even close.

Now, I am.

And I’ve just become a yoga teacher. 

It’s really weird and a hard thing to inhabit if I think too hard about it, think too hard about white people doing yoga, or about middle-aged white women, in general. Who should be authentically teaching yoga? Maybe people from India? Maybe skinny white girls who are former dancers and incredibly flexible? Whatever your picture of dream yoga teacher is, I doubt it’s a greying, soft bellied, curvy woman in her middle years…

So I had to confront that.

What I teach with a kind of ferocity is compassion, curiosity and generosity towards the body. Which is also ironic. Because I don’t inhabit my body with an ongoing state of compassion, curiosity and generosity. I have absorbed and internalized enough of the culture to judge myself for falling short physically in many many ways. 

But I’ve been showing up anyway.

I’ve learned that it actually hurts when you do something new.

Nowhere in your physical body. But very much in your brain. In a nerveless kind of way.

It wasn’t until something I saw on substack or instagram that I can’t find anymore said, brains are very plastic but when the brain is changing, and doing new things, it’s so uncomfortable it’s practically painful.

Yes. 

It is.

I can’t explain why. Or how. It made no sense to anyone else. Like, you use words for a living, and you go to a yoga class pretty much every day, what’s the big deal?

I’m not sure. 

But it is.

My lovely friend Pauline came close to naming it… she called it an intensity mismatch, sympathizing with the experience I was sharing by comparing it with her experience sharing new poems at spoken word events. The emotional intensity of your experience, crafting words and putting yourself out there, is not met by the audience. They’re not having an intense emotional experience, so their feedback is not “suitable.” It’s not effusive. It doesn’t meet you where you’re at. It doesn’t reassure you. This is good and appropriate. If you’re teaching a gentle yoga class, you want people to slide out the door as puddles, barely able to speak, because they’ve achieved a state of peak relaxation and self-acceptance. You want them to barely even register your existence. But the sad little ego part of you needs them to grip you by the arms, shake you, stare you in the eyes, intently, and say, my god, that was fantastic, that was the most incredible experience of my life. Only that degree of psychotic stalkerish fan girling would actually meet the intensity of your own emotions in exposing yourself in this way. Total mismatch. Having Pauline name that helped me immensely.

Of course, I don’t want that.

Okay then.

The intensity is mine and mine alone.

Then a dear dear friend asked me to host a session, for her and her sister, in the days after her partner had died suddenly from cancer, after being diagnosed just days earlier. Of course, of course, whatever I can do. When I held space her her, it was apparent to me that my neuroses and insecurities were literally the least significant thing on the earth. That I had by my good fortune, acquired a few helpful tools that could be offered in service of a friend who was suffering. That was a breakthrough day. I hate to talk about its effect on me, so selfishly. But it helped me let go of the selfish part. People are dying. Your neuroses are BORING. They’re never going to go away, they haven’t changed in the last 30-40 years. Who cares. Just guide the practice. 

What propels you? That is ultimately the question, really. In anything we take on, and in all the things that make our nerveless brains ache with new efforts and unfamiliar grooves. For me, it is a desire to offer and experience radical hospitality. A love for the beloved community. A desire to give back. And gratitude for the way this practice is landing in my body and heart. So that’s good enough, I suppose. And that’s all we can be. Good enough.