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Summer 1993

NAMASTE,

An old friend of mine used to teach yoga in a small, progressive Southern town a few years ago. Soft-spoken, clear-eyed, she exuded a gentle, ethereal sweetness coupled with an aura of inner strength that perfectly filled the general concept of what a yoga teacher should be. During a lazy conversation on a hot summer afternoon in an easy drawl that matched the day, she related a story that has stuck with me through the intervening years.

One day she was strolling through the local supermarket, she told me, picking up a few odds and ends for the evening meal, when suddenly she heard her name being called by an agitated voice. She turned to see a student of hers hurrying up the aisle toward her.

“What are you doing here?” the student exclaimed.

“What do you mean?” my friend asked, curious about all the consternation.

“What are you doing here?” the student repeated. “I mean, in the supermarket!”

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Seems as though this student could not conceive of someone so cosmic as my friend, being a yoga teacher and all, actually shopping in a supermarket of all places. We mused that perhaps she expected my friend to subsist solely on roots and tubers gathered deep in the forest. Or better yet, to not eat anything at all, to be a breatharian or something.

I suspect most yoga teachers who have been at it for any length of time have encountered similar reactions upon being discovered acting like ordinary people. Folks don’t expect yoga teachers to act like ordinary people. They don’t expect them to be ordinary people. After all, even though it has become much more popular of late, yoga is still not all that ordinary a thing to do.

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One reason people expect yoga teachers to be different is because the books about yoga, at least many of them, certainly describe people who are unlike any people we encounter in our normal lives: people who hardly sleep at all, who eat one chapati every two weeks, who walk barefoot through the snows of the Himalayas, who are hundreds of years old, who swallow towels, who sleep on beds of nails, who stand on one leg for days at a stretch, who are always calm and happy, and on and on.

Another reason yoga teachers aren’t expected to be like ordinary people is because many times, intentionally or unintentionally, teachers create an air of being different. They can do things with their bodies that most people can’t do. They describe experiences and observations that are well outside the realm of their students’ experiences. A lot of times students just suppose that since their teachers obviously spend their time doing strange things like standing on their heads, there’s no telling what other weird things they might be doing.

And you know, in one sense yoga teachers are different. I’m reminded of something Judith Lasater often tells her students: that yoga does change you. Over time it changes how you eat, what you wear, what you read, who you hang out with, how you spend your time, what you think about, how you feel.

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But in another, deeper sense, yoga teachers are not much different from everybody else. They laugh. They cry. They have small and large joys. They have small and large sorrows. They have moments of kindness and moments of cruelty. They experience times of certainty and times of doubt. They do things correctly. They make mistakes. They succeed. They fail. They are, in short, human.

Students – and others – sometimes don’t want this to be so. They want their teacher to be special, to be different, to be superhuman. They put their teacher on a pedestal.

Teachers sometimes don’t want this to be so, either, this being human. They want to be special, to be different, to be superhuman. After all, they’re yoga teachers; they’re supposed to be all these things. So they climb up on the pedestal. (Of course this phenomenon is not confined to yoga students and teachers).

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This is a dangerous business for everybody involved.

Yesterday, I was reading a story by Sy Syfransky, the editor of The Sun, a de-light-full, small, award-winning magazine about the arts, consciousness and life. Sy was talking about the pain he felt upon hearing of the death of a teacher he had recently come to know, a man who had moved and fascinated Sy with his wisdom, warmth and equanimity.

Sy said, “They say it’s better to pay homage to the teaching, not the teacher, for we get too attached. We’re supposed to care about their words, not the blood coursing through their veins. Yet drawn to the mysterious essence of a man, to his laughter, to the fire in his eyes, we want to stand beside him, see the world he sees.

And that’s naïve, they say, because sooner or later the teacher betrays us, or leaves us, and we’re left with this terrible ache.”

Later in the story Sy said of the same teacher, “I was only beginning to respect instead of idealize him, to let him come down from his pedestal and be an ordinary man.”

We all seem to want gods to worship, beings on pedestals or clouds or higher planes, larger than life, larger at least than our seemingly small lives. And the danger in this, as Sy points out, is that sooner or later, the larger-than-life expectations we create will come crashing down around us. What happens then is that the pendulum swings and the god we idolized becomes a devil to demonize. And all the while the teacher is just a human being, no more, no less.

I have seen this happen with a lot of teachers over the years, some famous, some not. I have seen it happen with my own teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar. Many people idolize him; many people demonize him. Interestingly but not uncommonly, many of the people who demonize him at one time were in the forefront of those who idolized him.

There are no judgements to make about this. It’s just that to see what we want to see and not to see what we don’t want to see usually keeps us from seeing what is. And what is is that inevitably our teachers are human beings with all that that entails. I have yet to meet one who wasn’t.

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We must still decide whether a particular teacher is suitable for us or not, but the more we do this based on who that person is rather than whom we would like them to be, the less susceptible we will be to disappointment and disillusionment, to the swings of the pendulum. More important, we learn to discriminate. We don’t confuse the teachings with the teacher. And ultimately, when the teacher does fall short of our expectations or desires, we are less inclined to throw out the baby with the bathwater by denying the truth of the teachings because of the shortcomings of the teacher.

After all the talk about teachers and students in these newsletters lately, I must say that I’m looking forward to seeing my teacher this August at the American Iyengar Yoga Convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The one thing I can say about B.K.S. Iyengar with some certainty is that his humanity is undeniable. It’s one of the reasons I cherish him. You might want to think about taking advantage of what may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Mr. Iyengar here in the United States. Contact the American Iyengar Yoga Convention at 313-668-1323.

Whether you decide to go or not, have a happy summer.

       

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