Reading Brautigan at the Ward Public LIbrary

Today is the second day of my aerial yoga class.  It's every day this week.  Yesterday was mostly yoga, supported by the trapeze bar (it's a low trapeze, before you get excited about me dangling fifty feet in the air or something), but today we had freeform exploration at the end of the class, which let me try out some fun things to do that I'd never done before.

The teacher of the class is a Kripalu yoga instructor, and the freeform thing is very Kripalu, except for the part where you fall off something and injure yourself, which did not happen today.  Instead, I did find myself getting unintentionally and unreasonably irritated with one of the other people in the class.  She was a tall blonde girl, who seemed like a teenager, and had a particularly disturbing habit of twisting her mouth to the side like a nervous tic.  I suspected she was a teenager because she was displaying a sorta blatant disregard for other people's personal space; she fidgeted and looked at herself in the mirror when the teacher explained moves; switched trapezes at random; and I don't know why all this stuff drove me crazy, but it did.

It was kind of weird.  I just got notification that I can apply for the Kripalu yoga teacher training I have been wanting to do in October, and I have been wondering whether or not to accept it.  I love yoga.  I love teaching.  I love teaching yoga.  But I am not the most flexible person, even doing it daily; there are plenty of asanas I can't do and some that I fudge and some that I deliberately avoid because I hate them (yep, I hate yoga poses, and I'm not afraid to admit it).  and the rest of yoga, outside of the asanas, I struggle with constantly.

It's all about staying on the mat: minding your own business, not comparing (comparisons are, after all, odious), being in your mind and the present rather than worrying about the future or the past.  But I find it so easy to be distracted, to spend my savasana being bitchy about myself or others.  In yoga class, I scope other people during Downward Dog, I get irritated by people's weird habits or the way they breathe, I worry about what's going to happen tomorrow, and I get off-balance: literally off-balance.  I fall over.

Being here in Boulder, in the mountains, is a kind of yoga.  Being in the desert of Morocco or Burning Man is a kind of yoga; walking with an empty mind is a form of yoga.  But I don't know how I can teach yoga when I so consistently go off the mat and worry worry worry about things that haven't happened, things that might not happen, things I am afraid of happening.  My mind is all wrapped up in things.  

I guess the short statement out of that is: I wonder where I'll be in October?