My high school yogis asked me yesterday when I was going to blog again. One of them piped up, “You should blog about resistance that you have been talking about the last few weeks.” How could my heart not melt at this request? Very sweet… very inspiring. Yet I don’t think Feyga knew the irony of her statement. Of course, the reason I have not blogged is partly due to my own resistance. It seemed fitting that I rise to the challenge.
I had noticed the energy dragging along through the 90-minute vinyasa classes I had been teaching the kids. I noticed them conveniently getting up to blow their noses when an arm balance or a dolphin came up in class. I noticed them needing water, bathroom breaks, advil, etc., much more frequently. When my requests for them to work harder to stay on their mat for the duration of class began to fall upon deaf ears, I knew I had to try something different. So the next time I held class, I began by erasing the entire board and writing in huge letters, “RESISTANCE”. The kids tried to figure out what I was writing as each letter came up….. “Resting Pose?” “Resigned?” “Resistible?” RESISTANCE! “Why are we talking about resisting? That doesn’t seem like yoga.”
I asked them what they thought the word meant, and they mentioned things like protest, hesitation, doubt, laziness, and exhaustion. I asked them to give examples of when they have felt resistance. “Fighting with my mom.” “Filling out college applications.” I don’t think people give High School Kids enough credit for how stressful their lives actually are. They come to yoga and they are filled with distraction of a million assignments, with doubt about their ability or their body, with anxiety about the future or the present, while being surrounded by people that they fear are judging them.
I told them that I myself dealt with resistance, and I was honest. “Even on the way here today, I was thinking ‘Oh, I have so many other things I want to do today.’ ” I saw all of their faces soften; they seemed surprised, but could relate. “But I am here, and we are going to have fun.” We talked about times that it’s easy to be resistant, and I mentioned that yoga is partly about bringing equanimity to each moment. “Like when your teacher suddenly assigns you a new project. You could get annoyed or mad, or complain that you aren’t going to have as much time to chill this weekend. And you might do that. I have done that… Or you can skip that part and go straight to how you are going to make it happen. Because the result is, you are going to have to do the project, so why not avoid the frustration that comes straight from you? It saves time and stress.” This one got some knowing smiles.
We then went on to talk about how it’s the same thing in your asanas. “I know you guys start to curse me in your heads when I hold you in Warrior Two for too long.” They laughed. “This is an unnecessary tension that comes to distract you from the breath, the pose, and what you are doing in the present moment.” I suggested that for the day they try to shift the tendency toward a more positive focus. Rather than the difficulty or challenge they were feeling, I asked them to focus on specific parts of the body or the breath itself. I asked them to observe how just a mental shift can change the pose and make it easier, instead of hating how hard it seemed or angrily waiting for the pose to be over.
We had a lot of fun that day. We ended up spending part of the class laughing as we attempted handstand and forearm stand. During savasana I talked a little bit about bringing that approach to life whenever we begin to see resistance come up. Take a breath. Figure out how to work with it, rather than against it. Make efforts to approach each challenge as an opportunity to stay present, no matter how small. When they got up and I asked them how they felt about working with their resistance, they said they liked it. I didn’t get much more than that, and I didn’t press for it. But I do bring up the magic ‘R’ word when we find ourselves all twisted up in garudasana (eagle pose) or doing Ana Forrest core work. And Feyga mentioning it yesterday gives me hope that perhaps they have been thinking about how they resist things off of their mats.
We know that every day brings new challenges. Instead of worrying or focusing on how these challenges are going to inconvenience or hurt us, let’s bring a confidence about our ability to surmount our challenges, and direct our focus to how we can do that. The first step can be to do it in our asanas during yoga class—in a small, controlled, safe part of our lives—but then we can work to do it outside of class as well. It is in moments like this that I am fully aware of how magnanimous the teachings of yoga are. I certainly can’t profess to be an enlightened person (or a ‘yoga master’ as one of the kids calls me), as I myself struggle to put these teachings into affect in my everyday life. As these words come out of my mouth I know I have no ownership of them. I often don’t know where they come from; they are lessons passed down for centuries, but they always seem fitting and right.
Every time I am resistant about doing something and I do it, I get more energy from it. Sometimes the results of our efforts are not clear-cut or rewarding, which brings about another opportunity to work with a new kind of resistance. We can’t shape our lives into the exact way we want them to be all of the time, we have to work and adapt to outside factors beyond our control. We have to resist our own resistance. Sometimes we can, other times we cannot. That is why it’s called practice.
