Marcia's Musings: When We See Each Other
/Of late, my mind meanders the mysterious corridors of connection. How do lovers attract each other? How do teachers and students home in on each other? What causes friends to decide on each other for a lifetime? Why do some business partnerships last a lifetime and others go up in flames?
It would break the boundaries of the compact between us for me to explore the exquisite intricacies of how lovers locate and then cleave to each other. (For that, you will have to read my novel.) Each of us carries within us our own childhood-to-grave friendship stories. As for business partnerships, I could speak volumes – suffice it to say that I was blessed with a great one – brilliant, funny, challenging, too – and one day, she and I may share that journey in a series of lectures.
For now, I concentrate on the relationship between teacher and student, one I’ve known in the academic classroom and on the mat.
As an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota for several years in the 1990s, my co-professor and I often speculated on the whys: Why does one student warm to a professor so deeply and another maintain a certain coolness the whole semester? Why does one faithfully meet homework requirements, another assume a “duly-noted” posture, and yet another attempt, week after week, to squirm out of assignments – or, worse yet, blatantly ignore them? And finally, what creates that most-magical of bonds when students and teachers freely learn from each other and with their brave voices admit this is so? To this day, one of our long-ago students keeps in touch with me – now a skilled published writer and speaker with an excellent mind (which always was present), I hold awareness that the student may have surpassed the teacher, perhaps several times. I marvel at the joy of this feeling.
In the days when we yoga teachers taught face-to-face in the studios, the bond with students was close, in distance and in energy. The ability to see each other and learn how bodies step into poses, breathe, and meditate occurred in the state of immediacy, feedback written on students’ faces and in teachers’ words. With the emergence of virtual classes, caused for the most-unbelievable of reasons, a pandemic, this bond fractured. Without being able to see each other in person, or at all with so many at-home yogis blocking their video, both student and teacher haltingly reach for each other. It feels similar to the childhood game when we blindfolded one player who had to hesitantly find the others.
Live-streaming yoga classes delivered positive aspects, of course. One could roll out of bed and tumble onto the mat to practice in pajamas. One could take a break from at-home work hours and sneak in a class in the middle of the day rather than before or after previously normal work hours. Worries about hair, traffic, yoga outfits evaporated. For teachers, the ability to deliver the practice despite a shutdown gave rise to new challenges – good ones – and crashed through any complacency we’d developed.
And yet. Nothing replaces the bond of being in direct contact with each other, whether lovers, friends, business partners, or students and teachers. As teachers we are unsure if our cues are adequate for virtual students because we can’t see their bodies. We shy away from teaching new aspects of poses – or even of teaching any parts of certain poses – because we hold evident that safety comes first. Students don’t call out requests, questions, jokes. We wilt without the banter, the interplay of sharing of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, the lingering after class to share...whatever.
What we’ve learned in this long, lonely period of virtual delivery is that yoga’s tenet of “direct experience” still stands after eons and after this pandemic. This is why in-person classes multiply weekly on our schedules. Are you ready to rejoin yoga at its roots, on the mat and in community with teacher and other students? Are you ready to resume human connection in the sacred spaces Green Lotus offers, recalling in the not-distant past the sheer joy and exhilaration found in the mystery of direct relationship? We teachers are. We are calling to you.
