This weekend we talked about what to do if someone gets hurt–physically–during a yoga class. As I shared with the group, I’ve had a student die in my class before–not a yoga class, an academic class I teach at American River College. He had a heart attack. It was towards the beginning of class and it was really traumatic for the other students. There was a young student (Lucas) who had taken my class before (he had flunked it the first time). He had a lot of mental health problems, but I loved having him in class because he was so animated and funny. He was the one who made the 911 call when the other student had the heart attack.
The part I didn’t admit to the class, was that I actually had two deaths that semester. About a month after the student died of the heart attack, Lucas died of an accidental drug overdose. I kept wondering “why me? what is it about me that attracts death?” In over 30 years, they had never had a student die in a classroom, let alone two students from the same class. It became somewhat of a joke (I have a dark sense of humor in case some of you haven’t noticed). Bob (my partner) was wondering if the school would have to take out extra insurance for me to teach. One teacher dubbed me the “black widow of education”. In fact, I couldn’t get a substitute teacher for that class to save my life! Seriously!
Some people praised me for being so “strong” during the situations, and facilitating the “de-brief” for students after it happened. What people don’t realize is that I have this sort of innate talent (I don’t have many but this one I’ll claim) and that’s that I have a delayed panic response. I panic and get emotional after a situation arises. I did totally lose it over these two deaths–but on the way home in the car or on the phone to my friend Cyndra the next day. It took me months, after the first student’s death, to go anywhere without my CPR mask with me. No kidding–I even brought it with me to yoga classes and the store.
As we have our yoga teacher training weekends, I sit in awe of the instructors. They are so amazingly accepting and graceful. Sometimes, I feel kinda like a disappointment to them because I really can’t do great poses, and my stamina isn’t that great. I get very frustrated during trainings. But this weekend I read an story by Alan Lew*. He was writing about a TV documentary series called “An American Family” which ran in the 1970′s. The Loud family was very prosperous, perfect, etc. and through the course of the TV documentary their family unraveled: the husband was quite the philanderer, the daughter was an IV drug user, the son was gay (pretty frowned upon in the 1970′s). Alan Lew writes of a scene where the mother, Pat, completely loses it:
“She finally saw her family, she saw her life, as it really was on this video that never stopped running . . . and it broke her heart. The photograph for which she had so carefully posed was crumbling to dust, and her heart was breaking. The minute it finally did, I fell hopelessly in love with her. All the way from the other side of the TV screen, I was smitten. That’s how I always feel when I see someone in the full reality of their suffering, when I see them with their hearts broken open. I’ve never seen a human being in that condition who wasn’t exquisitely beautiful. I was amazed that most people didn’t see her that way. Most people thought she was a dope.”
And that’s the kind of yoga teacher I want to be. May I always be more impressed by the exquisite beauty of a student suffering though an imperfect, arthritic, elderly, overweight, wobbly, aesthetically unaligned pose than a student who exemplifies the textbook fluidity of an asana. May I fall hopelessly in awe of the student frustrated and crying on the yoga mat, experiencing life in the raw. And may that student be my inspiration, rather than the student who, although more graceful and strong, has never known deep, heart-breaking suffering on the mat. Because that is the gift my teachers have given me–and I am very thankful.
*Rabbi Alan Lew is a Rabbi in the bay area. Prior to that, he was a Zen Buddhist leader and now the founder of Makor Or, the first meditation center connected to a synagogue. The excerpt above was taken from his book This Is Real and Your Are Completely Unprepared. His other book, “One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of A Zen Rabbi, won the PEN Joseph Miles award for literary excellence.
October 10, 2009 at 1:50 pm |
This blog entry made me cry. Thank you!
PS: Will check out Alan Lew stat!