Angela usually is pretty good at translating my feelings.
Teaching yoga may be good and true and beautiful, but the real shit is not glamorous. Nope. You don’t get to decorate your ego with it. It is about discipline, renunciation, intensity, and clarity of action. Often students say to me that they want my lifestyle. I doubt it. You want to have a social life, to eat what you like, to sleep at normal times, to take personal days.
Teaching is awesome, if and when you turn into a person who can enjoy long periods of austerity without being a hero or a masochist about it (these are second-order strategies for decorating the ego). If you turn into a person who can really get your kicks off the wellbeing of others, without much expressing that excitement or taking it personally. If by accident that transformation happens, ok. Then the teaching life doesn’t feel like one of deprivation, but of just another expansion of your street smarts, and the outer edges of the self.
I haven't been teaching for a little more than a year. Not in the usual way. Haven't been writing either. Intensity of practice coupled with a sense of responsibility left me speechless. I thought it would create more space for me. Like I was giving away too much energy and by preserving it somehow I would create other things. I suppose I have. But now I am curious.
Sharath talks about how after a certain number of years if it isn't for the spiritual, it all falls away. I completely feel that. I look back and I look around and I look forward and I can see the six poisons running around. I thought they were gone. Or maybe I was in that "yoga bliss" too and now my vision is clearer. Like the first time I was in India and was shocked that cruelty and sadness existed there as well. I'm nothing if not honest.
But now I don't really know where to go. I've got the transportation and a destination (as we all do). The route though, that's the part. And what a thing to be honest about.
