Yoga & Cake

Last Sunday, I taught my first-ever yoga class. It’s a class for friends who are new to yoga, and it’s free because they’ve basically volunteered to be my guinea pigs. It went well, I think. I left feeling like people had a pretty good time, and no one got hurt, and my nerves didn’t trip me up too much. It was exhilarating to give an instruction and see people following; it was discouraging when I couldn’t get the instruction right and I just got blank stares. It was also a little scary to be up there in charge. All of a sudden, I have the power to tell people what to do with their bodies – what if I say something wrong!?! In fact, I did – setting up for savasana, or relaxation pose, I thought I was instructing the class to take their hands and draw the skin of the neck up towards the base of the skull. I repeated this instruction several times before someone stopped me and pointed out that I was saying to pull the skin up “towards the base of the spine!” So, I gave a wrong instruction and it didn’t make sense and someone asked and we clarified and we moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world.

The thing I’m most afraid of is failing, and unfortunately, I have a very broad definition of what that means. It could mean going blank and not remembering what I’m supposed to teach next, or giggling hysterically for 5 minutes, or someone getting hurt, or someone saying “I hate yoga, I’m never coming back!,” or seeing blank stares, or…the list goes on. In my mind, failure means: not getting it perfect every single time. I come by this honestly. When mom and dad were first married, mom was a perfectionist about cooking and baking. She tells this story: one day, she was attempting to make a Black Forest Cake, a delicious, light-and-crunchy meringue affair that requires about 10 eggs per cake. It also requires the perfect environmental humidity level for it to rise. Her meringues kept falling, and – even though they were still perfectly light-and-crunchy, just short instead of tall – she threw them all away because they didn’t look right. She didn’t stop until she finally got one to stay tall, light, and crunchy: cake-worthy. These days, mom handles this differently: first, she is a ridiculously good cook/baker, so this doesn’t happen very often; second, she has learned when to say enough. Now, when her Black Forest Cake doesn’t rise to the occasion, she serves Black Forest Crumble, and – whaddya know? – we all love it!

What I’m trying to get to is this: don’t throw away the cake if it doesn’t look like the magazine picture. Of course, you may have to toss one now and then if you get the ingredients completely wrong, but mistakes are part of the process and making mistakes is no reason to throw in the towel. If I give up teaching yoga because I get blank stares or because someone decides they don’t like yoga, I’m selling myself short. That person might not have liked yoga no matter who was teaching (or maybe it was personal, but – unless entire classes are walking out on me, I can probably chalk it up to an isolated episode); those blank stares are just feedback letting me know that particular instruction isn’t doing the trick. Here’s how it’s gonna go: I will teach yoga; I will make mistakes; I will teach yoga; I will learn from old mistakes and make new ones; I will teach yoga; I will learn from many old mistakes and make new ones…and so on. As long as I’m learning and moving forward, I will call that – new definition! – success.