My yoga teacher says I'm stronger than I know
It's Day 5 of Teacher Appreciation Week!
In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week (May 5-9), I’ve been sharing a tribute to one of my own teachers each day this week instead of my usual roundup on the first Tuesday of the month. Thank you to every teacher – past, present, or future – who’s read these posts this week. I appreciate you and the work you do.
Six days after my marriage collapsed, when I was still crying every day, I went home to Miami to see my family.
My parents had filled their guest room with flowers, and I cried when I saw the space they’d carved for me in their lives.
I went to yoga with Shayne Cohen that week, a teacher I’d met a month earlier during a retreat with The Class in Zihuatanejo. It was pure coincidence that Shayne was based in Miami, but, as I’ve said before, I don’t believe in coincidence.
Also not a coincidence: Shayne’s class took place in the same mixed-use event space where my ex-husband I held one of our wedding events exactly 7 years earlier.
That first day in Shayne’s class she told us, “You’re stronger than you know,” and I never forgot it, partly because I’ve heard her say it many times since and partly because it’s not the kind of thing you forget under those circumstances.
At that point I’d been practicing yoga for 25 years. I’d honed my flexibility and balance but not my upper-body strength. Even after completing 200 hours of teacher training, I continued to believe I lacked the capacity for advanced arm balances.
I was still scarred from the chin-up requirement of the Presidential Physical Fitness gauntlet that haunted my 1980s childhood. I vividly remember the day we took turns hanging from the monkey bars at my elementary school. Only one girl successfully pulled herself up. The rest of us just hung there waiting to drop to the ground.
I was bottom-heavy, I thought. Even my high school ballet teacher told me basketball was making my legs too muscular to be a serious dancer.
But with Shayne I learned that for a quarter-century I had been doing it all wrong, trying to muscle my way into yoga poses, attempting to bend arm balances to my will, white-knuckling my way, just like pretty much everything else in my personal and professional life.
It turns out, Shayne taught me, that the way you find balance is not actually through strength although it can look that way from the outside.
You do not wrestle your bones and joints into submission. You stack them. Femur over tibia over metatarsal. Rib over elbow over wrist. Balance starts with alignment.
Only once you find the alignment, the bones stacked along their own axis, do you draw the muscles together, hugging them onto the bones and toward the midline of your body. The strength is the stability, not the source. Alignment is where it all begins.
Or at least that’s what it feels like in my body.
In Shayne’s class I suddenly floated into poses that were incomprehensible to me before. Here I was in parsva bakasana, my knees twisted perpendicular to my torso, my bent elbow supporting one leg, the other leg scissored up behind me. Here I was in eka pada koundinyasana, my arms in a push-up, my legs in a split, both feet off the floor, maybe, possibly, suspended in the air for a breath or two.
And, as always, the lessons I was learning on the mat were for the rest of my life too. Alignment over strength, over muscle, over white knuckles. There was nothing I could truly bend to my will, be it a yoga pose or my marriage. It was time to surrender that illusion.
Strength came from alignment, from stacking purpose over passion over practice, as my co-author and I wrote in our book about educator burnout.
Shayne was right. I was stronger than I knew. Not from the muscles I’d built but from the alignment I was finding.
I was surrendering, and there was strength in that surrender.
To Shayne, and all the other teachers who know what their students need to hear, thank you.
I appreciate you.
Your turn:
If you have 5 minutes: Share a comment about something that resonates with you. First draft thoughts are welcome!
If you have 10 minutes: Send a note to a teacher you appreciate – a past teacher of your own or your child, a colleague, a leader, or anyone else who helps others learn. Better yet, send them a gift subscription to the Cocoon for Teacher Appreciation Week, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day!
If you have 30 minutes: Schedule time on my calendar to chat. What are you working on right now? It’s a free half-hour of thought partnership!
Let’s partner!
I help educators break through their blocks by finding the intersection of effectiveness and sustainability.
I believe educators need to stay connected to their passion and purpose to provide all students with joyful, enchanting, empowering learning experiences–without burning out.
I have more than 2 decades of experience as an educator with deep expertise in leadership and instructional coaching across grade bands and content areas, learner-centered professional development design and facilitation, and teacher team development.
Interested in learning more?
“This book could not have come at a better time.”
Carolyn Yaffe, Executive Director, Valley Charter Schools
Thank you for reading this issue of The Cocoon. I’ll see you on the first Tuesday of next month for my next regular edition.
And if you’re interested in the pleasures, perils, and politics of mid-40s, post-divorce, perimenopausal, red-state dating, please visit my other Substack Red State Blue Balls. It makes a great birthday or just-because gift for yourself or someone else!