First Yoga Class @ Namo

Becky and I attended our first yoga class in Chiang Mai yesterday morning... I can't believe it took us three weeks to get to a studio, but we've been so busy moving in and getting our house in order that the yoga just got put on the back burner. We've been practicing a bit in our home, but it's not quite the same, and our Chicago yoga sangha is one of the things we've missed the most since arriving here. We were teaching 5-6 yoga classes a week in Chicago, and had developed a crew of regular students that gave us a lot of love every time we saw them, and that's not something that can be replaced at the drop of a hat in a new environment. Yoga is a central part of our lives, both the practicing and teaching of it, and we're still working out how we fit into this new city and its community...
Our first class in Chiang Mai was at Namo Yoga & Massage. We strapped on our motorcycle helmets and yoga mats on Saturday morning, braved the superhighway's traffic, and drove into town. We'd walked by Namo a week or two ago, on our first trip into town, and had been planning a visit ever since. The space is lovely, with massage rooms on the first floor and a yoga space on the second floor that fits about 15-20 people. Our class was taught by an ashtangi from Germany named Miri, and the room was full of people from all over the world. A lot of folks from France, some Dutch students, a crew of Americans, a Japanese student, and a pair of Thai students. Becky and I were the most advanced students in class, and there were a couple of folks who were at their first class ever. It was nice to sweat and practice with a group of people, and we're looking forward to going back to Namo for a few more classes.

It's a difficult thing to talk about and offer commentary on other yoga teachers. Our new friend Angela Tomassetti in Chicago recently undertook a "30 yoga classes in 30 days" blog, and spent the bulk of July taking classes from teachers all over Chicago and writing posts about them. She's managed to do that with grace and by staying focused on the positive, which as she mentioned in a recent facebook post, is a practice in and of itself. When you are a yoga teacher, and have gone through the long, drawn-out process of learning how to cue, sequence, and design yoga practices for students, you find yourself in a specific mental space when you're taking other teacher's classes. You think about the sequence you're doing, you think about the cues you're hearing, and a part of you is critical of what you're being taught. It's something you have to consciously turn off in order to practice with any semblance of clarity and ease, lest you fall into a critic's mentality that goes against everything you're supposed to experience while doing yoga. I find myself doing the same thing at concerts, since I am a musician. It's hard to turn off the analytical part of my brain, the part that examines how the music in front of me is being played, and assesses the skill levels of the people playing it. It's been a long time since I could just experience sound as a pure listener, without thinking about how it was constructed. It's almost a sign of the times, a symptom of the age we live in, that we believe all our opinions ought to be aired out in public. We've all grown so used to being critics, offering up unsolicited commentary on YouTube posts and writing on each other's facebook walls as if our input has been asked for. As Angela noted, it IS a practice in itself to just receive knowledge, media, or information without judging it or offering up commentary. In my marketing job, we talk all the time about engagement, interactivity, and delivering enriching experiences to people that they can participate in. This is the what people want today - the ability to see something, and to vote on it, offer up their take on it, and if it's interesting, to share it in their social network. Perhaps this is why yoga is so important to me, because it's about doing the exact opposite. Rather than engaging, you're disengaging from the part of you that wants to judge. One of the goals of many eastern knowledge traditions is to "turn off the self." The practice of yoga is about withdrawing from stimuli, both external and internal, quieting what we call "the monkey mind," and moving through physical movements in order to achieve a state of mind and state of being free from judgment. Not easy. In fact, in this day and age, where the average person is exposed to hundreds of advertising messages every day (some studies say thousands), it's growing increasingly difficult to turn off any part of your mind, because it's being bombarded with manipulative stimuli...

Anyhow, I bring this up because although both Becky and I had solid yoga practices at Namo with Miri, we both came away noting how we might have taught that class differently. We talked about it, and noted that it wasn't a criticism, it was an appreciation of how our training was different from the teacher in front of us. Miri taught a solid class that benefited all the students in the room, including the people who had never done yoga before. Any yoga teacher will tell you that having people in class who have never done yoga before is a much harder challenge than teaching students with advanced practices, who are already adept at bending and twisting their bodies into difficult shapes and angles. Miri did a great job, gave us both some great, quality adjustments, and today, I'm feeling yesterday's practice in my body and can appreciate newly awakened openings that had been dormant before the practice yesterday. We'll go back to Namo and look forward to more classes with Miri and the other teachers there.
Becky and I also noted that we've been spoiled in Chicago by the endless parade of master teachers that have come through Moksha during our tenure there. Beyond Daren Friesen, Kim Wilcox, Rich Logan, and Laura Henke from our home turf at Moksha, we've also learned from amazing teachers like Mark Lerro & Jim Bennitt & James Tennant & Gabriel Halpern & Amy Beth Treciokas, who are part of Chicago's larger yoga community and run their own studios, and who have been an important part of our journey as students and teachers. Chiang Mai has a vibrant yoga scene, we're told, and it has infinite promise as we eye it from the outside looking in, but nothing can replace what we left behind in Chicago, our circle of amazing people who all push each other to be better teachers every day. We did feel the need to leave the city, because the competitive nature of teaching in Chicago was starting to obscure some of what brought us to the path in the first place... So much about being a yoga teacher in the USA is about hustling, hawking your wares in the crowded bazaar in the hopes you'll have enough customers every day to earn a living wage. Everyone is busy posting events on Facebook and passing out flyers and posters and the studio owners are busy sweet talking GroupOn and trying to get students in the door just to keep their heads above water. It's been quite the spectacle watching the scene blow up over the last few years, and before we left, I found myself a little distraught at how the scene has transformed, seemingly becoming yet another space that's crowded with competing brands. Everyone spends so much time self-promoting, and it can get to the point where you're just weary of how much work it takes just to keep your own student base from diminishing. Yet here, from halfway across the world, it looks a little different, and I appreciate it for what it represents. In Chicago, the bar for yoga teachers is set really high, and there are quality offerings on every corner. That's a good thing. An amazing thing, actually. I look forward to exploring what Chiang Mai has to offer, and to learning from the many teachers and tapping into the rich vein of knowledge present here. I just have to remember, if you spend your time dwelling on what you've left behind, you'll never fully value the extraordinary potential of what's right in front of you.