oh, the pain. OH, the painofitall!

Extremely achy and sore today after teaching yesterday (twice). Right now the schedule is that I’m teaching the 4 PM classes for the first two weeks of the month, and another teacher, N, is teaching the last two weeks of the month. I thought I’d be glad to pick up another class time, but so far it’s been a real dud; one person the first week, nobody the second week. I was kind of glad not to have to do it this week…until I checked my email Sunday morning and found a plea from N, who had gotten the flu and then given it to her not-quite-one-year-old girl. Great. (More on N below.) So I agreed to show up for it, and one guy came, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I went to my 8:30 class. Since that class switched from 8 to 8:30 and the studio provided very little support for helping people know about the change, I’ve been showing up at about 7:40 to make sure that if people still have the old schedule, I am there to let them know about the new time. (And no, this hasn’t been for nothing.) A middle-aged guy was already waiting in his car when I got there, and he came into the studio at 7:50 to check in. I told him the class was at 8:30, and he went on in the studio and waited for forty minutes for class to start. I felt really, really bad – I mean, 40 minutes is half the length of the class! – but I didn’t want to make small talk with him and I didn’t know what else to do with him.

Two others showed up: a woman who appeared to be in her early 60′s whom I’ve never seen before, and a regular of mine who’s been sticking it out since January with me. So I started class. The older woman, it turned out, was quite strong and, while she had bad knees and was not terribly limber, she easily kept up with a decently-paced vinyasa class. Color me surprised. The middle-aged guy had clearly done a great deal of gym yoga. I’m not dissing gym yoga per se, it has its place, but he had bad habits and bad alignment, and he tried to power through a lot of the class instead of releasing into it. He was also not at all accustomed to a teacher’s hands on him; he tensed and trembled when I adjusted him. (I am aware of what else might have been causing these reactions, thank you.) And my regular was my regular – working hard without pushing, doing well without showing off.

My regular had to leave before savasana, and then the guy, after savasana, completely ignored all of my vocal cues and just sat right up out of it. I bring students slowly out of savasana, because that’s what I like to have done for me, and he didn’t go along with what I was saying at all. He also didn’t sit meditatively after he sat up, he was looking around and moving quite a lot. I don’t attach to what students do and not do when I give them cues, but I felt like this was disrespectful – both to me and to the other student, who had the opposite reaction and was so relaxed that she didn’t hear my cues at all.

Overall it was not a fun class to teach. I enjoyed having a couple of new people, but whenever I have older-than-middle-aged people in a class, I always worry that I’m making them hate yoga because my classes are so vigorous. (And I never know if they’ll be back.) So I was anxious most of the time. Plus, three people was exactly the wrong number: too many to get a one-on-one feedback form, too few to get a group feedback form. I went home in a slightly bad mood – I had written and taught a good class, and I knew it, but the same frustration I’ve had for four months, that I don’t have a good-sized class full of students enjoying themselves, was raging inside my brain.

What’s bothering me about this a lot right now is the feedback form thing. If I’ve written about this before, and my addled Monday-brain simply can’t remember it, I apologize for repeating myself. In order to be actually certified to teach yoga, I have to collect 20 feedback forms from group classes and 5 feedback forms from private classes and hand them in to White Lotus. I have taught a lot more than 20 classes, but most of them have had one or two people in them, and since I only have to collect 5 of those forms, I’m missing a lot of feedback that I need. I’m feeling like the White Lotus experience hasn’t really closed for me, since this feedback thing isn’t finished, and that’s a difficult sensation. I’m not denying the wonderfulness of the experience, but I’m ready to leave it behind me as a glorious memory and move forward, and I can’t yet.

So then I went to the afternoon class, which I’d agreed to do for N. I had one student, a middle-aged man who was unbelievably stiff, reminding me a lot of my unhappy experiences with MD. He was a regular at one of the classes I used to go to, on Mondays, before I started taking class at AACC again. I appreciated that he was trying to take care of himself, but GOD, I am just awful at teaching stiff people. It makes me so frustrated and unhappy. I feel like I’m not helping them, and I feel limited by their limitations. It’s immature of me, and I know that, and I’ve accepted it, but I just can’t figure out a way to deal with it when a really stiff person comes into one of my classes. This guy seemed to want to struggle on through it bravely, which I admired, but didn’t make the class any easier for me.

When I got home I was very cranky. I had to study for the test I have tonight, go to the grocery store, figure out what to do for dinner, and then get up and go to work the next day. And N didn’t have to do any of that; she just had to take care of herself and her baby.

I have been having nothing but uncharitable feelings for N for approximately the past year. This makes me feel like a rotten person. But here’s how it went down: she’s about my age, and she and her husband moved here in 2008 from Iowa. Annapolis has got to feel pretty weird. I started taking her classes, and we became somewhat friendly. Although she was pregnant when I met her, and I knew that would be a challenge because I have zero interest in children, I still thought it would be nice to be friends with her; she’s bright and interesting and I thought she might want to know at least one person her age in the area. But except for a single double date with me, BF, and her and her husband, she has done nothing but promise to get in touch with me about when we could meet for coffee or lunch or whatever, and then has never followed through. I feel like either she’s been constantly blowing me off for some reason of her own, or she is just too scattered to be friends with me. (And I’ve been The Organized One in friendships. Ain’t doin’ that no more.)

I’m also resentful of her because she doesn’t work except for teaching yoga. (And not very consistently, at that – she’s always getting subs so she can spend more time with her daughter, even when she’s not sick.) She is taking care of a baby, which is easily a full-time job, and I know that, and would not trade places with her for the world. But the simple fact that she doesn’t work makes me pretty upset that she can’t get it together enough to have coffee with me, when I work and teach and go to class and take care of BF (to some degree).

I’m being a little childish and unreasonable, but now that I’ve gotten into the habit of harboring these negative feelings towards her, it’s hard to stop.

That is a long post for a Monday morning. I did other stuff I wanted to tell you about – BF and I went to a Qi Gong workshop together, which was interesting, and I ate this really neat sandwich. But I think this’ll do for now.