at OT-1

One of my teachers told me once that she liked going to classes where she could be anonymous. I didn’t understand this then, because I have always been proud of what abilities I have and happy to demonstrate or explain for other students if I’m asked to as a student. It’s something I understood better after I’d been teaching for a while. Sometimes you don’t want to give the pose 100%, which you always, always do if students are watching you as an example. Sometimes you just want to be in the room, practicing, with no other considerations than what’s on your mat.

Getting attached to a new form of yoga, and returning to being a student in regular classes again, means adjustment. Part of the adjustment is this good thing of getting to be purely a student again, no consideration to anybody else (aside from not kicking them in the face, you know, just the general consideration I give to fellow humans). Another part of the adjustment, though, is not being remotely special in any given class. My form in Bikram is squarely average, neither terrific nor terrible, and I have such an inflexible neck that there’s some of it I can’t do at all. This feels pretty different from being the teacher, I have to say.

Also, it’s a little harder to chalk up the standoffishness of everybody around me. I’m used to yoga being warm and fuzzy when I’m the student, and in Bikram (at least at the two studios I’ve gone to), everybody is a little remote, just slightly on this side of hostile. I don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe they find everyone’s sweat gross but their own.

As the teacher, I find that my students fall into two camps: the avoid camp and the cozy camp. The avoid camp is composed of people who go out of their way not to talk to me, not to make eye contact with me, to get in and out of the studio interacting with me as little as possible. The cozy camp are on the opposite end: they want to chat with me before and after class, know things about me, and get friendly with me, more so with me than with the other students. There are some few who are in the middle, who are cordial without being pushy, and funnily enough these are usually my most regular of regulars. I try to smile at my students and be friendly to them, making myself open to them and anything they want to ask or tell me, but that’s pretty much where it ends for me; for various complex social reasons, it’s hard for me to look at my students and see them as potential friends. I have no problem being friendly, though – if I don’t make it a welcoming environment, why should my students keep coming back?

But the Bikram teachers are even less friendly than the students. They don’t want to chat with me, they don’t want to smile at me. They want to take my money and hand me a class and that is it. They definitely chat with each other; after my last class there was sort of a loft atmosphere going on, with Rihanna coming out of the computer on the desk and a few teachers who had just taken class lounging around on the floor drinking coconut water. But they only seemed to be interested in interacting with each other, not with any of us.

During Saturday’s class, I had to leave the room to pee, or I was going to pee on my mat, and I left during the rest before the first set of camel. I came back in the middle of camel, so in guilt I did an additional camel in between the other two. During the third one, I did one of the deepest backbends I’ve ever experienced, with one hand flying in the air behind me. It felt like if I had another minute or two to stay in the pose, my head could probably have touched the backs of my legs. The teacher asked me – using my name, which I haven’t a clue how she remembered, because she had seen me in a class only once before and didn’t ask my name then - if I was competing. I said no, with laughter, because OH MY GOD NO. But it was a nice compliment. I said during this interaction that I was a vinyasa teacher, and she said “Ahh,” and kept walking.

Were I teaching, this would be a topic I’d've picked up with my student after class, when she was at the desk paying for her 10-class card. But this teacher did not take the opportunity. She just kept one eye on me writing my check and one eye on her teacher buddies on the floor nearby. I don’t know if it’s like Scientology, and I have to pay for a certain number of classes or drink a certain number of $3 coconut waters before I can move up from the dirty dirty ground to the bottom unit on the totem pole. Maybe it is. Maybe I’ve just stumbled upon a particularly unwelcoming set of teachers and studios. I just feel kind of weird, like I’m paying for admission to a club, but there’s actually an inner club within the club, with glass walls, which we can all see from our outer circle but no one is allowed in.