Downward Dog Style: You Can’t Scare Me, I’m the Bus Driver

You’re standing in the doorway of a bus with no idea where it’s heading, none of the passengers on-board do, where do you sit? In the first row? Somewhere in the middle? All the way in the back?

I’m thinking about this question in a couple of ways: one, on a more indirect, semi-superficial level, in relation to where I choose to roll out my yoga mat every week. Starting at the top: pick of studio. I’ve elected to practice at a corporately owned one. But I’ll defend my decision: with a free week of yoga as an introductory offer (who could refuse  such a deal?), once I took that first class, I was forever in love with Core Power…damn marketing geniuses. Then (more talk with myself), I readily ask, as a fairly firm support-the-local, no-chains kind of girl, for yoga, I fully buck my morals? In short, yes, I guess I do. I just like the studio and the instructors that guide me. We must have a similar take on yoga (I probably wouldn’t fit in, otherwise), possibly on life (though I’m not claiming to know my instructors on a personal level outside of what I gather from the passion with which they teach). Next, drilling down a tiny, tiny bit, just below the pick of studio, is where in it I tend to physically roll out my mat. Since I’m typically a late arrival to most classes, a lot of the time I don’t have much of a choice, i.e., three spaces are open, I take one. When given the option, though, you won’t find me by the mirrored side wall. I feel some strange energy bouncing off those mirrors. Mirrors in front of me, mirrors to my right?—it’s all just too much. It feels like that ricocheting energy seeps into my body, crowds it, makes me heavy and full of other peoples’ weight and move with less grace. I can’t quite explain it, but, in my mind, I imagine it looking like a beam of light balling up and slamming into my chest. Except it is not a wanted beam of light. Rather, it invades me (a bit dramatic), takes over and the outcome is not pretty.

To return to my original question, the other, more obvious, way I’ve been considering this little team-building-esque cliffhanger, and I’ll pose it another way: Do you think there is a limit to your ability to alter your own story?

This question connects to a sentence in a fiction piece called “Matinee” I read in the July 25, 2011, issue of The New Yorker a few weeks ago, and reread yesterday in an attempt to better understand it: “‘Sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a movie I’m in,’ she says, somewhat tearfully, ‘and I don’t even have the best part.’” It’s a character in a made-up story, of course, but do most people live this way, I wonder? I sure hope not. What a sad way to live: to not have the life you want, to be fearful to sit in the front, have the best view of what lies ahead. The bus should be going somewhere great and beautiful, shouldn’t it? Somewhere with lots of opportunity, discoveries, and interesting new people to chat up. Buck up. Ensure it goes somewhere great and beautiful. Isn’t it up to you?

I won’t go all crazy and make some statement as to the likes of where you choose to stand in a yoga studio says something about who you are as a person, that you are a leader if you stand in the front, that you are an egomaniac if you surround yourself with mirrors, that you are a follower if you position yourself in the back of the room. These would be overgeneralizations, of course, and they just aren’t true. I do, however, think some of us feel comfortable and at ease in one area more than another. Maybe that is a sweeping statement as well; (a safe) one I’m willing to go out on a limb for.

Hmm, I wonder if I should face a minor challenge and get comfortable with the mirrored space, with the energy, make it less weird, use it for good? Why have I pinned it as bad, anyway? Can’t I alter the story?