I invite you now to right click this link and open it in a second window and let it play as you read on…
As Rafiki says, “The king, has returned.” In this analogy, “King” may be a bit much, ego thundering lord of yoga is on the same plane as “King,” but as I went to a class yesterday at noon, it certainly felt like a piece of the mystic puzzle had come back from the darkness.
It was over six months ago that this particular piece disappeared.
Throughout the beginning of my adventures in yoga, there was a teacher whose class I rarely missed if given the opportunity to attend. When I did my 200 hour teacher training at CorePower Yoga, he was one of the lead instructors. He was one of the reasons I wanted to become a teacher. I remember being in his classes and seeing something I wanted, to guide students through their practice with such power and inspiration. He was sneaky, you never thought “this sucks” with hot-blooded vehemence, but you got worked. The slow burn, the attention to intention, the patience to move with breath, to not rush, to feel alive, to fully commit, to not hold back…these were themes I remember.
His Friday night classes became must-attends. In his final class, I laid in corpse pose SAVASANA with zero room on either side and listened as everyone in the room gently sang “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees in tribute to one of our favorites departing……
We all have our favorite teachers. As you move through a dancing warrior series, or lie in half pigeon EKA PADA RAJAKAPOTASANA, you’d swear that they are speaking directly to you. Perhaps it’s someone you’ve never taken, maybe you know them, or maybe he or she is someone of incredible stature like a Seane Corn or Baron Baptiste. It’s that guru we all look for and in finding someone worthy, we realize that the only true guru we can follow is ourself. As the aforementioned teacher spoke of yesterday in class, it’s on the yoga mat that you get the kinks out. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, either a tight hamstring or that little piece of anger we’ve been carrying around from the week before. You can come to play soft or play hard, and it’s the teachers who challenge us to go to our full potential, to stretch to that point of near-uncomfortability who teach us valuable lessons, who show us how to lose our breath, and find it again. The eventual goal is to come to a place where we have a healthy enough practice where we can drop into rag doll UTTANASANA if we feel overwhelmed, stretch where we need it, and take the yoga off the mat into the world, into the conversations, into the chaos. No one can open our eyes for us, they are merely voices who guide us. But we find that special one that speaks to us, we keep coming back. They become like the different foods we need to feed our soul, or…they are the different machines at the gym that work our different muscles. We want to work but we need to feel connected to the source, or maybe we just want a brutal knockdown cardio session and we have a particular yoga sculpt teacher we almost love to hate.
Whatever the desire, noon Sundays at Kindness Yoga in Cherry Creek offers the chance to see what so many people came to know on those magic Fridays as their reason to attend yoga–Nick Wilder has returned.
****** 303 magazine and CorePower Yoga are offering a month of free month of yoga to the person who needs it most. Tell us why you deserve, want and NEED that free month of yoga in the comments below. The contest will run for three more weeks and then we will announce the winner. Good luck! *******
You do realize that this is an unnecessary plug for his already ridiculously GIANT ego, don’t you? Whatever joy, whatever anger you feel in a yoga class is all your personal experience – not a pot-smoking, drug dealing, coke snorting teachers. Comparing his skill to a teacher like Seane Corn (who has been practicing and teaching longer than Nick has been out of high school) speaks of your avidya (ask the king what that means) and then start doing your homework on what it means to practice and teach yoga and not just be another flash in the pan “rock star”.
I’ve taken many, many, many, many classes with Nick Wilder. What happens to me when I practice in a room with him leading is really wonderful. And it is those feelings, thoughts, emotions, spirit, that come up because they reside in ME, yet, his teaching coaxes them along. I always leave with some nugget to chew on, something I’ve been pondering myself previously, maybe, that he has just spoken to that gives me some solice to know someone else experiences these very same things. Empathy is something I greatly appreciate in life–just one of many reasons why practicing with him is a priority for me. What sits well with one might not sit well with another.
Doesn’t every person have to start out somewhere, be a certain age and level, experience life as they will to learn and grow, and focus on some limb of yoga, where ever that may be at any given moment, i.e. age really has nothing to do with it.
Condescension is a quality that doesn’t look so nice…the spirit in me respects the spirit in you…