Substitutes

by Pat Manchester

We’ve all done it. Your teacher announces that she’ll be away at a workshop the next weekend, or you check the website and see the sub’s name in pink italics. Suddenly you decide that this is just the morning you need to sleep in or the evening you can eat dinner before nine o’clock. Or maybe you’re more forthright and you say you just don’t like taking class with a teacher you don’t know – or, perhaps more relevantly, a teacher who doesn’t know you. Maybe it will be too fast. Maybe it will be boring. Maybe the teacher will do all the poses you hate. For sure she won’t know about your knee injury/favorite assist/love of ardha chandrasana.

And we probably all have unhappy sub stories. My personal favorite took place several years ago, when I hurried from work to get to class. I had just started to venture beyond basics classes, and the substitute was one who ran class at breakneck speed. You know those scenes in movies when the hero has to catch up to a moving train? That was me. The teacher called out poses like a ballet mistress calls out steps, “Inhale up dog, exhale down dog, inhale ardha chandrasana, exhale trikonasana, inhale grab your right big toe, exhale pull your leg behind and take the bind.” For me, it was, “Inhale, don’t panic, exhale try not to keel over, inhale why the hell doesn’t she give any modifications, exhale I bet only ten minutes have passed, inhale you could leave, exhale no way.” We ended with a pose I’d never seen before called bird of paradise: the people who did it actually looked like the exotic, angular, long-stalked flowers the pose is named for. Wilted dandelion would have been a more apt name for my pose.

But the fact is, I have quite a few happy substitute stories, too. Just as many years ago, one night Christina substituted in Stephanie’s basics class. She made everyone back off in janu sirsasana in order to root our sit bones back and find our breath and our side bodies– an instruction that has served me well ever since. As I walked out of class with another student, he remarked that her instruction about the occipital ridge (who knew?) was exactly the information he’d needed to understand a pose. We both had a new teacher. More recently, when they substituted for absent teachers, Jen has gently nudged me towards much-needed new learning in headstand and Lindsay has made me recall the beginner’s amazement in discovering the joys of flow.

I’m not Pollyanna. I still have the occasional time when someone’s teaching doesn’t work for me, and I have to fight the impulse to get caught up in the storyline of complaining and criticizing in my head. This happens off the mat, too, of course. It’s when we have to deal with unexpected pain or sadness that the urge to resist, to protest, to avoid looking at the teacher in front of us is strong. But we are lucky that our yoga practice – and our classes – provide us a safe place to learn to open our minds. If you can only practice with your teachers, how will you find out who your teachers are?