When the Learning Starts

I’m not sure exactly when I stopped obsessing over asana. There’s been a gradual shift over the past couple of years, as I’ve become less hungry for the next pose and more hungry for how to become a better teacher, a more devoted practitioner, a better person. This year has been full of unexpected challenges which have shifted my perspective. I went to India to practice and was stopped there by life circumstances. I went to Encinitas to see my teacher to help me through an injury when I was too scared to practice, and now I’m working on new techniques and at a different pace.

I’m here in Boulder almost 3/4 of the way through Richard Freeman’s month-long teacher intensive. This has been on my Ashtanga bucket list for years, and it has absolutely been worth the wait. The practice is slow and deliberate, led mostly by Richard. Confession: we haven’t done full primary yet! It’s a different thing for me, to take a month off from teaching and not bust out my practice. I teach all year, and when I go away I really like to focus on my asana practice because I so often just don’t have the energy or focus to invest into my own asana.

But this year, it seems, is different.

It’s a new thing for me to take time off to practice and to realize that I’m not that interested in practicing asana. Don’t get me wrong – I love asana! But in not focusing specifically on asana work, I’ve been able to focus on being a better teacher, a more devoted practitioner, and a better person. I’ve been able to shift toward serving my students better, and I’ve had this modeled to me so well by my own teachers.

You know what? It’s just as exciting and just as rewarding as any study or practice I’ve ever done.

Over the years, I’ve started to realize what it means to be a teacher. A teacher performs a function to a student, projects possibilities for growth to the student, and is representative of the path – this is no joke! Students are vulnerable to teachers, and that’s a delicate relationship that needs to be honored.

A teacher nurtures the journey of the student while not interfering with their path. Teachers work with all the hopes and fears of their students. A teacher should never hold on too tightly, but instead foster a love for the practice and empower students to be their best selves.

As a teacher, I try to create a warm and supportive environment for my students. A place where everyone feels welcome, safe, and supported. A place where growth and transformation are not only possible, but happen every day. I believe that a teacher should empower students, not hold them back or tell them how to feel. My goal as a teacher is for students to surpass me and eventually to find teachers who know more than me.

I’ve only learned all this because I have been blessed with amazing teachers. Teachers who have given to me generously, who hold me up, who humble me, who give me confidence and tell me I can. My teachers encourage me to study with other people and continue to learn.

What I value most in a teacher now is someone who supports not only my practice but my teaching, and gives me something to model myself after. The way I see it, great teachers are those who want to be surpassed by their students.

As a student I have gotten to the point where I no longer want to be taught about technique. And maybe this is where the learning starts. My growth now is to try to grow into my role as a teacher. And this is why the student-teacher relationship is so important to me. This is why I prioritize spending my time and my money to go learn from teachers who I hope to someday be like. Because I’m no longer looking only to learn the next pose – what I want now is someone who can teach me how to be a better person.

A teacher has to be a leader for their students, but also a follower of the lineage. There needs to be a willingness to lead, and to sacrifice. A teacher has to come from a place of love and willingness to lift others.

And when this happens it is truly is a beautiful thing.

Think of the fullness of possibility! A teacher raises a sangha, a community, to go forth and multiply and build their own communities and support all beings.

So you see, the point of building community isn’t to patrol – it’s to raise them up. And as a teacher, I am at the center not because I want to be the boss but because I want to serve other beings. The energy, power, and love doesn’t flow outwards from the center – it comes inwards.

The most important thing that I have learned from my most important teacher is that a teacher doesn’t hold the student back and the teacher always has the student’s back.

Connection, Addiction, Worthiness, and Blur.

Congratulations on being alive everyone!

In all our life's experiences there is one underlying commonality that moves through everyone, whether we are at the beginning or end of our life. The undercurrent of life is connection. It is the vital fluid that keeps all relationships, regardless of their depth or duration, salient and purposeful. When we are able to experience connection in its positive expression it is joyful, rewarding, inclusive, nourishing and uplifting. When it is expressed in unhealthy ways it becomes obsession, violence, exclusion/isolation, abusive, and lacks dignity or respect. Both forms of connection are present in some way in everyone's lives, and it is our awareness of the necessity for positive connections that allows us to choose to engage in relationships that are meaningful and supportive and rest in the goodness and worthiness of our own being. 

In conversation I have heard myself and others say things that reflect a deeply held belief that in some way we are unworthy or not good enough to have positive and healthy relationships with others. This is a subtle form of self-deprecation and self-harm that can be tricky to identify in our behavior and leads us to making decisions that while appearing to fulfill our desires are ultimately in effect self-sabotage or at worse self-deception. Part of what makes relating to others challenging is the social context that creates the habit of believing that relationships need to fit into certain categories, or have certain characteristics. Every being we interact with is in a relationship with us, regardless of how they appear to look.

When we try to impose our ideas on reality we create a tremendous amount of suffering for ourselves and other people. One of the most intense and confusing ways we can disable ourselves is through addiction. This beautiful short video shows that there is old research showing addiction can be rooted in an unfulfilled need for connection rather than chemical dependency. Addiction, like depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts have been taboo in most cultures such that avoidance, judgement, ostracizing, and discarding people were the standard method of not meeting the issues. It is no wonder, then, that we find ourselves amidst a burgeoning movement of folks working toward opening the doors on family histories, cultural repression, and social transparency. There are no limits to theways we can start to heal ourselves from the burden of seeking connection in unhealthy ways, and the trauma that causes ourselves and each other.

To put us all on the right track, what if we made a pact with ourselves to cherish and invest in the relationships we do have?
What if we agreed that all people who we meet, regardless of the situation and how we perceive them, are delicate, sensitive, exquisitely intricate, and beautifully simple creates that occupy this life-giving planet that sustains us all equally? 
What if we made a commitment to our own dignity, and already complete worthiness, to choose those relationships that foster and blossom our own already present beauty, gentleness, strength, capability, and compassion?

Our lives are valuable and worth living because we are connected. Our worthiness and goodness is guaranteed by our birth and does not come as a result of our actions - it is always with us. Our "work" is to be clear with ourselves about all the ways we close ourselves off to the connections we already have, and do what we need to do in order to foster and invite those connections that firmly place us within the context of our life, whatever it looks like, in a healthy, wholesome, and genuine way. No one else can do this work for us, and we are not responsible for doing it for anyone else. We are here to support each other and together we are strong. The secret, like the name of this Blur song from 1998, is to be with the part of ourselves that is Tender.

"Come on get through it.
Love's the greatest thing that we have..."

Or you could live like this person:

May we remember that we live in a world full of people, just like us, doing their best to live as best as they can. May we stay warm and open to those connections that remind us how fabulous it is to be alive!

Om,

Aqeel