Cycles
I'm off to help with the teacher training class this weekend. I got an email from the teacher running the course after I asked if they needed help out there. This years' students are coming down to the wire and are near the end of their course. They're covering first aid this weekend, doing one of these fast track courses covering all of the basics. It's during this time I've been asked to sit in on the course teacher's talk with some candidates for the course starting in April, give them some feedback on what the course is all about and answer any questions where I can, usual sort of stuff.
It got me thinking that this would be the 6th group of students I will have come across on one course or another all within the same yoga school. And of course, that means there's 4 groups or more I've had to say cheerio to as well. It's that Mysore feeling in a much bigger, longer scale. You may know, or not, but one of the problems yoga students face when in Mysore is the relationships that they make, often very deep, strong ones, that ultmately have to come to an end when one party ends up leaving and going home, and the other is left often to mourn the other's passing. Then, if you're the one left behind in Mysore, there's the challenge of making new friends all over again from scratch, if you can be bothered with it all. Where are you from, who's your teacher, where do you stop in your practice, where can I get my money changed.... please, spare me. And yeah, I'm as guilty for asking the same questions myself.
And it's intense. Both times I've been out to India I made good friends with people I met very quickly, and they made a big impression on me, one of them even got me into thinking about writing my own blog. And you get to spend a lot of time with the people you meet, it can all be a bit surreal, though very much in a nice way. Very much a 'yoga bubble' if there ever is one. But the break ups can be hard, one fair-well dinner too much.
And so it is with the teacher trainees. Ok, so I only see them once a month for a weekend, but year in, year out, I've seen the characters change and evolve. Like John Scott would say, lotus flowers blossoming in the garden. Some of them have become good friends, some of them well on their way to becoming great teachers, and one or two I do admit I'm sad to see go.
Life is a microcosm
I guess it all comes down to change, impermanence, everything changes but the land endures - all that good stuff, and I'd be naive to think it hadn't changed me too. I feel it strange sometimes when friends tell me how much calmer I am now, how much I've let things go, because for me, even more now than at any time, I feel like I'm grasping at things, at life, at postures, at practices, at people, and there's more inner tension and up-swirling, knots in my stomach, right there in that bit that can't be scratched yet is near enough to the surface that I can feel it.
And if anything it's when I sleep really well that I feel it the most in the sense that when my head hits the pillow, boom, it seems like I'm back awake in no time at all. Of course being inside most of the day sat at a computer desk doesn't make the day any longer. When I had 2, 3 hours to spare to walk along the shore in South Beach, the days seemed to last so much longer.
Well, I'm babbling again. Though I know I've had this very thought before....
I wonder what the new friends I'm going to meet tomorrow are doing right now?