We had a substitute teacher in yoga this morning. My usual dear, gentle, sweetheart of a teacher is on vacation and was (mis)represented instead by the intense woman who teaches Baptiste Power.
Honestly, it would be easy for me to get swept away, head right off the rails with that intense power style. I am a pusher, a tightener. But while I might want that fiery energy, it’s really not the kind of yoga that I need. I need to learn loosening.
Anyway, class this morning was hard. And wobbly. I was wobbly. And the teacher said that wobbly is good! Wobbly, in fact, is the way of life so we may as well settle into it.
I liked that. (Although I secretly suspect she only said it to get us to push ourselves harder to hold the pose for longer.) Still. I appreciated the sentiment. Life is dynamic, change is constant. And maybe feeling wobbly isn’t always a sign that I’m meant to crumple.
It reminded me of how liberated I felt when I first learned of deep practice: that cultivating talent sometimes involves paying excruciating attention to how very bad I am at something. Sucking at something as a sign of progress, I can get on board with that!
My first yoga class was probably 10 years ago: power yoga with my mom at our hometown athletic club. My mom rocked it, she of perpetual peak physical condition. I was out of shape, me of the college student’s sake bomb and burrito subsistence. I shook all through class.
No one else in that class seemed to shake. I was clearly not cut out for this. It was several years before I’d try again.
And now here I am, falling in love with yoga so much later, and learning that wobbly is apparently good. Not only that, wobbly is the way of life.
I’ve been reading Poser, My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, but kept putting it down, mostly because I was so darn jealous of Claire Dederer’s brilliant writing voice I could hardly stand it. (That and some of the ways her childhood reminds me of my own. A bit unnerving)
Although now that Eileen and I have talked through this creative jealousy phenomenon, I’ve been able to enjoy the book. Enjoy it so much, in fact, that I was sad to finish it this afternoon. I actually laughed and cried on alternate pages.
This newfangled idea that wobbly is good reminded me of something I read in Poser yesterday:
Shaking is a sign that you have awoken the prana body. Meaning, you’ve unleashed energy that was previously dormant. Shaking is a sign of life. Shaking is a sign of humanity. The energy is flowing like crazy through your nadis, and your subtle body is waking up. Shaking is a sign that you’re not quite perfect–and therefore you are not dead yet.
I’m all for unleashing previously dormant energy. Ditto for being reminded that I’m still alive.
And wobbling is good. No one ever told me this. I think I’ve been needing to hear it all my life. And now I’ve heard it twice in two days: Wobbly is good. This is a relief.
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Wow, I’d love to hear more about the shaking/prana connection – though I’ve been a bit shy about reading Poser. Peter Levine, a trauma therapist, has developed a process by which we can release trauma and it involves shaking. He writes:
Oh, Kali, thank you for sharing that process — I’m definitely going to check out his work. It reminds me of something I read once (maybe Eckhart Tolle?) about the way ducks shake off the excess negative energy after they get into a fight, flying away and shaking their wings emphatically and then just letting it all go. No grudge. No old gunked up emotions. The visual always stayed with me.
Yes to wobbling!
Your post also reminds me of a story my friend Jason Cain used to narrate. You would think that after spending half a billion dollars on the development of a missile, that that missile would shoot straight as an arrow. But thats not how it works.
Missiles are wobbly during 99.9% of their journey. And they self correct their paths so that even though it seems like they won’t hit the target during almost all of their journey, they always hit the bulls eye.
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Awesome analogy Ankesh. (Also, alliteration overboard!)
There’s something so reassuring in this example — that something as technical, serious, and important as a missile would have wobbliness built into its very nature in order to make it even more precise. I love it.
That book sounds SO good. After reading that passage, I’m already obsessed with it. It goes to the top of my reading list. Also, I find the word and concept “wobbly” just…adorable, somehow. I guess it reminds me of how babies are when they’re learning to walk. Or puppies, when they trip over themselves. So sweet and innocent. A good way to think about growth.
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