The first yoga class I ever taught lasted a week.
It was scheduled for an hour.
○
For most of those seven days,
it had already been happening in my head.
What I would say.
What I might forget.
How long to leave people in a posture.
Whether I would remember the Sanskrit.
What a proper yoga teacher
was supposed to sound like.
By Friday afternoon,
I had rehearsed the class enough times
to make something very simple feel almost impossible.
○
The room was small,
but felt enormous.
Tealights burned in lotus-shaped holders.
Trams rattled past outside.
I had arranged everything
to look reassuringly like yoga.
Then I tried to do the same with myself.
The tealights, at least, looked relaxed.
○
Just before six,
the door opened.
Two students came in.
They looked tentative,
almost apologetic.
At least I wasn't the only one
unsure of what happened next.
They took their places.
I asked them to stand,
using words they probably
didn't quite understand,
and became, officially,
the teacher.
Or tried to.
○
From the first mantra,
something felt slightly off.
It was a lot of Sanskrit
for two people who had just walked in.
I counted the postures in Sanskrit, too.
I'm fairly sure I got some of it wrong.
Although for all they knew,
I could have been reading
the menu of a Nepalese restaurant.
The words came out.
The students followed.
Nothing went visibly wrong.
The students followed my instructions.
I kept checking the clock.
Making sure everything happened when it was supposed to.
And two kind people allowed me
to practise being someone
who knew what he was doing.
An hour later,
they thanked me politely.
I never saw either of them again.
○
After they left,
the room became a room again.
I'd done it.
Was that it?
Nothing had collapsed.
There was no verdict.
No revelation.
Only the peculiar relief
of no longer having to teach the class
I had already been teaching for seven days.
○
For years afterwards,
I kept walking into rooms
and being called the teacher.
Sometimes there were three people.
Sometimes a hundred.
There were days
when teaching became almost ordinary.
A room.
People breathing.
Someone needing help.
Someone wanting to be left alone.
Mostly, the usual beautiful human chaos.
And every now and then,
the old machinery quietly started up again.
The wish to get it right.
To know what came next.
To make sure everything went according to plan.
Which, of course,
it rarely did.
