Comfort and Complacency

Comfort and Complacency. They're our enemies. Destroy them.

_________
I'd taken classes with this dude before. Typically, I'd describe him as a laid-back surfer who teaches mellow classes in a 72 degree room. You know, the classes where you hold "easy" stretching poses for so long that you forget your name, where you were born, and what the heck you're doing in asanas with cute-sounding names like Baby Pose. Child's pose. Pyramid pose. 

I went into the class, sleep-deprived and sunburnt from a fabulous long day on a boat, thinking, "This'll be a cakewalk. 90 minutes of light stretching and a long savasana and the bf and I will be off eating delicious vegetarian Mexican food."

As often happens in this life on the mat and off, I got so humbled. No wait--I didn't just get humbled, I got served.

This guy just quietly, politely worked us to death. I kept looking over at my boyfriend mouthing to him, "What the heck? Are you ok??" Because it was that tough. No, I wasn't pouring sweat. I wasn't trying to kill myself. But I came face-to-face with some monster in there.

The other students in class didn't seem to be missing a beat, but I was suffering. Man, they hold those poses a long time. And some of those poses take you deeply into muscle groups I didn't even know I was related to. It was somewhere in Twisted Triangle that I had a revelation.

"Jeez, man. This shit hurts," I thought, as I slid into a pose I vaguely remember from my Ashtanga days. (OK, no, that's not the revelation.) Twisted Triangle is a tough pose. It's like the Bikram triangle--the master pose--with serious pain. To do it properly you need hamstrings like butter and a ribcage that can spiral upward like tree branches. If you don't get into the posture fully, you struggle gracelessly trying to balance. I wrenched myself into the position and took the standard Ashtanga 5 breaths, thinking it would all be over shortly. But it wasn't. We kept holding it. And holding it! Let me tell you, I sent serious daggers of "OMG I HATE THIS. LET US GO." to the teacher with my eyes.

I realized that I've been hanging out on the edge of comfort and complacency. My cozy early morning classes are ones that I can power through. I can look good, not skip postures, and feel energetic throughout the classes. But it's like I'm in the middle of this little bubble of flexibility. I'm just hanging out, not pushing the edges at all.

The Bikram class I took this afternoon (San Diego studio, with Jim Kallett and a great, great friend) took this a little further. Jim has this very steady quality about him. Initially, you think you are doing fine, that it won't really be such a bad class after all, no matter what you remember or have heard about him. Halfway through it, however, you're on the floor, wanting mommy and a cold hand towel.

(An aside: please don't use the phrase "pouring sweat" loosely. When it really happens--when the sweat comes off your body in streams instead of drops and you feel you are generating enough heat to power a small town--it's an entirely different, almost frightening game.)

Jim said something that drove this idea home, though. In Half-Moon pose, he stated the "beyond your flexibility" idea in a different way. "Your flexibility is what it is," he said. "Find your strength. Use your strength in this pose instead of the flexibility."

I see a connection here with the complacency idea. Many of us are relatively flexible physically, emotionally, or spiritually. But that can almost make things worse. It's so easy to stay there. Someone who may be at point A can struggle and get more out of the experience than someone at point Q.

Why is it so hard to remember that we need to stay at the edge of discomfort, all the time, no matter what we do?

Speaking of discomfort, there's a pile of papers that aren't gonna grade themselves :-)