Ego

I confided, once, to a friend that I felt quite competitive in yoga class. If there is a pretzel to get into, I want to be in it. If there is a strength pose I want to hold it as long as anyone else. If the ashtanga series calls for 50 chaturangas, I want to do them all. I told him that some mornings I would be overly aware of a yogi nearby, watching her practice, wanting to compare. He was shocked "I didn't think yoga was supposed to be like that" he said. "It's not the yoga." I said "It's the ego."

If you have hung out with me, you will know that I am not generally a competitive person. I rarely push a point to win an argument. I usually bowl a 40 and I'm okay with that (mostly). I've been running an 11 minute mile for 10 years now and still I'm out there 3 times a week poking along in sun, wind or streaming rain. Generally I'd rather have peace and good feelings than a victory. Then I started taking a vigorous form of yoga, and suddenly I wanted to be the best.

When I moved to Ithaca and started at a new yoga studio, I somehow felt I had to prove myself. Most of the poses were familiar, but there were new variations, new juxtapositions. We were doing a lot more arm balances and wheels then I was used to, and when my wrist started to hurt I didn't listen. It's also true that I was doing a lot more keyboarding and driving in my new job, and a lot of heaving lifting as we moved into our new home, but regardless of the cause of the injury, I only felt it in yoga. At first I pushed through the pain, but finally I admitted to my teacher that my wrist hurt and asked his advice. He encouraged me to hold back, to use props, to skip certain poses, but my ego just could not let me skip some super-cool pose that I'd been working on whenever the rest of the class was doing it.

Months went by like this until finally something in my ego just broke. I had to give in to the idea that my wrist might never be quite right. I saw a physical therapist, I used my props, I started working on some of the forward folds I had never mastered in Ashtanga while everyone else was getting better and better at an arm balance I had always wanted to learn.

And one day I realized the pain was gone. I slowly put some weight on my wrist, and brought poses back into my practice one at a time. I still use a wedge for many poses, and I know now to stop when my wrist gets tired, and that some poses just aren't worth the cost. And somehow during all that my ego softened. I got used to setting up my mat 3 rows back and doing my own thing. And though I can now do wheel again and Eka Pada Koundinyasana, my ego is much softer. I sometimes wonder if I will keep getting better now that I don't crave competition on the mat, but I kind of don't care. I wonder if this is part of the wisdom age brings; things fall apart and teach us something about what remains.