The room where I teach at the club is a small multi-purpose room. It’s not precisely ideal. It’s home to several tall stacks of plastic chairs being stored there, for one thing. It has a wall of mirrors, for another. I know that many yoga studios do have mirrors, but I’m against them, personally.
On the first day I began teaching there, I had to decide how to orient the room, and deliberately placed myself at the wall opposite the mirrors, so the students face me with their backs to their reflections. I wondered if that would arouse comment, and sure enough, yesterday one of my new students asked why we didn’t face the mirrors, as they had with their previous yoga teacher. I was glad to have the opportunity to explain.
To my mind, one of the greatest things that yoga can teach us is how to relate to our bodies from the inside out. B.K.S. Iyengar, one of the greatest living teachers of yoga, talks often about using our practice to “awaken the body’s intelligence”. In modern life many of us live in our heads rather than fully inhabiting our bodies. I know that was true of myself for many years before I began my practice of yoga. It’s so easy for us to relate to our visual reflection and never learn how to feel whether we are in alignment within a pose. I still struggle to bring consciousness to many corners of my body, but I revel in the progress that I’ve made in the last few years in gaining awareness. I hope I can help my students to begin expanding the intelligence of their own bodies as we work and grow together.
