Eating Humble Pie and the Newness of Being

By Tatiana Forero Puerta, MA, RYT, HHC

Art by Ashley Kircher

“Release through right there” my teacher said, as she pressed her finger firmly into my upper back, tapping into the space between my shoulder blades. “More, more—keep going!” Adomuka-Svanasana, or Downward-Facing-Dog had never been so hard. I dropped down to my knees, feeling defeated. Not only had I done the pose thousands of times in my own practice, but had taught it hundreds of times as well. How was it that now it felt so… difficult, so strange? How could I, a yoga teacher, be struggling in one of the most frequented poses in all of Vinyasa yoga?

It was my fourth day at a special intensive immersion training for yoga teachers. I’d been offered the opportunity to attend at the last minute, and had jumped on it like a kid onto an ice cream truck. On the way there a few of us joked about the circumstances of our gathering—what happens when you put fifteen yogis in one house for nine days of non-stop work? It was like an episode of Real World: Yoga. But as the dust began to settle and things got, for lack of a better word – real – we realized it was more like Yoga Boot Camp. It was called an “Intensive” for a very good reason.

I wasn’t the first one to break down in tears, crouched in the back room, huddled like a little ball wishing I could run away. But that didn’t make me feel any better. My body felt broken by the countless hours of practice, my ego crushed by critiques on my teaching, on everything that I thought I knew. By the fourth day I was feeling hugely incompetent, deeply intimidated and severely humbled. I couldn’t even do Downward Dog right, for goodness sakes! How could I call myself a student of yoga, or worse still, a teacher of yoga? It felt like it would take centuries of hard work for me to learn all of this, to integrate it, to learn to apply it and especially to pass it on to my students not as raw information but  as teachings that come through with grace rather than didacticism.

“It was… intense and humbling. I felt like I didn’t know anything. Not even Down Dog” I told one of my teachers when she excitedly asked me how the training had gone.

“That’s perfect!” she said with a smile. “That means you’re a true yogi!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, not knowing is the path of the student. Once you think you have it all figured out, that’s when you’ve fallen off. ” I smiled. “You know,” she continued “in other practices Downward Dog is a very advanced pose and not taught until a student has reached a certain level of mastery.”

“Interesting….” I grinned,  “I didn’t know that.”

Pema Chodron says that one of our greatest challenges and callings is learning to allow room in our lives for not knowing. It is uncomfortable and strange at first, a sensation of instability and precariousness. It is tough for our preconceptions to fall apart, for our egos to be confronted and to be made to eat a little piece humble pie—it can feel humiliating and instinctively, we react defensively. All of a sudden, we desperately grasp at the straws of justifications tied to our perceptions of self worth, our comebacks go amok like the flashing red lights of our internal fire alarm. To willingly create the space for unknowing, however, can teach us to get to know that sensation and better yet, to settle into and ultimately to hold the reins of our automatic reactions in the face of the unknown. The word yoga, after all, comes from the root yog, to yolk, to bind, to rein.

As the week  of training continued, more of my poses were deconstructed, more of my teaching analyzed and critiqued, but each time felt less harsh than the time before. Each time I went into Down Dog, my mind started to take a different turn. I paid close attention to my hands, to each finger, to each knuckle. I started to sink deeply through my back, softening through my heart and noticed how it felt in my body. I listened. I settled. I breathed. I stopped thinking and started observing.  Suddenly, the practice felt brand new. After all this time, it hit me that I was still a beginner, and then it stopped being about me, what I was doing wrong. I no longer felt offended or embarrassed by what I had originally interpreted as my lack of knowledge about yoga (something I was supposed to be quite knowledgeable about, and was taking very personally). Suddenly, it was just about the experience itself and that was it. No more, no less. That simple. And then, I no longer wanted to run away. I was fully present there. In fact, I didn’t want it to end, I wanted more: more newness, more exploration. An internal flip had switched. Perhaps I had tapped into what Buddhism calls “beginner’s mind”—the ability to take in experience as if it were the first time, every time.  I felt like a kid.  I felt simply… wonderful.

Alan Watts calls wonder the underlying element in all spiritual search. Wonder presumes mystery, necessitates a courage to face it, and requires a space of unknowing– a fluidity of experience that is open and trusting, rather than knowing and certain. Conversely, certainty is a static and fixed state; more like clinging to a rock than floating on water. The problem is, Watts reminds us, that life, the nature of reality itself is fluid; not solid. When we cling to the rocks of knowledge in our lives, our experience may feel concrete and linear but as soon as something changes we are caught off guard, our script is flipped and we begin to sink. We panic. We react. What if instead we stop clinging, learn to let go of the rock and simply let ourselves float? To do so requires an acknowledgement that in the end, no matter what we think, we simply do not know. Recognizing the inherent mystery in life is a scary task, but ultimately, it’s what keeps us above the water.

Yoga, like other practices of awareness, is a tool that can help us cultivate a relationship with uncertainty, to turn uncertainty from an opponent to a friend, and better still, a teacher. The nature of the practice behooves us to approach it with newness at each moment. Taking the same poses repeatedly and learning to settle into them can reveal to us the ways in which something we previously thought we understood can be experienced as an entirely new phenomenon when observed through the eyes of the beginner. Through yoga we learn to watch our breath. The practice teaches us to become acquainted with the cycles of prana, the ebb and flow of our respiration, swaying like gentle sea waves. When we investigate further, we find that at the very top of our inhales, there is a minute pause before the breath is released and again at the bottom of the exhale, before the breath circles back, continuing its cycle. It is within these spaces, the tiny nooks of nothingness sustained in our very bodies, where unknowing resides, where mystery is still possible and where we can learn to more deeply release into the newness and the wondrous subtleties of being, as if it were our
very first time.

Tatiana Forero Puerta is a writer, yogi, teacher and student of life. Tatiana has studied Religion and Philosophy at University of the Pacific, Stanford University and New York University. Tatiana works with yoga teachers and private clients teaching yoga, philosophy and nutrition. As a writer, Tatiana’s work deals issues in philosophy, yoga, nutrition and their relevance in our lives. Her writing has appeared in Assisi Literary Journal, Religion and Psychology Research, and JOY: The Journal of Yoga. She can be contacted through her website: www.tatianafpuerta.com