Downward dog

Today I was scolded by my yoga teacher while doing a headstand for being so impatient as to kick up my legs first, before positioning my shoulders to support the weight.
"Why is it that people feel they need to get their legs up there so quickly?" she said, as I finally stood upside down without risking a broken neck as I am prone to doing.
"Er, because they're Type A personalities?" I ventured from the floor. She laughed.

The trick to doing yogic poses is to concentrate on what you are doing and why. It is just like everything else in this world - just as you would work smarter rather than harder, you strategically push your energies into a select part of your body instead of blindly trying to muscle into the pose. With time, and the right amount of breathing, comes flexibility.
"Make your body fluid, instead of strictly aligned into the position," the teacher said as she went about the room, adjusting the occasional stiffly held neck or shoulder.

I try to remember what the teacher says when I am teaching M. how to do basic yoga. He is tall so I think he finds balancing a bit more difficult - but then, I found it incredibly difficult to do anything when I was starting out. He is wobbling badly on the purple yoga mat we have spread across the carpeted living room floor as he positions himself into Warrior I.
"Are you using your back leg? You have to balance yourself on your back leg - it should be straight," I say, feeling the leg to check.
"Yes, I am," he says, still wobbling. I watch him trying to find his balance, bemused. M. can lift loads that I can't but he can't move his body into different positions - this is not about power or strength. He looks perplexed when I show him the Wheel pose.
"I think I could do that when I was a kid but I don't think I can do that now," he says. Yoga is an incredibly patience-demanding exercise as well as requiring you to use muscles you normally do not recall as existent.

"It's like Jedi training," M. says as we move into the balancing poses. Yes dear, it is like Jedi training - the Force is with you, you just need to work out how to use it. If only we could harness that patience and wisdom with which we practice these movements on our bodies to use in dealing with others.