Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I arrived at the hospital where I’m going to be teaching yoga in plenty of time to have my TB test read (”totally negative”), change clothes, and scout out the location. I’m teaching in the actual ward, and to say that the space is limited is and understatement; I spread out my mat in front of the nurses’ station, and had my dozen-or-so students scattered down three hallways that met up right where I was seated. No yoga mats…no blocks…no way to dim the lights…and if I hadn’t brought my CD player, there wouldn’t have been music, either.

It didn’t matter.

My students are all women; the youngest is eighteen and looks twelve, and the oldest is probably somewhere in her late forties or early fifties. One of them was a hurricaine evacuee. None of them had any previous experience with yoga; most of them were rather out of shape. I immediately chucked the class I had mentally prepared and pulled out every modification I could think of that didn’t require props. I decided to start as simply as possible, with a breathing exercise. While I was telling everyone else to focus on their breathing, I was trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

I have no idea how, but I did manage to give an hour-long class, essentially making it up as I went along. Only two or three of the students were able to do every pose, even with the extreme modifications, and they were all generally more talkative than I’m used to at my gym. Still, when we finished, there were a lot of smiles. And as I was leaving, one of the staff members asked me if I’d be available to teach a class for them—for pay!

I think this is going to work out very nicely indeed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Yoga Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.