In Salabhasana, the locust pose, I was ordered by a poised, cavalier, liberated man to abandon my likes and dislikes—my dislikes there in those damp moments assumed to be the waves of contractions burning in my lower abdomen and then the rest of me. This was the correct expectation. We paused, all nine of us floundering women, to breathe in his ancient motto. We breathed in discipline, and out petty annoyances. We breathed in stuffy air, and out air conditioning.
I confess now it had seemed at the time outrageous that I was being asked to forfeit my curated beliefs, to throw away years of refined preference in exchange for sore fascia. What an insult to my good intentions and judgement, I said over the phone later to my husband. Indeed it should be noted that the limits of my orneriness reach high above my tolerance. Stubborn, they say; careful, I do.
You may perceive that this lifestyle presents some difficulty. Misplaced weight is imposed on certain preferences and not to others, creating wrongful imbalances. Quite often during the last several years, the safety I’ve found in my particularities has become a standard and has worsened as cynicisms proliferate in my frontal lobe. Age will do this sort of poor practice: the ubiquitous urge to betray good faith. I am condemned, I felt leaving the yoga studio that I have only recently joined as a trial of something new, to the constraints of my likes and dislikes.
Perhaps the only disagreement I hold against this command is the presumption of liking over loving, and disliking over hating. The consumer lacks subtlety. Desire comes from the gut and eats itself away. This is the language of pride that we consumers have become fluent in.
Such eye-opening afternoons, the ones with wise earworms whispering the unfamiliar, leave enough to awaken dormant ideas. I waited for them to reach the point of action on a sticky afternoon but failed at the first stage of enjoying the dew that carries heavy heat. To choose to enjoy the unenjoyable states of discomfort is likely the first step to dismantling pickiness. To indulge in the ego, doubling down on preconceived beliefs of good and bad and permissible is the lifeblood of individualism and free enterprise and homogeneity. I, like many of us who are bred in the isolation of North American loyalty and who are trying something new to build lower core strength and calm the nervous system, carry my fair share to Yin class.