This is a hard one to write...

As I sit down to write this post, I still am not sure if I will be brave enough to post it. I certainly won't tag a bunch of people. The upshot is that I think only like three people read this thing anyway, so I'm probably worrying for nothing.

This weekend I completed a ten month/200 hour yoga teacher training. I was so pumped for our graduation weekend where we would get the chance to demo a twenty minute sequence and then celebrate how far we've all come.

I can't tell you how much time I spent preparing those twenty minutes (really at the expense of other things that should have taken priority). Because this program, and these people have become so special to me I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to incorporate all I had learned, as well as create a class that really reflected me.

Since my focus was on the four elements (earth, fire, water, air) and the divine feminine, and had a bit of a 'witchy' feel to it, I chose every pose with purpose and intention to fit my theme, poses such as star, goddess, half moon, dancing shiva, cobra. I even called poses different names (banana became crescent moon because I didn't want to break the story I was trying to craft). Here, I should have heeded advice Carolyn Myss cites in her book, Sacred Contracts. Her high school English teacher once told her, "you have to learn the laws of English like a master, so that you can break them like an artist" (43). I'm not master status yet (obviously, and trying too hard and too much is a known shortcoming of mine).

I'm a stubborn student though, so I went right on ahead and tried too hard to do too much.

I brought incense, and poetry, and gifts, and planned on playing the kochi chimes at the end of the sequence. My playlist was on point (Eyes on Fire, Rise, I Did Something Bad, Castle, Down to the River to Pray)! I had gone to The Enchanted Grove and bought special moonstones for all the ladies and typed up a list of all the things that stone symbolizes/heals complete with a reference list.

I felt prepared to slay it.

I didn't sleep at all the night before. I was so excited. I was number nine in a group of 16 and so after approx. 3 hours of physical practice on my mat, I was up. I got my music ready, lit my incense stick and then it all went up in flames (not the bldg thankfully, although I was worried about that since I didn't have a proper incense holder). My instructor started having an allergy attack in response to the incense. She couldn't quit sneezing, and I saw her race to the bathroom. I then promptly forgot a few of the poses in my Sun C sequence which screwed up the timing which meant we were no longer in the water element I had intended, flowing one breath per movement (this will make sense to some yogis out there). I knew things weren't going well, and at this point I just wanted the whole fucking disaster of a practice to be over (although apparently not bad enough, or I wouldn't have run 5 minutes over reading a piece I had written while the ladies were in shivasana lowering my score on the grading rubric even further).

After a painful performance, my teacher handed me the paper with my score and her feedback and we broke for lunch. I waited to look at it until I was at a coffee shop alone as I knew it wasn't going to be good. What I wasn't anticipating was a grade of D or more specifically a .678% or a 13.5 out of 20 (she tore off the score in an attempt to comfort me when I was having part temper tantrum/part breakdown in the back room).

I'm still so so embarrassed, but something about writing and sharing helps me to process and recover. I also risk that by sharing this with the world, I don't get offered any yoga gigs anytime soon, and it is not exactly a rousing endorsement for students to come to my class.

And yet, I share anyways.

When I saw my score I was devastated. Every ounce of accomplishment I had felt for how much I had grown in the past 10 months completely evaporated. It feel like someone who had studied for the bar exam for the better part of a year and then didn't pass. Now, I would never practice law (or in this instance yoga).

I was suddenly transported to a few weeks ago when my nine-year old auditioned for a competitive gymnastics team. Immediately after tryouts as she was putting on her coat and tying up her shoes, she said to me and her father, "That wasn't my best performance. I don't think I made the team."

And she didn't.

I remember seeing her face in the rear view mirror as she read the email delivering the news. She had practiced so hard, and wanted it so bad. She had begged to hold my phone on the drive out of town to visit my mom so she could check my yahoo account every five minutes for the audition results. I hated seeing the disappointment on her face when the email finally came through. She quietly announced she didn't make it, and then got quiet. So so quiet. I ended up pulling over, and refused to start the car again until she was able to say out loud that she was proud of herself. This only happened after watching a few YouTube videos on all the 'successful failures' out there like Dr. Suess and Walt Disney.

I texted Olivia to let her know I was now giving myself the same pep talk. She actually probably handled her loss better than I did. I went to the back room of the venue where we were practicing and cried my head off. I then seriously considered taking up smoking again, and honestly had it not been for all those other women I had grown so close to waiting in the other room to finish their sets I probably would have walked. I mean it is one thing to screw up in month 2 or month 9, but to screw up so royally on what was supposed to be the showcase of how much I've grown in my skill set felt truly awful. I quit pouting long enough to practice for another 2 hours so that I could a least take pride in having participated in every other woman's 20 min. demo.

I'm still actually feeling pretty humiliated by the experience, and each time i see one of my fellow YTT's post their certificate, I feel like I should give mine back. The teacher in me knows that if a student failed my English class, they'd have to retake it. I'm trying to remind myself, however, that failing the final, doesn't always equate to failing the course. I'm trying to tell myself it was one off day, while the chattering monkey in my head is spinning all kinds of tales about how unfit I am to teach, how little I've learned, and how dumb I am to have thought I could pull this off.

Our lives are made up of second by second choices. I can chose 'fear' and 'unworthiness,' or as one of my yoga teachers reminded me, "I can choose courage" (thanks Karen!).

I will be reteaching a longer, free, and hopefully more polished version of the class I failed at this past weekend, on Sunday, April 28 at Praxis Fiber workshop from 10:30-11:30.

I think my choice is obvious.