To be or not to be pissed off by your yoga teacher

Have you ever had the experience of being pissed off by your yoga teacher? You're not alone. However, you might feel alone about it.

I've experience an interesting tendency amongst the yogis I've met. When you go to a  yoga class as a student, you automatically expect that you'll be able to open yourself and your body under secure guidance of the teacher. However, that's not always how it works out.

What if you just don't really get the right vibe with your teacher? What if he or she makes you feel irritated? Then a conflict is created between your expectations and the reality of the situation.

If you meet people on the street, you don't expect your heart and body to trust strangers completely.  Sometimes you meet people, you like - and some times you don't. It's exactly the same thing in a yoga studio, since yoga teachers also walk on the streets. You might feel amazed by your teacher, or you might feel pissed by his or her presence.

If you feel resistance against your teacher - accept it. It is just the way it has to be, and there is nothing wrong about it. However, there might be some very interesting things to learn from situations like these.

When I met one of my most important teachers, I felt a lot of resistance against her. Already during the first lesson, I sensed how our energies clashed together - at least in my mind. The strong feeling of resistance made me want to create a distance between her and me. I even told my fellow yoga students how much she frustrated me. I felt irritated by her being, and I was quite sure that she noticed - and moreover I was sure that she felt the same way about me.

It took me around 100 hours of lessons to meet her with true, humble openness. And then I realized that the resistance against her was caused by her nonverbal confrontation of the black holes in my heart. She was pressing the red buttons in my soul, and I had to accept it. she was silently entering a part of my territory that I wanted to fall into oblivion.

After I ended my training with her was over, I was going trough a very difficult time of my life. I was entering the shadow land of my soul, since now there was no way back. And just as I felt worse than ever, I understood that she was the only person in the world, who could help me. She was the only person who could support me in my difficult process of cleaning up my heart and history. I wrote her an e-mail and asked if I could join one of her retreats - and soon I was on my way to meet her again.

Her yoga lessons and teachings together with the beautiful place made it possible for me to take a step back and get a view on my life. Finally, I saw that things were just as they had to be for now. And I found peace.

*

I had a very interesting experience with a young, strong guy, who came to some of my lessons in Copenhagen.

After his first class with me, he was very honest about his personal resistance against me. He told me that he felt really pissed off during the lesson. I was very fascinated by his honesty, and I told him that of course he might feel irritated in my presence during a yoga class - just as well as he might have felt it, if we had met each other in a bar.

However, he came back. Many times. In the beginning, he came when he didn't know that I was taking the classes. And I could se how he was thinking: "Oh no, not her again".

But as time went by, he started to appreciate my classes.

Last time I met him, he came to me to talk after the lesson.

"I don't know if you noticed, but I got angry off during the class today", he said to me. "You kind of pissed me off."

Again, we started to talk. I asked him when and why, but he couldn't say. We started examining the poses of the class, and soon we found out when the irritation appeared. The guy felt frustrated during the class as I asked the class to do simple movements which required mobility. As a sportsman, he was caught in the feeling of a hopeless competition between his strong thighs and and the girls flexible hips. He was used to be the best. And now, he suddenly had to face a challenge, where people around him did things, he wasn't able to do yet.

Who doesn't know that feeling? You are used to be something special in some kind of area in life, and then - BAM - you have to accept that someone is doing things better than you. And here we have one of the key reasons to why we do challenging poses in yoga: If we practice to face a challenge on a yoga mat with an open spirit, we eventually will keep calm when we face challenges in the real life.

*

If you force yourself to let go of your resistance to a teacher that doesn't make you feel comfortable, the situation might even create more tension and resistance in the mental body as well as the physical. My invitation for you is to accept the situation as it is - and find out, what is triggering you.

Don't expect yorurself to let go off all the resistance in your body and mind, when you go to a yoga class. Be humble to the proces and let it take all the time, it needs. Show your body and heart all your patience and love, and it will respond with so much more trust and dedication than you could ever imagine!