the class that lasted a week

The first yoga class I ever taught lasted a week.

It was scheduled for an hour.

⚪︎

For most of those seven days,
it had already been happening in my head.

What I would say.
What I might forget.

How long to leave people in a posture.
Whether I would remember the Sanskrit.

What a proper yoga teacher
was supposed to sound like.

By Friday afternoon,
I had rehearsed the class enough times
to make something very simple feel almost impossible.

⚪︎

The room was small,
but felt enormous.

Tealights burned in lotus-shaped holders.
Trams rattled past outside.

I had arranged everything
to look reassuringly like yoga.

Then I tried to do the same with myself.
Every cell focused on looking harmonious.

⚪︎

Just before six,
the door opened.

Two students came in.

They looked tentative,
almost apologetic.

At least I wasn't the only one
unsure of what happened next.

They took their places.
I asked them to stand,
using words they probably
didn’t quite understand,
and became, officially,
the teacher.

Or tried to.

⚪︎

From the first mantra,
something felt slightly off.

It was a lot of Sanskrit
for two people who had just walked in.

The words came out.
The students followed.

Nothing went visibly wrong.
But the room had already become
more serious than it needed to be.

And somewhere inside,
every passing minute seemed to be asking
the same question:

Do they believe you yet?

The clock on the wall
was no longer measuring time.
It was measuring credibility.

⚪︎

I counted breaths.
Demonstrated movements.
Said the things
I had prepared to say.

And two kind people allowed me
to practise being someone
who knew what he was doing.

An hour later,
they thanked me politely.

I never saw either of them again.

⚪︎

After they left,
the room became a room again.

Nothing had collapsed.
There was no verdict.
No revelation.

Only the peculiar relief
of no longer having to teach the class
I had already been teaching for seven days.

⚪︎

For years afterwards,
I kept walking into rooms
and being called the teacher.

Sometimes there were three people.
Sometimes a hundred.

There were days
when teaching became almost ordinary.

A room.
People breathing.
Someone needing help.
Someone wanting to be left alone.
Mostly, the usual beautiful human chaos.

And there were other days
when I could still feel
the old machinery quietly starting up —
the wish to get it right,
to have all the answers,
to be seen as someone who knew.

Not quite the same person
as on that first Friday.

But not entirely different either.

⚪︎

Twenty-something years later,
I still remember the candles.
The trams.
Two tentative students,
and one teacher working very hard
not to look tentative.

He thought he needed
to make something happen.

Mostly, people breathed.
The trams kept passing.

⚪︎

The first yoga class I ever taught lasted a week.

The next one was a little shorter.

Probably not because
I knew much more.

Perhaps I had simply spent
a little less time
trying to look like someone who did.

And some of the students
even came back.