Everyone’s a fraud!

In my last post, I talked a little about losing my own voice as a yoga teacher and feeling like a big ole fraud. If you missed it, feel free to check it out below. But what I didn’t mention in that last post was the growing suspicion that everyone around me was a fraud as well.

Several years into teaching, I started having a really hard time taking class from any but a small handful of teachers. I was so critical of other teachers that I could barely focus on myself. Of course I never voiced this criticism aloud, but I can assure you that it was a riotous symphony in my brain. I may have looked all calm and namaste, but inside I was screaming:

How could you give THAT person THAT adjustment?! Do you not see her knee turning in, butt sticking out, shoulders at her ears, crunched lumbar spine?? Are you trying to send her to the operating table? And are you kidding me with that terrible Sanskrit pronunciation?? It is SAVasana, ok! Not SHIVasana!! We are talking corpses here not deities!!!

To say I was judgy is….an understatement. And to say I was angry…yes, just a little.

It was like some debilitating form of yogic paranoia. But beyond anything, it was very isolating and gave me a great excuse to not go to class.

The fact of the matter is that we are all frauds to some extent. I mean, I was once asked to teach a class called “Rock your Ass-ana” for God’s sake. Now if that’s not “authentic” yoga, then I don’t know what is! It’s ok. We can laugh at ourselves when we are stupid. And that class title was STUPID. Bless my sweet, sanctimonious, twenty-something year old heart for recognizing it even then and refusing to teach it.

But seriously, at some point or another, we are all frauds. The dangerous frauds are the ones who never recognize their own fraudulence or seek to do anything about it. And there are certainly plenty of those in yoga, as there are in every other sphere of life.

I am trying to face my fraud head on so I can get back to the yoga I love. And if I can be patient enough with myself to try and do this, it is incumbent upon me to show that same respect to other teachers as well. We all need the room to be a bit of a fraud. And we all need time to figure it out.