Not my job
Unless you ask me
When you ask me to teach you Yoga, we are entering the atha Yoga anusasanam relationship. Meaning, You willingly permit me to assess you your mind/body/nervous system/ emotions/ behaviors for potential hindrances to your well-being. I administer take-home practices that help remove them. You do these practices daily, and we modulate them to bring you closer to your goals.
That is my dharma; however, just like a school principal, an attorney or a doctor, I am not immune from taking my job home with me. Not literally, but figuratively as personality requirements, on overdrive. Perhaps law enforcement can be a bit authoritarian. Medical, a bit hypervigilant with health situations. School admin task oriented to the extreme. Attorney, litigious. Yoga therapist, determined to help you remove your health obstacles.
This week my dharma (life work/purpose) and asmitā (the identities I take on as self) tug-of-warred. You see, both are quite instrinsic. Both define us. Both are characterized by deep patterning that is built over time. And their overlap often, and without very astute awareness, merge, as if they are one. In the Yogic text, samyoga similarly introduces an “as-if-one” merging, the drasta (inner perceiver) and drysam (lens it see through, and what it sees).
Samyoga is troublesome. When the inner me is one with my impulses, my emotions, desires, hatreds, my ignorance, my identity, my personality characteristics, my nervous system cues, there’s never any peace, at least for very long. An offshoot of this norm is our responsibilities taking over our entire personality. While workaholism is one way this shows up in life, another is in our work duties sticking with us long after work is over, and this builds over time.
Optimally, reduction in my own klesa-s (mental obstacles) spills over from teaching into life into practice into life into teaching. That’s preferable, as well as important, as that’s the work within that Yoga is asking us to do. Also optimally, when you choose to learn with me, because I do this work, I can see you relatively clearly, and share strategies through Yoga.
Sub-optimally, I take my work role, avidyā (ignorance) reduction, to the next level. Outside of work, I take it upon myself to single-handedly avenge the ignorance of all whom I encounter! In the grocery store, in my neighborhood, on the road, the train, at the doctor’s office, on facebook, twitter, at the holiday meal table. Whenever I come into contact with someone who is acting out of order, in accordance with escalation in their mental obstacles, I alert them and advise them to get a grip, diplomatically at best, plainly at worst.
We can see how this itself becomes an obstacle for me. If you are not asking for help, I have to remind myself to do me, sometimes a task at hand to step down from my therapeutic persona. Yama and niyama breaching people tend to be a catalyst for deeper practice, on my part. Or for complete failure, depending on my state of mind at the time - which happened to be blizzarded out.
In a recent near-text-escalation with a neighbor over their refusing to park in their driveway during a snowstorm, I noticed they had no regard for the consequence self-centered parking etiquite on the greater whole. Not on my watch. The ignorance. Truth be told, it was an amazing moment in life. The child I’ve been trying to model conflict resolution with young-manned on me.
“Mom, right now, we have a good relationship with our neighbors. It’s in our best interest to keep it that way.”
He pratipaksa bhavana-ed. He did that. So caught up in how to convince them they needed to obey town rules, let the plows do their work and not give me at least an hour more shoveling, he reminded me that wasn’t my job. I thanked him. I said nothing. Inconvenienced, shoveling on overdrive was I, meanwhile they were snowblowed out. But we’re still on good terms. And I learned that it’s not my job to remove people’s ignorance unless they ask me for help.