How to order coffee, and the art of non-attachment.

My husband refuses to speak Starbucks. While I found it frustrating at first, since I am fluent and enjoy practicing my language skills, it’s now kind of funny. My drink: a grande-soy-no water-chai. His drink: a grande-triple-nonfat-latte. When my husband orders, it’s a medium-chai-made-with-soy-milk-and-no-water and a medium-skinny-latte-with-an-extra-shot. The baristas correct him ruthlessly, every time, with me snickering in the background. To me, ordering in Starbucks is easy and rolls off the tongue, since that’s where the majority of my chai ordering has been. For him, he worked through college as a barista at an independent coffee shop (truly yummy coffee, and my many thanks to our friends Matt & Kelly for the caffeine that kept me going through college) and has a festering dislike for the man, aka Starbucks, and Starbuckese makes absolutely no sense to him.

Doesn’t this happen in our practice? We become very attached to our particular style of yoga, the style in which we first became aware of our body and how truly unaware we’d been, and once we learn the language we don’t want to disturb it. I am so guilty of this. I love Ashtanga, but only from Richard’s studio or his teachers. My first yoga classes were taught by an Iyengar teacher, so there’s my alignment with, well, alignment (and Richard has a solid foundation in Iyengar, as well, so I understand him). And over the past few years, I’ve been taking Anusara classes when I can (because a lot of my Ashtangi teacher and student friends connected with it as well). But with other styles, I find that I critique them harshly and quickly ask, “Where did this teacher train?” “What style is this, exactly?”

We become fluent in the particular style that makes sense to us. And sometimes, don’t you think, we can become stuck in the familiarity and the safety of it. We shine there because we trust the system, trust the teacher. Opening up to our own vulnerability, we can really reach deep inside and begin to release our own creativity, our playfulness, our curiosity.

But I must say that when I have taken a class here and there with a teacher or in a style with which I was unfamiliar, I almost always learn something valuable. I hear an alignment cue that is different and opens my body in a new and fascinating way. Sometimes my knowledge becomes challenged by wisdom. And sometimes, the truth is, I don’t like the teaching at all because there’s no good foundation. But always, in reflection, I remember that I am a beginner and revel in that. It’s a fun place to be, this beginning spot, and it’s here that I can taste vairagya, or non-attachment, which is one of the “two core principles on which yoga rests.” It’s the balance of both never giving up and always letting go.

So with that, I raise a grande-soy-no water-chai to you and your own reflecting. Namaste.

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