I’m reading Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.  Get it for yourself on video or transcript.  He talks about the value of playing football when he was a kid.  He says the real value is in the head fake indirect learning.  It wasn’t about the dream of playing professionally or really, about playing at all.  It was all the other stuff that had the most value - learning preserverence, teamwork and sportsmanship.

And the head fake bit is what I love about yoga too.  And that’s the challenge for the teacher.  How do you take a room full of newbies who want to ‘get fit’ or ‘touch their toes’ and help them do that as *well as* learn about mindfulness, compassion, yamas and nyamas - in an eight week session?

Well, of course you don’t.  Teaching them the poses injury-free is often a full-time job in itself. 

But the best head fake learning is what we take in from doing the yoga itself.  That a few simple deep breaths can completely alter our physiology and perspective.   That the sweet spot, the eye of the storm, is being in the moment.  That just doing the poses, whether we touch or toes or not, is its own reward.