yoga anxiety?

I wasn't feeling well this morning and thought I had sent a text message to my teacher Hari-Bhakti, but it evidently didn't go through. Obviously, I would have preferred to feel better and to have made it to my morning asana class, but apparently I fell asleep again only to have awful yoga anxiety dreams. Now, it's possible that my dream was a reflection of my anxiety about having missed class, or perhaps, as was pointed out to me by a dear friend, my body actually needed that extra bit of sleep to process anxieties that I had already churned up and needed to be dealt with. In any case, the dream was sort of fantastic, in the sense of hitting pretty much every angle of anxiety available.

Pretty much the dream went like this: there was my teacher H-B, only in my dream she had this wild pink hair and was really really fashionable. I mean like super-model guru fashionable. And she was casually sitting in a chair saying to me (with a cadence and tone completely unlike her natural speaking voice), "Well, you know, maybe you're not pure of heart enough... This practice really takes commitment and hard work and maybe you're just not dedicated enough to attain any kind of enlightenment." And as though that weren't painful enough, the dream then flashed back to my arrival at that morning's class (because in the dream I had made it, but I'd made it an hour late). I walked in to find that the whole class had choreographed an elaborate yoga dance routine, replete with song, and they were performing it flawlessly. It was more complicated than a professional marching band field routine. And H-B was very casual about that, too. "Oh, yes, we just threw this together this morning." And I couldn't believe it. It was the sort of thing that would have taken weeks to develop and several more to execute flawlessly. "You must really be a great teacher," I told her. But she wasn't having it. "All of my students were just so into it, you know?" And I stood there, trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened, how anyone could have accomplished all that in an hour, and I stared in amazement at all of my fellow students' smiling faces.

But that wasn't enough. My dream wanted to make sure it had tripped every anxiety laden circuit available to it, and it was then that dream H-B revealed to me that they had ALSO taken a comprehensive midterm that morning and that it was not something I could make up. So, there I was, stunned, feeling completely like a yoga school flunky destined for spiritual failure and a lifetime of un-enlightenment. It really, really sucked. But then I woke up. I decided right then that perhaps I should be kind to myself and accept that I had missed class and that, rather than beat myself up about it (or anything else related to yoga school) I should instead regroup, refocus my energy, and rededicate myself to this adventure, and do so with a spirit of wonder and joy and NOT with all the weird stuff my dream was directing my attention toward. Yikes.