It’s said that attachment causes suffering and I suppose that’s true. I was attached to my first yoga teachers and the alignment-based system of practice they taught. My attachment ran so deep that as I arrived for class if I noticed there was a substitute I turned around and left.  My attachment to their teaching and to that system remained after I moved away and began the search for new teachers. The deep, impenetrable layers of judgement I carried with me, however, prevented me from enjoying practice. More importantly, judgements prevented me from learning because no other yoga instructor could climb the pedestal on which I’d placed my teachers. How incredibly unfair. It pains me to think of all the opportunities I lost – opportunities to gain knowledge because of the attachment I held to my yoga ‘lineage’ and to my first yoga teachers.

Decades later but only a little more wise and I find myself in an awkward position. A few weeks ago I was offered and accepted a new class, stepping in to take over for a beloved instructor who had been teaching at Samyama, like me, from Day One. When I first agreed to take the class I didn’t think about the implications.

And then I did. 

By saying ‘yes’ I set in motion a chain of events that upended my schedule and required that I practice aparigraha – non-attachment. Because as much as students become attached to teachers, teachers become attached to students.

There’s comfort in seeing the students’ same smiling faces when I take tadasana in front of a class. We know what to expect from one another. They know I’m going to crack a few bad jokes. I know that a least a few of them will laugh even if they’ve heard the same joke for the last eight years. They know I’m going to encourage the use of blocks in half moon and revolved triangle in order to experience the unencumbered swoop of clear energy a few inches of extra height delivers. I know that at least a few will decline the suggestion and that I won’t mind as long as they’re safe because we are all on our own journey. They know I’m not going to play music because silence is so rare. They know I’m not going to offer hands-on adjustments because I don’t know their entire story (and I don’t have x-ray vision). I know, that for some, these are the reasons why they chose my class. 

But the students who lost their teacher had not chosen my class. They chose someone else’s class and now that someone was gone.

Arriving at that realization (a ‘no-brainer’ for some but for me a ‘smack-in-the-head-emoji’ moment) opened my heart to a deeper understanding of arparigraha. Setting free attachment to schedules and classes and the comfort of smiling faces is sort of easy. Knowing I could also set free my attachment to the knowledge that I am not the teacher I am replacing (and the anxiety that knowledge causes) set in motion another chain of events. Releasing that attachment also released my attachment to the fear I have of being a disappointment, of not being liked, of losing students and of not experiencing the same success as my predecessor.

At the end of the day, I am lucky. Many of the students I had in my earlier class moved to the new class. And it looks like more than a few of the previous teacher’s students are staying, too.

What have I learned? I’ve learned that the most difficult attachment to let go of is the story we tell ourselves. I’ve also learned that there is one attachment I hope to never let go of: my attachment to being me.