My yoga teacher thinks he is a comedian. How should I react?

My new yoga teacher thinks he is a comedian and I am not sure I know how I feel about that. This morning while he had us at his mercy in sequences of downward dog, crow, happy baby and warrior, he kept making us laugh as well.

Don’t get me wrong – I love jokes and laughing just makes everything better. At the same time, I am one of those people that buys in to the idea that yoga is primarily about preparing your body to be able to sit comfortably in meditation for extended periods of time. So I found myself struggling to meditate and maintain my concentration while also wanting to laugh out loud every time my teacher said something hilarious.

This went on for the better part of the class. And then suddenly I had some sort of micro epiphany. I remembered listening to one of my mentors giving a talk about the kind of thinking that is increasingly more important for us to deal with the complex challenges that we are faced with as individuals, but also as a global community.

Citing Edgard Morin, he said the first aspect of complex thinking is the ability to sustain paradox. Most of us were educated in a paradigm that is based on cartesian thinking that leads us to want to “solve” everything.

We are always trying to “figure things out” and paradoxes drive us crazy.

As it turns out though, our lives are inextricably tangled up in paradoxes. Everyone that has ever been in an existential, quarter life or mid-life crisis knows exactly what I am talking about. With multiple ways of looking at the world and multiple paths that our life can take, we often feel paralysed. The range of possibilities is immense and gaining enough clarity to commit to a direction is tough. Add a high degree of fear of missing out (FOMO), and we find ourselves crumbling in the face of paradox, hoping to find the single way out — the solution.

But lets go back to yoga, jokes and epiphanies, where all of this started. So there I was, struggling to choose between laughter and concentration. Then it happened. It suddenly dawned on me as I pushed my shoulder blades into my back and had my hips pointing backwards that there was no need to choose between focus and laughter and try to resolve the situation by ignoring the jokes or allowing myself to lose my concentration. I could just try to sustain the paradox and let life unfold, moment by moment.

In fact, not only could I sustain the paradox, but maybe even transcend it. For to sit in meditation is not to sit without everything else. It is to sit and meditate, within everything else. So the next time, may my teacher’s jokes take me deeper into my practice and not farther away from it.

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