Good Touching... and Bad Touching (sort of)

[whipslave20]

It has been said that when it comes to being touched, I react like a cat.

In general being tactile is good for me.  When playing, when cuddling, touching really suits me.

Today, however, it didn't.

Comments

Yogically speaking, says Mitzi

[anonymous]

There are many kinds of yoga, and most of them are impossible to get right the first time. Especially when they lack clear instruction and rely on mistranslated gobbledegook. My favourite instruction in my first serious attept at yoga was "keep the throat soft". Gradually I worked out this meant you have to stay as relaxed as possible and not tense up, especially in your breathing.

I also did not enjoy being "corrected" in my first lessons with different instructors - I've yogaslutted at different times, to find a good class. Not many could compare with my first soft-throat Instructress, a 70 year old called Joyce at the Waverley Arts Centre, BOndi Road. Highly promoted by moi. The clientele are all elderly and a few are pregnant and Ladies who Lunch, so you never feel the pressure of a glamorous crowd.

In Thailand my newly-graduated yoga teacher friend tested her lessons out on me. It was a great way to learn and the postures were aimed at relaxation and not on cutting a striking figure for the cover of Women's Health. You can always find a different teacher at a different place. Although if it's more convenient to yogafy at your gym, you'd best make your instuctors aware of your haptic boundaries.

Australians are not generally a haptic bunch unless it's a slap on the back. Yoga changed all that! Now people feel free to go stroking lower backs and remodelling each other like an ongoing twister game.

Even in yoga class, strangers have no right to break the haptic boundary, and it really shits me that they float through the straining, stretching crowd in a godly, more flexible than thou fashion, correcting postures at will.

So, and this could be my only sadistic streak, I am glad you embarrassed the instructor, who did not bother to come down from their I'm specialer and yogier than you so have no need to feel as if anyone has any boundaries any more, and the Aspie factor is almost incidental. I say this because I got extremely stressed out at a yoga class in Newtown, during which the instructor had told the class to move their bowels before coming to class.

This set me on edge for the following hour of difficult athletic strain, and the crowd were intimidating in the extreme - dreadlocks, sinewy rubbery limbs everywhere, tattooes of trihard Eastern symbols, and other kinds of cooler-than-thou guff. Also, I got plenty of correction that class, and to the instructor's credit, a reminder to relax, because I was 'trying hard than anyone else'. I thought, if you looked at everyone else, I had a lot of catching up to do ... and I ran out of the class in tears. It did not help that it was 6 in the morning. The instructor had to leave the 30-odd yogis in tree pose with the trainee while he made sure I wasn't running into the traffic.

So, I hope my yoga disaster story has soothed your concerns just a little. They are all a bunch of freaks who have not translated the already-wierd practises of yoga into our culture. You were and always will be well within your rights to deter hapticity.

Now for all of that - don't give up on yoga! It's fantastic, really! You just can't compare yourself to others, but enjoy it for the extra stretchiness it brings you.

Re: Yogically speaking, says Mitzi

[whipslave20]

Wow! A response that is longer than the original post I think.

I will have to use the word "hapticity" more often.

Also I don't care for the try hard eastern stuff. I have said "Namaste" to my Hindu friends from time to time, but I'm pretty sure the instructor was not Hindu given that she was a white woman named Shirley. It felt odd being one white person being asked to say Namaste to another white person.