Am I building a number or building me?

Yoga taught me another lesson morning when I rolled over with my alarm at 7:30 and started arguing with myself. It was time to get up if I was going to make it to the 8:30 yoga class. If I didn't get today's two classes in, I knew I'd have a hard time catching up on the 108 Challenge. I caught myself thinking how this was a chance to get two more classes in and that's when  it hit me--yoga was teaching me another lesson and it had nothing to do with cool poses. 

When you walk into a class, you hear about "no judgment, no expectation, no ego." When did I lose sight of the part I love the most? When did I start worrying about what everyone else was doing? How many classes they'd been to? How many beautiful poses they could do?  When did I start thriving on acknowledgment and praise from the teachers who are all trying to teach me not to worry about it?

I'm highly competitive--always have been. I am also used to being the best at a lot of things--it's a combination of some God-given talent and some well-honed stubbornness. But Yoga is an individual journey. I'm supposed to be building me--not a list of asanas I can do and not an insane number of classes I finished. 

Our teachers work very hard to bring our awareness to things like self-judgment, going within, competition, celebrating every breath (even during dragon), and personal growth. It has all started to permeate my life and I am much more balanced off the mat, but somehow I managed to shift a lot of those bad habits into my yoga practice. 

I fell in love with yoga because of the little moments--the day I could get my hands all the way down in forward fold, the day I flew my crow, the day I laid completely flat in pigeon. In the beginning, I embraced being a beginner. My expectations ramped up much too quickly.  And yoga hit me with another lesson. 

I set a goal in January to do 108 yoga classes this year. I've done 61 and I may finish in 108 days. It would be really cool if I did that. Not because I'd be one of the first. Not because other people would like it. But because I did it. Because I will have I grown in my practice, learned on and off the mat, and changed my perspective with all of these yoga lessons. 

Just when I start to think I've got the hang of this, it hits me with another lesson. I'm still a beginner and I'm okay with that--even if I have to remind myself a few more times.