The Mysore room opened at 6:30 anyway. Not because I felt inspired. Not because I had slept. Not because the universe sent a little gift basket of “you’re doing great.”
That morning I was at my wit’s end. No sleep from neighborhood noise. My cousin had a second stroke. I was staring at a $1,500 hole. And yes—violent fantasies about my neighbors. Gross. Also real.
Here’s the humiliating part: “What kind of yoga teacher am I if I wanna beat people up?” The answer is: a human one. Thoughts happen. They’re not the same as words. Words aren’t the same as deeds. For a long time, those thoughts stopped turning into anything. More recently, the violent wishes stopped altogether. So when they come back, I don’t call it my “dark side.” I call it burnout.
Burnout has tells. Short fuse. Thin skin. The feeling that socializing makes you worse. That there’s no way out. And the sneaky belief that you should cancel everything until you can present a nicer version of yourself.
But the practice doesn’t wait for optimal conditions because optimal conditions never reliably arrive. The mat was there. The students were there. The container was there. So I showed up. Not as a victory lap. More like basic hygiene.
If you’ve ever had the morning where walking into the shala was the hardest thing you did all day—good. That’s the work. Not the pretty part. The useful part.