Why Does a Yoga Teacher Need to Be Massaged?

My name is Yu Murong (alias), and I teach yoga — flexible, disciplined, my life arranged like a textbook. My friends assume I need no one's help relaxing. I know better: I am expert at caring for my own body, and a complete beginner at letting anyone else do it. I hesitated a long while over the application, and through the days it sat in review I kept stretching on my mat, asking myself: when you get there, can you truly do nothing? The night the approval came and the address was sent to my phone alone, I said to my reflection: Murong, this once, you are the student.

The door ritual disarmed my professional habits first. Slippers at my feet; my plain shoes, the ones that live beside my yoga bag, taken away; warm tea in my hands. I changed without lifting a finger — standing there being dressed in a robe, my shoulders rising reflexively to help, then remembering, and letting them fall. The bath was attended gently, steam and scent around me, and into it came one sentence: today you don't have to do anything right; hand over all the weight. My nose stung a little. I have said those words to students a thousand times. I had never heard what they sound like said to me.

Through my first session lying down, I kept 'cooperating' — muscles engaging on reflex, breath deliberately paced, exactly as if I were in class. Warmth arrived at my scalp and waited there a long time, as if waiting for me. Then the warm, silky Nuru liquid covered my shoulders and back — smooth, close, steady — travelling down my spine to my arms, my hips, and the legs I am proudest of and hold tightest, and out to my feet. I practised letting go: shoulders first, then breath, my body like a bag set down after years of carrying. By the time the warmth wrapped my toes I understood it at last: to be cared for whole, scalp to toes, is not a selection of favourite poses. It is every inch being cherished — a completeness I had taught for years and never once received.

The final passage, the Yoni private care, was the quietest lesson of the evening. Longing there was, and shyness too — on ordinary days I am the one standing at the front, demonstrating. My terms were stated first: stoppable at any moment; no judging, no comparing. Then warmth and patience opened me slowly, and I found that being cared for felt entirely different from my teaching — no standards to meet, nothing to make beautiful, only sensation to receive. Relaxation, it turns out, is not a technique. It is an act of trust. For those minutes I set the identity of 'teacher' down completely and was only a woman, cherished steadily — solidly enough to make me sigh.

Teaching yoga for years, my hands have read a great many backs, and I know everyone's tension hides in a different place. Lying down myself that night, I found where the deepest tension lives: underneath the sentence 'I am the teacher; I should be the best at relaxing in this room.' When the warmth crossed my hips, that place resisted first, then — like water moving under ice — began, slowly, to flow on its own. The scent was a still, woody green, entirely unlike my studio's; it kept reminding me: this is not your classroom tonight, and you are not the teacher. When my feet were held steady, every toe wrapped in the warmth — feet that have stood on yoga mats for more than a decade — my nose stung without warning. The tact of being cared for is not something a lesson plan can produce. It exists only in a real evening of patience, in being cherished as an ordinary person.

I sat a long while in the rest area afterwards, the warmth of the hot towel still on my face, and I decided to take this lesson home: from now on, my classes keep five extra minutes at the end for doing absolutely nothing correctly — just lying there. I have become the member who recommends this place most warmly: the better you are at caring for others, the more regularly you need to be cared for yourself, once. I asked about the travelling ritual, too. When I run my next retreat camp at Joshua Tree, I want this care booked into my own room for the final night. A woman who has spent years teaching others to set their weight down should have someone set hers down, too.

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