The Room I Planned For
This past Saturday I taught my monthly independent yoga class, the fifth one so far. By now I’ve settled into a routine. I get to the space about thirty minutes early, rearrange the room based on who’s coming, prep the music and the mic, and welcome everyone in. It’s simple, and I’ve come to love the rhythm of it.
What’s funny is that for the last couple of classes, my intuition had been quietly telling me it was time to explore other spaces. So I listened. There was another studio I’d been in conversation with, and I toured it, loved it, and booked it for the following month. I actually signed for the new space about twenty minutes before I walked in to teach on Saturday. I didn’t think much of the timing then. I think about it a little differently now.
What I expected to walk into was my normal routine. The first small sign that the day had other plans came at the entrance, where there were flyers for an art showing taped up. I didn’t even look at the dates. I walked up the stairs, punched in the code, opened the door, and found a full art exhibit installed across the entire space. Art covered the walls. Sculptures sat in the middle of the room. There was a goal tracker, loose papers everywhere, an entire show where my empty studio was supposed to be.
I was shell-shocked. It was 10:32 and class started at 11. I felt the anger rise as I walked through the room. I called the co-owners. No answer. I texted. Nothing. And there it was, that moment where I had to make some game-time decisions. A few options presented themselves.
Cry.
Yell.
Cancel class.
Figure it out.
I went with number four. I remembered I had a smaller turnout booked for the day, so I did the quick math on whether everyone would fit if I just rearranged things. The eyeball test said yes, easily. There would be more distractions than usual, but it would absolutely work. I started moving the installations from the middle of the room out toward the edges. I called my partner to come help. And I took long, deliberate breaths the whole time I was moving the shit around.
Somewhere in those few minutes, one of the co-owners called back. I’ll leave that conversation out of this. Then I went back to breathing, and back to shifting the room, until there was finally enough space to teach. The first few students trickled in. They looked surprised. Not in a bad way. Just surprised.
That’s when I made the second real decision of the morning, which was to make light of it. To laugh. “Surprise,” I told the first person walking in, “you get both yoga AND art today.” Then I explained that the space had gotten overbooked, but that none of it would touch our practice. Telling the first person made it easy to tell the next, and the next, and the more I said it out loud the funnier it got. As I walked the room I actually started appreciating the art. I noticed the students appreciating it too. Then I taught. Class went smoothly. There was plenty of space to move. The art didn’t interfere with the practice at all.
I left that room calm. At peace, even. Reminding myself that it did not matter whether I was teaching in a pristine studio or an art gallery, because the practice was never about the room. It’s about grounding students in their body and their breath. The mat, the space around us, all of us arriving in the present moment together. That was all we ever needed, and we had it.
There’s a line often attributed to Viktor Frankl. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I’ve come to believe that yoga, or really the ongoing practice of trying to connect to ourselves, our breath, and our bodies, is where the beauty of that space actually lives. Yes, the mat is the vehicle we use to practice it. But the payoff, at least as I’ve come to learn it, shows up when real life walks in. It might be the smallest crisis or a big capital C one. Either way, I’m grateful for what the practice keeps teaching me to carry out into the world. The awareness that the anger is even there. The noticing that there is a space at all, and that inside it sits more than one road, not just the single one the heat of the moment wants to shove me down. That noticing is the whole thing. It’s what turns a reaction into a choice.
So the next time the room isn’t the one you planned for… what will you notice in the space between stimulus and response?
