Competitive yoga

I just got back from the first session of my Introduction to Yoga class which was a lot tougher than I thought it was going to be. If this is an introduction, I simply cannot imagine how much more difficult things are going to get. I appreciated it, when the teacher explained how we were going to curl our toes under and lift into downward facing dog, when I heard someone else in the class mutter, "Oh, Jesus." Yeah, like that.

They made it absolutely as gentle as possible. If you couldn't sit on the floor, sit on blankets. If you couldn't touch the floor, bend over and touch blocks. And at the end -- such a treat! -- we all got to lie on our backs as the instructor came around and put bolsters under our legs as we breathed in and out. That's exercise I can believe in.

But I noticed the most alarming thing: I couldn't stop competing. Was my posture better than others? Was the assistant correcting me less than she was correcting other people? Was I BETTER THAN everyone else? For a class of something I'm bad at, in a discipline that (from what I can tell) has absolutely nothing to do with comparing myself with anyone else. If I'm like this here, how must I be in areas that I know well and can do well? This yoga is going to be a good discipline for something other than exercise, I can tell already.