Why I Kind of Suck at Yoga

I attended a yoga class today for the first time in months.  I rarely get to a class due to the fact I'm holding down the fort alone at home so much; plus, the fact that I'm still in a tight place makes it difficult for me to justify the expense, even for just one class here and there.  

So today in class I couldn't help but feel "behind" everyone else, that I was trying to join a class and catch up when the "semester" is actually almost over.  Once, even twice a day, I do yoga at home on my own mat, but it's never the same.  At home, I don't do things I don't already know how to do.  I don't think of what I do at home as real, somehow--like it almost doesn't count as a yoga practice to be proud of.

But going to class was actually bad because I left feeling bad.  In elementary school, I was always the last one picked for teams during physical education classes.  I was the smallest, the scrawniest, the slowest, the weakest.  In fourth grade, it took forever for me to get the volleyball over the net.  I lost the races, was always behind.  So everyday, I left P.E. feeling bad, fantasizing about being better, but physically unable to make that happen.

That's how I feel when I feel bad about yoga.  That what I'm supposed to be doing in class is never going to happen for me.  There is a lot of talk about being "where you are" in class and that the breath is everything, the most important thing, but that's not the way it feels when my fellow classmates swing into their asanas and vinyasas.  They move quickly and with intensity, and I can't seem to match them.  And I can't stop watching them.

I've been doing yoga on and off for about 20 years and when I first moved to the city I had a yoga teacher who was strangely bothered by my seeming inability to be "awesome."  (This was before there was a studio on every corner.) It actually made him angry, my yoga suckage--pushed some  major buttons in him--and for years and years I never attended class again.  

And I've always wished that both he and my '70s-era PE teacher knew how awful they'd been.

It's too bad I'm feeling so negatively, so tight about this, because I'm counting on yoga to help me through many things in my life (ironically, to get me out of my tight emotional places); on the other hand, sometimes I wonder whether I should be doing yoga at all. 

What about you?  What do you consistently practice that you still kind of suck at?

Sometimes I feel judged by the others.