What it is to be a student, Wizard of Oz style:
Yoga is like the journey of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. We can sometime find ourselves in an unhappy place. And through the stress of life, we begin to swirl in a tornado of self-destruction, with the ego chasing after us (“I’ll get you my pretty”). By chance, if you’re lucky enough to take your first yoga class, you’ll be set down in the land of OM. With the guidance of a good witch (guru), you will journey inward. Along the way you will wish to have a brain (scarecrow) connected to the body. Then you will need to link the brain to the heart (tin man), and in order to show up on the mat day after day, challenge after challenge, you will need courage to overcome your fears (lion). You will travel through dark places (the haunted forest), and you will be chased by evil ways (samskaras a.k.a flying monkeys). You may even come across a field of poppies with alazya/laziness radiating from each bloom. But eventually, through the brain to the heart, and with all of your courage, you will meet the divine, (the man behind the curtain) that lives in the Emerald City. You will realize that all you had to do was tap your heels together three times and repeat: “There’s no place like OM, there’s no place like OM, there’s no place like OM”. You will then go back and live life through the heart with a smaller, gentler ego by your side. Bliss wasn’t something you had to go out and find, you just needed to go inward, it was there all along.