Yes, I wrote that. It all started with a fart.
And devolved from there.
Until Monday, I was uninitiated into the zoom bomb experience. I remember hearing about it when we all first started moving our yoga classes online in 2020 but then waiting rooms and passcodes were supposed to prevent them. I don’t know if all zoom bombers disrupt the meetings they take over with poop talk but this one had a LOT to say about it. #everybodypoops
I’m embarrassed to say that it took me half an hour to figure out how to get rid of them. The first “bomb” was a fart noise in the middle of the opening meditation. I assumed that someone must have unmuted themselves inadvertently. I noted to myself that I’d need to edit it out of the recording and kept on leading the class. I mean, we’ve all either had that moment or dreaded that we might, right? No biggie. And then, the fart became something else.
I have to give lots of props to the students in class as they encouraged me to keep teaching and to just ignore them. I tried that for awhile and then the “bombing” became a constant and increasingly loud deluge of gastro-intestinal commentary and I had to stop and evacuate the bomber.
While this was all unfolding, I noticed how keyed up my nervous system got. My gut was clenched. I was not breathing even as I cued my students to do just that. I was clenching my fists while demonstrating warrior pose. I kept squeezing my eyes shut with every excremental expletive as if I could make it stop by not looking! You’d think I was actually having my own gut distress.
What I was feeling was… unsafe. I didn’t feel in control of my environment or that of the students I was trying to hold space for. And my nervous system was moving into a sympathetic response; increasing my stress hormones to ready me for attack and preservation. It may sound a little over the top but the body doesn’t always know the extent to which you are in danger and will automatically pull out all the stops to keep you safe. Has that ever happened to you?
I had also begun imagining what the students must be thinking and how the new student who’d never come to one of my classes before would, of course, NEVER come again and I would get a reputation as a teacher that couldn’t figure out technology and so on... As if this was what they would expect in all my classes and judge from that! Don’t you just love the ego? Very helpful and rational in times of stress.
And then one of my student’s very kind grandson came on the scene and said, “You’re being zoom bombed. They are pretending to be someone you know and you need to remove them from the meeting.” I literally had to chase them around the zoom room because they kept changing their name to match the name of others in the class. Finally, I “caught” them and expelled the little turd.
With agreement from the students, we finished the class. I immediately had us get down on the floor to get grounded again. We kept the breath slow and steady and focused on integrating the breath and movement together. The body loves coherence. We did some forward folds and twists which are calming to the nervous system. We stayed an extra couple of minutes in savasana to continue to digest and metabolize the experience and to let go of the waste.
Now I have a blog post full of poop puns. I guess everything came out all right in the end!
