Welcome to my first weekly letter on learning to practise and teach yoga.
Right now, you could be reading approximately eleventy billion yoga-related newsletters, websites, Facebook pages or Instagram accounts. Or I could be. Why add my voice to all this noise? Well, just in case…
Just in case this is the voice that happens to be one you need to hear at this moment, in order to steer you some place you hadn’t thought of going before; to reassure; to provoke, even.
Every class I go to, whether as a student or a teacher, and almost every yoga-related conversation I have, I come away with a shiny little chip of a jewel that I can add to the glittering pile I’m collecting. My collection is different to the next student’s, the next teacher’s; the way my coloured shards refract and the way I reflect them back to you might be what you need to see. (Phew, that metaphor was getting tortured. I’m really going to cringe when I read this again in a year.)
What I mean is, maybe something I’ve noticed a student do this week might connect to something I heard a teacher say a year ago, and me making that connection might resonate and help inform your own practice in some way. It might make you think twice about an assumption you hold, it could give you a thought to push back against or maybe it will just make you go, “Aha!” in recognition of experiencing something similar. I usually like to hear what other students and teachers have distilled after years on the mat. You might, too.
First: An introduction. We all have our potted stories of how we started to practice and, if we teach, how we came to teach.
I’ll start with teaching.
I started to “teach” yoga last year. (Teaching seems like the wrong word. But “guiding”, “holding space” and all those other euphemisms are even worse. Ugh.) If you had told me on January 1, 2018 that by December 31, 2018 I would be teaching studio Bikram and hot Pilates classes, and be poised to start teaching Vinyasa classes, I would have said you were freaking insane.
But in October 2017, to cut a long and boring story short, a low-level repetitive strain in my arms from typing escalated into pain that made typing 40+ hours a week as an editor impossible to continue. I panicked. I’ve written or edited all my life. What else could I do?
I had already done a 26+2 teacher training in January 2017. (I had the pain in my arms then; I thought I was doing wind-removing pose wrong. Probably, doing the yoga had been keeping the pain at bay for as long as it could.) Like many people doing teacher trainings, I was doing it to “deepen my own practice”.
Suddenly, though, teaching made sense. It didn’t involve typing! But… how? The only hot studio near home was the studio I practised at, and they didn’t need any teachers, let alone a new one with no experience.
And then I had the experience of finding an extraordinary bodyworker who healed my arms, but also seemed to bring me back into my body in such a way that I knew exactly what I needed to do, step by step, day by day, with remarkable clarity, even without knowing or really caring what the final outcome would be. It was a period of complete transformation; six years of yoga laid the groundwork, but I’d hit a plateau and without the bodywork nothing would have changed.
I dragged all the furniture out of the lounge room nobody used at home and with the indispensable help of my home studio teacher, installed mirrors and heaters to create a hot little home studio. I taught for free (I was terrible, nobody would, or should, have paid). Three times a week I managed to get four or five bodies on mats, bribing additional people with food on Saturday nights. Luckily, I had a decent side job involving typing just 10 hours a week to help continue paying the bills, and a supportive husband who took over my job in our business.
In May my studio’s owner needed a new teacher. But he needed someone who could teach more than just Bikram. I asked him what, so I could go learn it. Pilates was not a welcome answer, to be honest, but it was just a three-day training and there was a training in August in Ubud. So I promised to do it, and got the job.
I still can’t believe how things took a turn and how lucky I am to be paid to do what I absolutely love; I literally see people making these transformations every day now.
So, what? What’s in this story about me for you?
My sample size is small. It’s just me.
I’m just an example that supports the notion that the answers to a lot of our intellectual questions lie not in more intellectual somersaulting but right here, in the body. If we’re falling apart, there’s a reason for it (beyond better ergonomically designed office chairs). I wasn’t that happy just editing. My body knew it. If we can drop back into our bodies, whether through yoga or bodywork (I vote for both), then we can start to tap into our intuition and be right where we are supposed to be.
Enough about me. I loved this piece about why you should not skip savasana. It drives me nuts when students leave early or refuse to do it.
It won’t all be about me next week.
Till then, stay in that goddamn savasana.