Hopefully a Yoga Teacher

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately that has to do with the way we eat – A few weeks ago I read a great article on Salon.com called Can we afford to eat ethically? which describes the writer’s experiment on the ability of her and her husband to eat conscientiously for a month,  on the government-defined, food-stamp minimum: $248 for two people. The results were very inspiring, especially to someone like myself, who really struggles to stay on a budget. The prospect of being frugal while eating in a way that’s healthy for myself and the environment is something that I find very exciting.

Right now I’m working my way through Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver. I’m a little late on the uptake, since I know that this book and others like it have been popular for a while, but it seems to have just recently clicked with me as a very important way of thinking about food, and something that I really want to implement in my life as best I can.

Happily, this coincides with the re-opening of the Mass Farmers Markets, which I will be visiting frequently. I also happen to be growing my own herbs and tomatoes this season. As usual, synchronicity brings these things together at once. It’s good to have something to be excited about, especially food! And I think that this helps to round out some of my experience in YTT, and trying to figure out how to be a better yogi, teacher, and person. Awareness is the name of the game, and food is no exception.

By the way, Kingsolver’s writing is as beautiful as her mission. It’s very much a meditation on eating and living in connection with the earth, community, and family. I love this passage from her chapter “Waiting for Asparagus”:

“From the outlaw harvests of my childhood, I’ve measured my years by asparagus. I sweated to dig it into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason that that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular…other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who’s to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?”

So I’ve had a few prospects for yoga teaching come up. I interviewed at a dance/body movement studio called World Rhythms, which is slated to open in July. Now I need to come up with a course description – something to entice people. I also need to pinpoint what audience I’d like to teach to. Excitement has slowly turned into dread the more that I’ve been thinking about this. Most people who want to take a yoga course there will most likely be beginners. The same with the other place I’ve been trying to get involved teaching at – the Community Boating club in Boston, which I recently joined. The idea of getting in front of people who don’t know what they are doing, and don’t even know where to begin is much more daunting than calling out poses to a bunch of people in a studio who have practiced a thousand times, and have a pretty good sense of what I’m talking about. I’m getting the feeling that it takes a more experienced and knowledgeable teacher to teach to beginners than it does to teach to experienced adults. What do they want to know about? The history, philosophy, anatomy? Do they want a fast paced challenging workout, or is it better to start very slowly and break down the poses? I might not have come back to yoga when I first started practicing, if I hadn’t felt like it was a serious physical challenge. When I first started I was mostly interested in having sore triceps the next day. Now that I’m more experienced, I’m finding so much value and meaning in refining postures in a way that is supportive physically. I want people to get into yoga, and be able to have it as a practice for the rest of their lives, to set a good foundation for a practice to grow. It’s a lot to think about. Then there’s the age of participants, which I’m allowed to specify for WR. I was inspired by Mary Kaye during TT when she talked about the influence that yoga has on kids that she teaches to, and especially pre-adolescent and adolescent girls that are struggling with body issues, social drama, and family stress. I would love to be able to have a positive impact on that age group, but I’m scared of not knowing how to treat them, instruct them in a way that’s in control but also receptive and playful. Because of these doubts, I’ve been dragging my feet on coming up with a class description, and also building up apprehension about my ability to be a teacher. It’s much easier to retreat into this without the support of weekly TT sessions, and guided push over the line of my comfort zone. Any ideas of there? Inspiration?

While reading my fellow yogi-alumni’s blog today, I noticed her post, which was all about compassion and consideration, and the ways that a lot of insight on these subjects had come together for her at once. And of course, as the Universe would have it, this synchronizes with whats been going on in my own life as well. In respect to that, I defer to A’s collection of musings on compassion. Leggo of the ego, people. Let’s all be nice to each other, for crying out loud. Everybody’s path has its own difficulties that we will never know. So assume, always, that the kindest way is the best way. And read this.

This past Sunday marked the last day of yoga teacher training. It was a very bittersweet ending to what ultimately turned out to be a great albeit challenging experience. I am now sick as a dog, my body’s final attempt to get me to slow down for the first time in two months. But for all the time I spent wishing to have my weekends and pain-free shoulders back, I found myself very sad at the prospect of not returning to the studio again for training. A fellow student had a tearful moment towards the end of the day as we sat in a circle.  “I feel like Prana is our bird’s nest and T and P are our bird parents, and now we’re 40 baby birds that have to leave the nest and flap around Cambridge looking for places to teach yoga,” she said. I feel the same way, it’s scary now to leave that comforting place that we all became used to, and have to go out into the world and figure out what to do with what we’ve learned. It’s a lot like graduating college – I have the degree, but no experience. It’s up to me now to find some creative ways to get into teaching.

That’s the challenging part, which I’ll have to work on. The laurels that I’ll rest on for now though, are this: I did it. I finally decided to quit dreaming about something and actually do it for a change. It was difficult and taxing, and brought up a lot of challenging emotions and physical stuff. But I did it, and I’m proud of that. Now it’s time to rest and get ready for the next step.

I’ve been negligent in my posting consistency, but not because of lack of action. Last weekend at teacher training was very interesting. We covered a lot of information on assisting and adjustments in poses, which I loved. It’s such an unusual experience (for someone who isn’t in a profession like massage or physical therapy) to touch people that you may not know very well in a very personal (and platonic!) way in order to make them feel better in a pose. I love being assisted in classes, and I think that most people are craving this kind of human contact that is loving and gentle and not asking for anything in return.

As part of our teacher training, we have to assist 5 hours of classes, and my first class is this evening. I’m nervous and excited to be working with people in a “real” yoga class. I’m interested to see what will happen if I come in contact with people who don’t want to be adjusted, also.

Also – we spent some time finding our Spirit Guides and Power Animals through guided meditation this past weekend. Much to the amusement of everyone I know who isn’t in the training. Silly it may sound to some, but I have been enjoying having my Power Animal tucked away in my psyche for safe-keeping, in case she needs to be called upon. She’s a snake, if you must know. And she wants me to start standing up and stop being afraid. Which is encouragement that I’ll gladly take, even if it comes from the depths of the Shaman’s underworld (you had to be there).

Only two weeks left of teacher training, and I feel like it’s been flying by now. This past weekend was a good balance of heavy and light, covering the meaning of the Yoga Sutras on Saturday, and learning how to teach yoga to kids on Sunday. The instructor was a crazy-fun kids yoga teacher named Mary Kaye. Her potty humor (i.e. open your hips and pretend to pee on a hydrant in Downward Dog) and rampant enthusiasm make her very likable and relate-able, to all age levels. She had us get in a circle and share a special talent or secret that no one knows about us. Some of the more exciting responses came from a preschool teacher who moonlights as a pin-up model for a porn site, and a classmate who can whistle with his tongue stuck out.

There’s also been lots of sharing with discussions on the transformation-through-reading-asana paper assignment. I haven’t discussed mine yet, but little by little we’ve been hearing some really personal and inspiring stories. It seems to be a pretty common thread that most of the people who have come to this training are very sensitive individuals, many of whom have had pretty traumatic experiences or hardships in the past that they’ve overcome in some way with finding the practice of yoga. I don’t know if the openness in discussing such subjects is due to the type of person who comes into a yoga teacher training. Maybe it’s just human nature to want to reveal your battle scars and victories to others, once you know that you’re in safe company. I think we’ve all been overwhelmed by this and very grateful to be able to share, and to be able to listen.

I’m happy to say that I was able to finish writing my second writing assignment, on the Yoga Sutras of Patajali, this afternoon. It’s due tomorrow, and having it off my plate of things to be stressed about is a big relief. What can I say explained by other people like Iyenger. What I’m most interested in is the way that the teachings from these texts intersect to a great extent with modern psychology and other religions. The Samadhi Pada Sutra describes the ways that the mind is clouded, lost in “samskara” which is basically a false perception, a way of having our minds’ experience that I’ve learned from this reading? A lot of it was stuff that I’ve already heard before, basically translated and clouded by the past and delusions. This sentiment is seen in the New Testament in the Corinthians passage that states, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face I shall know even as I am known.” While Christianity might see death and merging with God as the only way to see clearly, the Yoga Sutras see this merging, called Samadhi, as an earthly pursuit.

This is the goal to be obtained through the eight limbs of yoga, of which the actual physical poses are only one piece. Mediation is another big part of it all – it gives us the ability to separate from the minds’ craziness, to step back and see things more clearly as they really are. Without the veil of false beliefs that we’ve built up about ourselves, without holding onto past associations or fears. Doctors and psychologists have jumped on board with this in more recent years, this article about the benefits of meditation is one of many similar studies found in Psychology Today magazine.

It’s nice to read texts like this and be reminded that practicing yoga is really just a small part of a much bigger picture, that it’s a tool to living better, but not the end goal.

Weekend 4 completed – this is getting easier now. I don’t feel quite as much like a train wreck on Mondays, and my personal practice feels like it’s getting a little easier and lighter these days, which is nice. It occurred to me today how great it is going to feel to have the satisfaction of having completed the program in a few weeks. I did get the chance to teach this past weekend. I’m feeling a lot less nervous and crazy before each teaching session now, and a little more comfortable up there, even though I’m having trouble remembering the newly added portion of the “vanilla flow”.

I liked the feedback that I got from our teacher this past weekend – while she had some constructive criticism for me, she also said that my presence was very sweet and nurturing and motherly (she asked if I had kids! I definitely do not). These were nice things to hear, and pretty much the first positive feedback that I feel like I’ve gotten so far in the training.

Similarly, the 60 degree weather today is a nice reminder to all of us Bostonians that Spring really is on the way. It’s so nice to see people walking around with happy expressions, and easy to feel a kind of contagious excitement about the upcoming season. A little bit of encouragement goes a long way.