Wednesday 14 March 2007
To teach or not to teach,
that’s the issue currently tormenting me day and night, night and day.
I had to cancel the two yoga classes I teach in the Gallery on Saturdays for 4 weeks because the space is filled with a ceramics exhibition – 25 individual, beautiful, very breakable things on plinths.
It’s been such a relief not to teach on Saturdays that I’m now realising how much stress it uploaded into my system.
When I’m not teaching, I don’t have to keep up any particular kind of yoga practice and I don’t have to feel guilty for not practising daily; I don’t have to read about yoga, or find yet another new way to say tilt the pelvis back or elevate the ribcage; I don’t have to keep up with the local yoga scene, and stay one step ahead with snazzier brochures; I don’t have to worry about who will or won’t or doesn’t turn up, and what they think of me, or what they’ll say about me; I don’t have to eat sensibly if I don’t want to (although in the 2 weeks that I haven’t been teaching I’ve risen to new heights in the healthy eating stakes – something to do with less stress=less comfort food); at last I can spend Friday nights watching movie marathons with my gorgeous daughter, hanging out and eating pizza together, bonding, sleeping over, sleeping in, then going shopping on Saturday morning; I can drop all those false notions of having to be special, pure, spiritual, compassionate, wise and all-knowing, and at last become a total nobody, reclusive, invisible, a yoga drop out, a NORMAL PERSON with nothing to live up to.
All sounds too good to be true. Could it possibly happen? Could I give up being a 'yoga teacher' after all these years? Condemn all my dedicated students to continuing their yoga journey with the deathly dry Iyengar teachers?
Hmmmmm…yes.
Yes.
That is…
until I run into my students in the street and they tell me how much they miss my classes, how much their bodies miss my classes, how they can’t wait for my classes to start again. Then I run into people who’ve only HEARD about my classes and they ask excitedly how soon they can start coming to classes and what they need to bring.
When I’m actually teaching a class, I love it. But when I’m not, I want abdication from all responsibility, release from the torment of facing my fear of ridicule and failure, to be an anonymous, free ranging, low life chicken again.
It seems cowardly to take the easy way out.
But it's taking courage to let go of what I was, and what I had, to even consider riding the strong winds of change into the unknown.
I have one week to decide.
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omg are you reading my mind? This sums up exactly how i feel :)
I taught yoga full time until about 4 months ago.. that was full time, 7 days a week, with early classes, and late classes, and a life full of sleeping/eating/breathing/thinking yoga. And it was HARD. Ppl think it's so relaxing - but teaching, yr making sure ppl aren't hurting themselves, that they're having a good time, getting things from it... I hear you.
I have dramatically cut back now and am LOVING going to classes as a student again. I still teach a few classes a week and this works well... because I actually enjoy them again, because I've got time to enjoy my own life, off the matt too.
It's all about balance - good luck with your decision.
x
I taught yoga full time until about 4 months ago.. that was full time, 7 days a week, with early classes, and late classes, and a life full of sleeping/eating/breathing/thinking yoga. And it was HARD. Ppl think it's so relaxing - but teaching, yr making sure ppl aren't hurting themselves, that they're having a good time, getting things from it... I hear you.
I have dramatically cut back now and am LOVING going to classes as a student again. I still teach a few classes a week and this works well... because I actually enjoy them again, because I've got time to enjoy my own life, off the matt too.
It's all about balance - good luck with your decision.
x
It's really interesting to get a yoga "teachers" perspective and sometimes as students, we forget that our teachers aren't super human. I hope the decision becomes easier to make during the week :-)
I hope you won't leave us guessing about your decision.
I sometimes wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew, as twice a week I scuttle from work to my class of lunch-hour yoga students. But it almost always seems, as I scuttle back to work after class, that the end is more than worth the effort (and juggling, etc.).
As you noted, the burdens seem greater when I'm not teaching than when I am. Prana, it seems, is more than just breath.
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I sometimes wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew, as twice a week I scuttle from work to my class of lunch-hour yoga students. But it almost always seems, as I scuttle back to work after class, that the end is more than worth the effort (and juggling, etc.).
As you noted, the burdens seem greater when I'm not teaching than when I am. Prana, it seems, is more than just breath.
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