I have been a yoga teacher for eight years. I have had some exhilarating times and some heart-breaking trials. Like anything in life, my yoga practice and my teaching has had highs and lows. In the beginning, every time I taught a class, I was on cloud nine. I left the class feeling as good if not better than the students I taught. I felt exhilarated, uplifted, accomplished, and joyful. I had found my groove, my path, my calling.
I always thought that once you had found what you love to do, hardships never came again and life would be easy and uncomplicated. This is true to a degree, but doing what you love isn’t separate from life and so can’t be completely free from the challenges that naturally arise. For the first 5 years of my teaching career, I taught 1-2 classes a week as a weekend passion. Then an opportunity presented itself to open my own studio and I couldn’t resist. I went from teaching 1-2 classes a week to teaching almost 80 classes a month. In what seemed like an overnight shift, yoga became everything. Not in the way I had envisioned – the 3 hours of uninterrupted meditation each morning, strictly Ayurvedic diet, traveling to India, doing what I love kind of immersion. It ended up being grueling 14 hour days away from home, constant computer time, cleaning clogged toilets, going 2 weeks without taking a yoga class kind of immersion. It was hard, it was fun, it was gut-wrenching, and it was new.
Two years into teaching 15-20 classes every week, things had become a little less exhilarating. The joy of teaching, while still there, had become a little harder to feel. Like most things that we do repetitiously, my teaching shifted to autopilot. While this can be somewhat of a necessity to reserve our physical energy and mental fuel in stressful times and preserve our sanity when we are all too quickly depleting it – it is not the ideal place to teach from.
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