After years of waiting for the right time, I have started my Yoga Teacher training (YTT). I”m studying online for my 200 hour YTT through YogaRenew
I’m on a journey and I want to share; I want to express my thoughts and feelings. I want to document my insights, wonder, joy, sadness and pain. I want to offer people a way to connect with me on something that has become an increasingly important part of my life in the past 10 years.
And, I have a confession. I feel both fear and curiosity about this training and my hope to become a yoga instructor. I feel fear and curiosity about being vulnerable with a public audience. Maybe the concerns lie in an uncertainty: do people even care? Will there be an unknown soul who resonates with my offerings? Can my journey reach someone who is hoping to learn and grow alongside me? Will my close friends even really care to know my deeper inner reflections? Is part of my fear seating in making new friends and entering a new community, growing outside of my current ones. At this moment, I do trust myself. This is a positive path to walk and my hope is that my curiosity will win out over my fear.
“While some classes flow more than others,…there is always dynamic movement that involves consciously placing the body-breath-mind in a special way. To flow we need form and a stabilizing structure. Like a river flowing from the mountains, the riverbank, the riverbed, and objects along the way channel the flow just as the flow changes the shape and conditions of that with holds it. Sometimes a powerful flow will break the banks, creating a new relationship along a different path in a way that could be a disaster or a blessing depending on what happens. Sometimes the structure is so rigid, like the concrete walls of the Los Angeles River, that the flow is constricted to a point of seeming lifelessness. With time, with evolution, a new balance is always emerging, the flow expressed in a new and wondrous ways.”
From: “Teaching Yoga / Essential Foundations and Techniques” by Mark Stephens, pg. xvii
The author, Mark Stephens, goes on to reflect upon our outer and inner teachers which are both equally important, necessary and different. I love the metaphor of the river and it’s banks, as the external and internal teachers because it resonates my own search for form to flow within. I feel that my mind and body thrive within an environment that has a deeper structure that can be revealed and articulated through study, practice and community.