Teaching!

Hello, my little chillens. I am back on the West Coast, which, you will note, rhymes with Best Coast. Low humidity. I'm just sayin'.

I am back at the office, too, working on an hourly basis. My boss is very, very cool, yo. He lets me take a 5-week hiatus. He lets me come back to work hourly and take time off as needed to teach yoga (or...whatev.) And work is a ten-minute walk from my beloved yoga studio, where I just taught my first of three Bikram classes between now and Aug. 15. Truly, I am blessed! Now frankly I'd like to be working at the office a little less and whipping up business cards and marketing myself to various yoga-friendly establishments a little MORE. But as the blues man says, I need some money.

So, this morning I taught my first yoga class since I've been back. I walked down to the studio and was a skoch late since I started talking to a guy who was out on the sidewalk practicing his golf swing. He's just visiting but I gave him information about the studio. His golf club back in Texas has Yoga for Golfers classes-ding ding ding!

The first challenge was getting the studio open. Since it's a small studio they don't keep it open all day, and I arrive a half-hour before to open it up and start up the heat. They just changed the code on the key safe so I spent ten minutes trying to get that open. Turns out I'd heard Camille wrong when she said the code. It was a V not a B! That was really the hardest part.

I taught the Bikram sequence, but the studio owner told me to teach the poses as I see fit, from the heart. Which is good. I felt very confident going into it. It was a small class--4 people--no beginners and all had been coming for at least two months. They were awesome! And even reminded me when I started to skip Standing Separate Leg Forehead to Knee. I, however, felt weak in the voice, and just couldn't find my words! Lots and lots for me to work on. I wasn't really NERVOUS except when I stumbled. Annoyingly, what came out of my mouth was often what I'd heard Camille say in her class yesterday, which is not what I authentically want to say. I'm going to study by saying the cues out loud, and I might even record myself and make myself a CD to listen to in the car, so I can really internalize the Barkan cues. They're there, they're just hiding in my brain, short-wired by the pressure of being up in front of the class. I couldn't help playing a little bit, and did a variation on Tuladandasana (Balancing Staff Pose,) second set. I also paced back and forth a LOT and never stood to the side or in front of the class. Sigh.

No feedback from the two women students, I got a smile and a "thank you, that was a good class" from the two men.

The second hardest part was walking home and thinking of all the things I COULD have said, how I'd like to plan and direct the energy of the class better with my voice. It's all uphill from here! Overall, I'm not being too self-critical. I know my training will continue to come out, and my students are great teachers. (When I was taking too much time getting them into the pose, it was pretty obvious, for example.)

I had a comment recently asking why I went all the way to Florida to train to be a yoga teacher. Good question! There are, of course, wonderful training programs here in Seattle, and other places closer to me. But I love hot yoga, it's what I love to practice, it healed my spine, it's what I have personally experienced and so that's what I wanted to teach initially. There are NOT a lot of hot yoga teacher training programs--the main one, of course, being Bikram's 9-week program in LA. I decided that wasn't a good choice for me. (I can go into why if anyone's interested.) I looked into one other, in Portland, CorePower, but their schedule is really oriented to those who live in Portland, and I just got a good feeling from the Barkan Method website and a previous graduate of the program. And, as you can hopefully see from previous posts, it was an incredible program! Definitely the right place for me. Oh, I miss it--I miss LEARNING and I miss practicing twice a day. (Don't miss South Fla, obv.)

Down the road, I plan to get more training, in Barkan Method Level II, which is Vinyasa, and possibly prenatal yoga. And I'll see where it goes from there. I hope I'll have lots more entries in the coming weeks as I find places to teach. I work every day on cultivating a positive intention for teaching yoga, and let that be my starting point.