The teacher vs the Yoga

Special mention to my Wednesday peeps.  Thankyou all so much for your continued support of my classes.  I've perhaps been lazy when it comes to marketing (what marketing?) but it also reflects my current position that I never started these classes with the intent to become commercially successful.  Viable? yes.  That what I do will be found to be relevant and will therefore find a home? yes.  At times I find this a difficult concept to explain to other teachers, if only because it risks coming across as patronising or condescending.  This concerns me very much when in fact I have so much respect for what they do, especially when I know they are authentic and have dedicated so much time to cultivating their own journey.

I still have no clarity as to whether teaching will become a greater part of my identity.  It remains a possibility who's time has still not come, who's time might never come, which is absolutely fine and exactly as it should be.  It's not a goal, it's a journey, like the practice, each step suggests where the next one will go and preconceptions about a long term destination will only corrupt that.

I've been exposing myself to other teachers quite a lot lately.  It continues to bring home to me that I'm unorthodox. I'm not drawn to overly technical teaching (though I can respect it in others).  I'm not drawn to the deep analysis of underlying bio-mechanics related to the Asana practice.  Yet in another sense I am, I just don't feel that engaging yoga as an academic pursuit is the right path [for me] either as a teacher or a practitioner.  I'm learning stuff about my body all the time.  I'm understanding how muscles relate and interact with each other.  I'm learning how my breath and state of mind connects in a very relevant way to my physical and mental well-being.

But to bring this type of experiential knowledge into an articulate verbal instruction set feels counter productive and anti-intuitive.  It's not how I practice, I'm not running my cognitive computer system over the poses and making sterile adjustments when I observe I'm breaking the rules.  It's working at a different level of consciousness than that.  More intimate and abstract, somehow closer to the source.  This is how I practice, this is therefore what I see and what I want to convey through my classes.  But I really have no answer to exactly how I do that, other than remove those things that I think get in the way, and whatever is left behind, that is what my classes will be.

It's not perfect.  It doesn't always go the way I would like.  I make mistakes and both physically and emotionally I pay a price.  But as long as I'm learning, the transaction is worth it.  The reward is growth and improved consciousness.