Rox Does Yoga

Yoga, Wellness, and Life

2012: Year in Preview January 8, 2012

Filed under: checking in,reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 5:03 pm
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Last week, I looked back at 2011 to assess my progress and see how far I’ve come. Now it’s time to think ahead for the new year.

I definitely want to continue to pursue my yoga, to build myself as a business, to maintain the skills and knowledge I’ve built in the past year and keep growing. Here’s what I have planned:

  • Get registered with Yoga Alliance. (I started on this, and all I need to do to finish is to scan a copy of my graduation certificate to PDF, which I can hopefully get done this week.) After registering, look into yoga teacher insurance.
  • Turn this blog into an official website with a schedule and more information about me. Start a Facebook page for RoxDoesYoga separate from my personal FB to make it easier for yoga friends and potential students to find me.
  • Keep up my ties with EEY, the yoga center where I completed my training, by attending hatha yoga class there at least once per month. I also hope to attend any special events or workshops that come up, and teach as a sub there as opportunities arise.
  • Reach out to new studios and make connections with other local yoga teachers by attending at least one new yoga class per month. I’d love to start building a new yoga community a little closer to home than EEY and look into teaching opportunities with other yoga centers.
  • Keep teaching my weekly Front Porch Yoga class for private students at my home, at least for the next few months. This class will continue to be free, since these students are my friends and their interest in yoga and continued dedication to showing up at my house has provided me with invaluable teaching experience. For now, I really want to stay in practice as a teacher and not lose my confidence, and continuing the free Front Porch class will help me do that.
  • Begin exploring other yoga teaching opportunities. This is a little more vague, since I’m not sure what’s out there. Some ideas include teaching a discounted class for my neighbors at our town community center, or seeing if the dance studio in the next town over might be interested in starting a yoga program.
  • Continue to challenge myself with reading books on yoga and meditation, with a goal of one yoga-related book per month. Contact Yoga Journal and other related magazines to look into writing book reviews for publication.
  • Maintain my personal yoga practice. My goal is to fit in some sort of practice every day, whether it’s an hour-long class or three sun salutations. I want to work on practicing pranayama and meditation daily.
  • Continue this blog by posting 2-3 times per week. I figure all the goals and plans I’ve listed here will give me plenty to write about!
  • Look into and begin researching prenatal yoga.

Yeah, prenatal yoga. Because here at the yoga blog we’re expecting a yoga baby! For me, this makes the goals above even more important. I need to keep up my personal practice to get ready for giving birth and to keep my body healthy and strong as my pregnancy progresses. I need to rededicate myself to pranayama and meditation, in preparation for the birth but also to help me become the kind of mother I want to be. And I don’t want to give up my yoga dreams in the midst of fulfilling our dream of having a child. The baby’s scheduled for a July debut, so of course these plans and goals will get sidelined for a while mid-year, but I want 2012 to be a year with room for all the dreams.

 

2011: Year in Review January 5, 2012

Filed under: checking in,reflections — R. H. Ward @ 6:47 pm
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With the new year, I always like to take a little time to consider the year that’s just passed. Most of you know that 2011 was a big year for me. I started the year with the hope that I’d look into yoga teacher training programs, maybe buy a house with my husband, and try to write more. I managed to complete all of these things.

I not only looked into teacher training programs, I found one I liked, signed up, worked hard, and graduated. This fulfilled a goal I’d had for over five years, and I feel really proud not just of graduating, but of how hard I worked in the program and how much I learned, how much I drove myself to learn and make the most of the opportunity. I managed this even while my husband and I were buying our first home, moving and settling in. This was a huge step for us as a family, and all of it – from house shopping to inspection and settlement to moving and doing yardwork and making repairs – has been exciting, sometimes difficult, and usually time consuming. Yoga teacher training and the house together made this a big, challenging, and rewarding year.

Another major part of this year has been this blog. I started the blog in March 2011 with the idea that it would give me an outlet for my writing during a period when I wouldn’t have much time for my poetry and creative work, and that it might help me keep up with my teacher training homework assignments. Since then this blog has grown, and I’ve been really happy with how it’s helped me to work through many of the issues and lessons of this past year. I never really expected that many people would read this blog, but lots of you have found me, and getting to know you has been, well, really neat. It’s meant so much to me when you tell you’re out there reading this, that my words touched you or helped you or inspired you or just made you laugh. You’ve kept me honest and dedicated when I might have slacked off. I started this blog for myself, but now it’s just as much for you. That’s pretty cool.

For the new year, WordPress sent me some interesting blog stats that I thought I’d share. I made 198 posts: almost 20 posts a month, so on average I achieved my goal of posting 3-5 times per week. This blog was viewed 11,000 times, which isn’t insane or anything but sure isn’t bad for the first year. I’m kind of fascinated that a lot of people found my blog by searching for “yoga gorilla pose”. The full report can be viewed here.

Next time, I’ll look ahead to 2012 to plan and imagine what’s next for this blog and for me, in life and in yoga.

 

Books: Karma-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda: My Response December 13, 2011

Filed under: books,reflections,yoga lifestyle,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 1:15 pm
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I recently summarized and commented on Swami Vivekananda’s book Karma-Yoga. Although the book is based on lectures given by Vivekananda over a century ago, it feels incredibly relevant and important to me today, and I wanted to comment on what touched me so much about this book and what seemed so important about Vivekananda’s words on work and duty.

First, I identify as a Karma yogini (which is why I chose this book to read rather than Vivekananda’s books on Jnana yoga or Bhakti yoga). I feel that the ideals of karma yoga that are outlined in the Bhagavad Gita are really beautifully explicated in this book; the Gita tells us to be unattached and to work without regard for the results of our actions, but Vivekananda begins to explain how we’re supposed to manage that. He sets the case for Karma yoga as the yogic path that is most accessible to anyone – a Jnana yogi has to study and use logic and intelligence, a Bhakti yogi relies on love and devotion, but a Karma yogi mostly just has to show up, and keep showing up. I have always had a high regard for the virtue of showing up, whether it’s for work, for appointments and events, for classes and study, or, on a larger level, showing up for your life. If you think about it, a lot of people don’t put in the effort to show up for life, not truly. Many people coast along, just getting by, then wake up when they’re 50 and wonder what the heck happened. A Karma yogi makes a commitment to show up every day and be truly present in the work they do.

This book gave me a way of looking at my own life that really meant a lot to me. I’ve received a lot of blessings in my life, I’ve worked really hard, and I’ve also been incredibly lucky. My life is pretty fantastic, but just like anyone, I have parts of my life that are less than ideal. This book gave me a window into how to negotiate my way through those things. For the past five years, I’ve worked in a job that I don’t particularly like. Sometimes I get angry about that, or frustrated, or all worked up; I’ve tried to combat that by reminding myself how lucky I am to have a job at all, let alone a job that pays well, with good health insurance, with colleagues that I like and respect. Reading this book has given me another way to manage my day-to-day frustrations. I’ve started trying to treat my job as my Karma-yoga duty, at least for right now. I have a family to support and a home to maintain, and it’s my duty to go to work and to do my very best while I’m there. By getting worked up and frustrated about my job, feeling trapped by my job, I’m just getting more and more attached to it. If I practice non-attachment, the work goes more quickly and it affects me less. I’m able to leave my work at the office more readily, which allows me to more fully enjoy my home life, which is what really feeds my spirit. This doesn’t mean that I give up on the dream of finding something that suits me better, but it does mean that I feel more peaceful in my day-to-day life. Feeling more peaceful means that I have more of myself to give to my family (and I whine a lot less), and I’m better able to do my work when I’m at the office.

When I read the Bhagavad Gita, I understood the concept of Karma Yoga, but it never really clicked to me how to make that an everyday part of my life. I thought of the larger scale implications of Karma Yoga, but not the small scale ones. Reading Swami Vivekananda’s book has really helped me to understand this better and to apply it to my own life. I’m only at the start of this practice, but just reading the book gave me a great sense of relief, and the lessons that Vivekananda teaches are ones that I want to cultivate.

 

December Training Weekend: Graduation Wrap-Up December 12, 2011

Filed under: reflections,teacher training,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:18 pm
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My weekend was a lot more emotional than I was expecting.

Friday night, we spent some time checking in and figuring out what had gone wrong with communication about our group’s end-of-YTT celebration. Different people had had different things in mind for our celebration, and, not knowing that the others were planning something else, moved forward with reservations and such. The spirit behind the problem wasn’t the problem: everyone just wanted to make sure that we all had a chance to celebrate together. Things just weren’t communicated as well as they needed to be, which resulted in frustration, disappointment, and hurt for a few people. We talked it all over and cleared the air, and then proceeded to plan on having modified versions of both celebrations, which was really the best of both worlds.

We then spent some time Friday night talking with N about the business end of yoga teaching: what to charge, how to charge, where to teach, what do we need to worry about in our non-compete clause, whether to register with Yoga Alliance (short answer: yes, definitely), whether to get liability insurance (again: yes, definitely), how to react to emergency situations, and other aspects of the business. This was really useful and we all had questions to ask and things we were wondering about. After Friday night’s class, several of us went next door to Sukho Thai for Celebration # 1. A few people brought wine and since the restaurant was almost empty except for us, we really had a chance to relax.

On Saturday morning, I attended the 10:30 all-levels hatha yoga class with several of my classmates (my last opportunity for complimentary yoga!). After lunch, we started on the afternoon’s classwork. First, we talked with J about some different issues with being a yoga teacher: how to react to and deal with students. J talked about his long experience in working with different students, and it was really informative. Every person brings something different to yoga class; different people want different things, and there are often students who came with a friend who don’t really want to be there at all. J talked about strategies for working with difficult students and not taking things personally. Then N arrived and we played our last Yoga Jeopardy game. J was Alex Trebek/Vanna White again, and again did a fantastic job. My team somehow ended up with all the hardest questions, but overall our group did really well and got almost all the answers right (and really, who needs to know the Sanskrit name for candle-gazing anyway?).

After Jeopardy, N and J held our graduation ceremony. It was very simple: each new teacher came up to the front of the room and had a chance to say a few words if she liked, and then N and J presented her with a certificate. We all choked up several times as each person spoke about how meaningful this training had been and how much we’d learned from each other and from N and J. After graduation, our spouses, friends, partners, and kids began to arrive for Celebration # 2. N had picked up some cookies and pound cake from Whole Foods, and we shared tea and snacks and met the people our classmates had been talking about all this time. I was still feeling really teary from graduation, so I clung onto my husband F perhaps more than necessary. We all said our goodbyes and cried some more, and then F drove me home.

When I was first planning to do a yoga teacher training, I was thinking of it as a requirement to fill, a piece of paper to achieve. I am very good at school and at filling requirements. I knew I wanted to teach yoga, and this was the credential that would allow me to do that. I was not thinking of a yoga teacher training program as a transformation or a journey. Yoga teacher training isn’t like taking a course on web design or something; it’s not just developing some specific skill. It includes that, but that’s not all it is. When I began this program in March, I was not a yoga teacher. Now I am one. The piece of paper I received this weekend isn’t what makes me a yoga teacher, it’s just a recognition of what’s happened: I am a different person now than I was ten months ago. I think this is part of why this weekend was so emotional for me. I wasn’t just receiving a certificate, I was acknowledging a major transformation in my life and the end of a process that’s meant a lot to me. This weekend also marked the beginning of something new as I look ahead to what may be next for me as a teacher. I was also saying goodbye to a group of people I’ve come to love – even though I may see them again at the yoga center, and some of them I may even see often, we won’t really be together in the same way again. These are big, emotional things.

I just want to say here that I really appreciate everything that N and J have done for us, and everything I’ve learned from my classmates. I also want to say that I appreciate all the support and love that F has given me throughout this process. He never said no, he never complained, he just made room for more (more yoga classes; more time for me to do my homework and write papers and work on the blog; more people in our house at my home yoga class every week, and even more beyond that), and he always made it a priority, because it was important to me. I feel incredibly grateful for the gift of the past ten months.

 

Graduation December 9, 2011

Filed under: checking in,reflections,teacher training,yoga,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 7:26 am
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This weekend, I’ll be graduating from my yoga teacher training program. We have a short session tonight, followed by a little party at the Thai restaurant next door to the yoga center, and then a full day tomorrow, and then I’m done! Ten months of work and learning and growing. I’m a little sad for it to end: I’ve really gotten to love my classmates, and I’ll miss seeing them all the time. I will also miss having the time set aside specifically to work on my yoga and my spirituality. (And of course I’ll miss the unlimited hatha yoga class pass that comes with the program – I’m going to have to start PAYING to go to yoga classes again!)

But I really feel like I’m ready. I’ve learned so much, and really come so far since I started training in March. I feel like I’ve gotten out of this program what I wanted to get out of it: I have the confidence to teach yoga, first of all, and most of the expertise necessary to do so, and more will come with more teaching experience. I also really wanted to explore the spiritual aspects of yoga and meditation, and this program definitely gave me the time and support I needed to do that. I’d like to look into teaching meditation on its own, actually. I think that, combining both the yoga teaching confidence and the time spent on spirituality, I’ve grown as a person and I feel much more confident and happy and comfortable in myself. That’s the sort of thing I couldn’t expect or predict, but only hope for, at the start of the training.

The ten months of this program felt like forever at times, but looking back, I’m really glad I chose such a long-term training. I’ve talked to friends who’ve had shorter training programs, and it seems like in order to get all the hours in, they have to cram a lot of information into a short amount of time. In my program, I really had a chance to absorb everything I was learning. Now it’s hard for me to separate some of the things I’ve learned or point to specific things that I learned, because it’s all a part of me. I feel like the ten months was transformative in that way: I wasn’t a yoga teacher before, and I am one now, not just because I finished a program but in some indefinable way that has to do with who I am. I’m not saying that teachers who choose short or intensive programs get less of this; I just know that if I’d done a program like that, I would still feel like I had a lot of work to do afterwards. I really wanted that spiritual growth piece in my teacher training, and you just can’t cram that into a short amount of time. (On the other hand, you can’t cram it into ten months either, and I’ll be working on my meditation practice for the rest of my life – but I feel like I have a good firm foundation to build on.)

Overall, I feel really proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’m going to enjoy the heck out of this weekend, and then do some relaxing and unwinding over the holidays, and then see what happens next.

 

November Teacher Training Weekend November 21, 2011

Filed under: reflections,teacher training,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 1:08 pm
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Sorry for the posting gap last week. I needed a little time off from the blog to recharge and deal with some non-yoga things. Now I’m planning to get right back to our regularly scheduled 3-5 posts per week!

We just had our second-to-last teacher training weekend. We’re all starting to feel a little bit sad that it’s almost over – it’s been such a journey. At the same time, I do feel ready to move on, get my certificate, and start on the next big project (because of course there are several big projects in the works). My poetry manuscript ain’t going to revise itself, nor will my poems send themselves out to journals or book contests. I’ve already learned that my house doesn’t clean itself (to my great dismay). And I’m really looking forward to reading some books that aren’t related to yoga, spirituality, or meditation. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot more yoga reading to do, and during this year my To Read list has just grown exponentially for books I want to read in this field, but I’ve done very little literary reading this year, or poetry reading, or archaeology reading, or even sci fi reading (I don’t think I’ve made any progress at all in 2011 on my “Read Everything That’s Won a Hugo Award” project). There are a lot of ways to challenge my mind, and I miss the ones I haven’t been doing.

In any case. On Friday night, we started off with a discussion with N about the Upanishads. (Haven’t posted a book review/description here yet because I’m still finishing up the Afterword.) We also did teaching practice with Kate, another teacher at the studio, and it was good to hear someone else’s voice.

On Saturday, we had our morning hatha yoga class, and then some of us went to the Thai restaurant next door for lunch, which was delicious: lemongrass soup and a spring roll and tofu pad thai. We’ve made plans to go back there for a little celebration next month after our last YTT session.

Once lunch was over, we headed back to the yoga center for some Upanishads talk with J. We covered some of the same topics that we covered with N, but J always has a different perspective, and we covered some other topics too. I’m sorry to say that I was so sleepy that I totally dozed off mid-discussion, but I don’t think anyone but Joanna really noticed, although Nancy commented later that I looked sleepy. At our mid-afternoon break, some of the girls ran across the street for coffee and picked me up a hot tea, which helped a lot.

We spent the later part of the afternoon reflecting on our teacher training journey. J asked us to think about who we were when we first started YTT nine months ago: where were we with our yoga practice, what were our hopes for what we’d get out of YTT? And then, to look at where we are now: how have we grown and changed? What’s different about our yoga practice now? And where do we see ourselves taking this in the future once YTT is over?

I really feel that I’ve changed in some subtle but important ways. My personal practice has changed greatly: as I’ve written about here before, I’m much less interested in vinyasa style yoga, doing advanced poses, and getting a great workout. I’m less interested in teaching only advanced students. I really like the slower, classical hatha that we practice, and I really want to teach beginners. In my personal life, I’ve seen a lot of changes too. Before, I struggled with a lot of fear and depression, and that’s greatly lessened for me. I feel that I’m calmer, more content, better able to roll with what life doles out. I feel a lot more comfortable living in my own skin. As for the future, I started this YTT knowing that I wanted to teach, and I still do. I feel like the next few months could bring a lot of changes for me. The simplest thing is that I’d like to find some local places besides my front porch where I could teach yoga once or twice a week. I can envision much bigger changes (like trying to teach and freelance full time), but I’m not sure what’s even possible. I know what I’d like to be possible, but I don’t know if I have the courage and drive (and time!) to make those bigger changes a reality. I’ve worked really hard this year, and I see a lot of payoff to that hard work; I need to finish up where I am right now and then see where my path takes me next.

 

Practicing Non-Violence November 11, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 1:52 pm
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I’m finding more and more that yoga philosophy is seeping into my consciousness when I’m not looking. I’ve noticed lately that I’ve become less able to deal with violence in television and movies – the images really disturb me and keep replaying themselves in my brain. For example, lately I’ve been watching the second season of Dollhouse, which is incredibly dark and violent. Usually I love any show that Joss Whedon creates (like Buffy and Firefly), but this one is really bothering me. My husband and I are also watching The Walking Dead together, a show so tense and intense and dark that I can no longer watch it at night; we’ve taken to watching last week’s episode on sunny Saturday mornings. I’ve never liked horror movies and gave up watching those a long time ago, but I never had a problem with violence before – in the past I was a fan of Dexter and thought it was great, so clearly something’s changing. I’m finding myself undecided about whether to keep watching these shows. I really want to know what happens at the end, but I don’t know if I want to keep putting myself through watching them and filling my mind with dark things that don’t need to be there.

I mentioned this issue to a friend, who told me that she’d experienced something similar after she started meditating. Now she can’t watch Law & Order: SVU anymore, among other things. I wonder if many people who begin cultivating a spiritual practice (any kind of spiritual practice) experience a change like this?

For me, I think this change is a combination of a few things. First, yoga teaches non-violence in the form of ahimsa. This isn’t just refraining from violent actions: ahimsa means keeping violence from our words, voice, and thoughts as well, and what’s more, striving to bring peace to our actions, words, and thoughts instead. Ahimsa was a major inspiration behind me becoming a vegetarian – I didn’t want to bring another creature’s suffering into my body or make that suffering a part of me. So why would I want to take suffering into my mind, even if it’s only the suffering of fictional characters?

Yoga, Hindu philsophy, and Buddhist philosophy alike all teach that we are all one – that the one truth is that we’re all part of one Self, one higher Consciousness. Our physical appearances may differ, but at root we’re all the same. When you start to absorb this philosophy, the idea of violence becomes repugnant. Any violence done by one person to another hurts not just the person on the receiving end, but the do-er as well. In fact, it hurts everybody. We’re all joined, all parts of one whole. The Upanishads emphasize this again and again. It’s a concept that can be hard to comprehend intellectually, but after a while you start to feel the truth of it.

Jesus said it too: Love thy neighbor as thyself. That simple saying is easy for schoolchildren to parrot back, but it’s hard to put into practice. When you begin to believe that we’re all brothers and sisters, that the spirit in me is the same as the spirit in you and you and you, then the love starts to come more naturally. Loving your neighbor is the same thing as loving yourself! And correspondingly, the acceptance of violence dwindles.

I think this is about where I’m at in my spiritual practice, and I think this is why it’s hard for me to watch violent shows anymore. I have four episodes of The Walking Dead left to watch, and maybe five or six episodes of Dollhouse. Part of me thinks I should stick it out, finish these shows off and then be done with violent shows. But then when I add it up, that’s a good ten more hours of watching people stab and hurt each other. I’m not sure if I’m up for that.

 

Listening Meditation October 19, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:37 pm
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In the book The Joy of Living, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche provides several different, simple meditation techniques. One of my favorites is his meditation on sound (pages 151-152).

Come to rest in a comfortable seated position as for any meditation. Let your mind rest for a few moments in a relaxed state, and then gradually allow yourself to become aware of the sounds happening near you. Depending on your location, these could be sounds like cars driving past, airplanes overhead, the hum of the refrigerator, birds chirping, or just the sound of your own heartbeat and breath. You may want to play a recording of natural sounds or some soothing music, and that’s fine too. Listen to the sounds happening around you. Don’t try to identify each sound or focus on a specific sound – just be aware of the sounds you hear without assigning meaning or value to them. Be in the present moment, cultivating “a simple, bare awareness” of each sound as it comes to you.

You may only be able to focus on the sounds around you for a few moments before your mind wanders, and that’s okay. When you catch your mind wandering, just bring it back to a calm and relaxed state again for a few moments, and then bring your awareness back to the sounds. Alternate between resting your attention on sounds and letting your mind just rest in a relaxed state.

One of the things that I find challenging about this meditation is listening to the sounds without assigning meaning to them. For example, meditating after a rainstorm, I heard the sump pump kick on in my basement. Immediately I recognized it as the sump pump and realized that water must be coming in the basement, and the fact that the pump kicked on meant that my basement would stay dry. All of that meaning occurred to me when I heard the sound. I’ll also often hear my husband moving around upstairs, and when I hear his noises, I can’t help but smile since I do kind of like him a lot. But working with this meditation, we’re trying to open our minds and listen without generating the emotional response. Building that skill fosters in a small way the sort of non-attachment that is the goal of yoga and meditation.

The monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh also writes about sound in his book Peace is Every Step. He notes that a bell is sometimes used in meditation practice, as a call to stop the mind from wandering. The sound of the bell brings you back to your true Self. Hanh suggests that any sound, even an unpleasant sound, can have the same effect if we let it. Hearing a siren, or a barking dog, or the sump pump kicking on, we can think to ourselves, “Listen! Listen! This beautiful sound brings me back to my true Self.” I love this idea. We can separate the fear, annoyance, or frustration we usually feel when we hear an unpleasant sound and instead feel peaceful. “Listen! Listen! This beautiful sound brings me back to my true Self.” I want to think that all day long.

 

Subbing at the yoga center! September 28, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 1:37 pm
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Last night N wasn’t feeling well, so she sent out a call for subs for the evening classes. I volunteered to sub for the 6:15 class. This marks the first time that people paid money for yoga taught by me! I was nervous during the afternoon, but when I thought about it, I was less nervous about actually teaching yoga than I was about the logistical things like filling out the paperwork properly and using the credit card machine and the stereo.

I arrived around 6pm and N showed me what to do: how to log the students who come in, where to put the money, how to run credit cards, how to work the stereo, and she helped me pick out music for the class. Six people came to class: one of them also teaches at EEY, a few were more experienced students I knew, and one person was brand-new. It was a smaller class, so I rolled out my mat and taught while doing poses myself, which is what N & J usually do. At my home classes I walk around more and I’m working on making adjustments to people, but last night I just wanted to give them a standard EEY class.

Overall I was pretty happy with the class I taught. Usually at home I teach a one-hour class, but classes at EEY are an hour and fifteen minutes, so I did feel like my timing was a little off: I felt like I moved faster through the standing poses than I should have and ended up with more time at the end than I wanted, so it felt like I was stretching out the seated poses. A couple of extra sun salutations would have helped a lot, I think, but we still did good seated stuff too: camel and bridge and cobbler and forward fold plus some twists. I don’t think I shorted the standing stuff, though: I was definitely sweating a bit by the end of the standing poses and some of the students seemed to be puffing a little too. (I reminded everyone to lengthen and calm the breath while we stood in mountain pose, and I immediately heard breaths calming and lengthening! It really works when you say that!)

One thing I did mess up is that I started the standing poses with the right leg stepped back, and then stepped my left leg back to mirror what the students were doing, only then I forgot I had done that and was verbally cuing the poses on the wrong side (i.e., “lift your left hand” because I was lifting my left hand, when the students were all lifting their right hands). No one seemed to get off track, though. When we started on the other side, I realized what I had done and started cuing poses as front/back instead of left/right to keep myself from getting mixed up again.

I ended class with a guided relaxation that I thought went well. I really worked on slowing it down and waiting a few breaths between lines. The class started a little late because someone needed to pay with a credit card; we ended right on time just after 7:30pm, so I guess I cut it a little short, but by that point everyone had savasanaed and was ready to go.

Since it was my first time really teaching a full class, I couldn’t help thinking, “oh god oh god they hate me”, which I am sure is not true, but it’s impossible not to think it. I had some very experienced people in the class and some who were brand new, and so I taught to the middle as best I could – I worry that the class may have been boring for some people. I hope it wasn’t, but I taught the best class I could teach, and that’s all that’s in my power to do. Teaching yoga isn’t about me: I’m not going to get feedback on my teaching at the studio the way I do from students at my home classes, because that’s not what the purpose is! The students who go to the studio are there for themselves, the same way I am when I attend classes there, and I gave them the best class I could. I know I can do better next time, but I feel good about my teaching last night and satisfied with what I did.

 

Yoga vs. Emotions September 27, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:17 pm
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In the yoga sutras, Patanjali tells us that when negative thoughts arise, positive ones should be thought of instead. Patanjali is trying to help us break the negative cycles of emotion that we all get caught in from time to time, but of course this instruction is easier said than done! This month, we’ll spend some time examining yogic strategies to overcome negative emotions.

First, let’s take a minute to consider the dominant emotions in our lives. This will be different for everyone. What strong emotions do you feel frequently? Are there any well-worn emotional paths in your mind that you find yourself going down over and over again? What emotions typically come up for you when faced with stress or unexpected difficulties – how do you react to such situations? When strong emotions come up, how do you cope with them? These questions may be difficult to answer, but spend a few minutes thinking it over. Be honest, too – don’t just think about how you wish you reacted or what you’d like to be, but think about who you actually are. It’s all in the interest of greater self-knowledge!

For me, the dominant emotions in my life tend to be anger, fear/worry, joy, and love. (Don’t forget to include the positive emotions too!) I’ll often experience all of these emotions in a short period of time: for example, walking home from work, I might worry over a future event, fearing an adverse reaction, and then invent a scenario where the worst happens and get angry at the imagined poor treatment. I do this all time (seriously, I’ve concocted whole tearful deathbed conversations when no one in my family is deathly ill and had arguments with the schoolteachers of children I don’t even have yet). When I catch myself at it, I try to turn my mind around. Pretty soon, I’m looking up at the blue sky and feeling joy about what a beautiful day it is, and then I arrive at home, where my husband is waiting to greet me, and I feel a powerful surge of love (that is, before he sends me out to mow the lawn). Of course I often experience other emotions, both positive and negative (like sadness, laziness, compassion, laughter, nervousness, relief, or many others), but these tend to be the ones that dominate my life.

When stress and unexpected difficulties arise, my instinct is usually to go on the defensive. I have to work really hard to push this instinct down, because I can come off as nasty and abrasive. I’m trying to learn to keep calm and focus on communicating about the problem – often it’s not as bad as it seemed at first! Sometimes problems come up that we can’t do anything about, and in those instances, it’s best to find a way to let go and let what happens happen. For example, my train is often late. A year or two ago when faced with a late train I would’ve been manic, worrying about being late to work or making up missed time, stressing out about getting home late. Lately, though, I find myself just sort of shrugging. The train’s late – nothing I can do to make it go faster, so why worry? The other day when my train was late I noticed a woman getting visibly upset, talking on her cell phone, obviously worrying. It made me glad I don’t put myself through that anymore – I don’t need any extra stress in my life!

When strong negative emotions come up, my usual instinct is to push them down or hide them. I don’t want to be perceived as an “angry person”, so I just won’t acknowledge that I’m angry! Yep, that really works well. I can’t do anything to move past the emotion if I don’t acknowledge I’m experiencing it. Or I might explode – doesn’t the other person see how stressed I am? Neither reaction is a productive way to handle the emotion. Deep breathing and cultivating a better consciousness of my emotions helps me to catch these strong negative emotions before I have an instinctive reaction, which allows me to choose how I handle the situation rather than letting my instincts choose for me.

What are your dominant emotions, and how do you handle them?