THANKFUL FRIDAY

I hate public speaking of any kind. As soon as standing on a stage, singing or playing an instrument, stopped paying for college, I walked off the stage with a sigh of relief. I am surprised that I do not have these same feeling when I’m standing in front of a class of yoga students, but I stepped into my yoga teacher self with ease and comfort. I loved it, but I also really loved the break I gave myself from teaching after moving to Kansas City. I have been reluctant to step back into my yoga teacher self. That break gave me space to cultivate my own personal practice that was so much sweeter than the one I had before when I was teaching all the time. I did not want teaching to interfere with that and I’ve done well at keeping my set boundaries.

I’ve been teaching yoga classes at work for some time now. What started out as a last minute fill-in for another yoga teacher, turned into a regular schedule. The yoga classes I teach have morphed and changed based on requests and needs. I now teach a chair yoga class once a week. When I was first approached to change my Wednesday samatva yoga class to a chair yoga class, I said ‘yes’ immediately but was a little disappointed. I wasn’t really into the idea of teaching a chair class, but I asked for the class to remain a forty five minute class as opposed to cutting the length down to thirty minutes.

I love my chair yoga class. I didn’t think I would love teaching it as much as I do, but it is my favorite thing to teach now. My friend Melissa, who has a spinal cord injury and is wheelchair bound, comes to my class and she is a willing (Guinnea pig) participant. This class has become the most soothing class for me to teach, as well as the most challenging. I have always struggled with a forty five minute time frame for a yoga class because it never feels like I have enough time to do the poses I want to do and give my students a decent final relaxation. I do not have that problem in chair yoga. When my chair yoga students peel themselves up from a ten or fifteen minute savasana, I can feel their peace and calmness radiating from them.

This brings me joy.

I recently sat down with the director of our fitness facility, Amie, to talk about my classes and ideas for January. First, I can’t believe we are already planning for the next year. What the hell happened to this year?!? Anyway, here we are barreling right on into 2023 like a truck with no brakes. Class attendance for my Thursday evening class is pretty low to absolutely empty and I told Amie that it should probably be cut from the team. She agreed that the timing for that class just wasn’t working and then she proposed an idea of teaching a six week beginning yoga course starting on Monday evening in January. My feeling about this idea registered on my face before it really hit me in my heart because Amie said something about how my whole face lit up with excitement.

Y’all?!?! I LOVE teaching a beginning yoga series!

I think it’s because of my first yoga experience and how my practice was born from just muscling my way through class after class. Yoga teacher training was a V8 for my personal practice because I learned how to do those poses without muscling my way through it. Then I learned how to teach this to other people. This knowledge of how to teach people the safe way to get in out of yoga poses makes me want to buy the world a Coke, but instead of soda make it a yoga mat. My six week beginning yoga class is for every person who ever said to me “I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible.” It is for every person who as ever walked into a class and felt overwhelmed because they had no idea what was going or what even the teacher was saying. I could go on and on, which makes me realize just how excited I am to teach yoga again.

That’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a long time.