Teacher


“There is a place where people come together to learn, to heal and find balance. A place that gives back to the community. An oasis of warmth, of sunrises and sunsets, of freedom to explore and deliver.

About a year ago, I ‘graduated’ from a 300 yoga teacher training program through a studio in my home city.  Toward the end of the training program, I found myself asking the same questions that I asked myself when I graduated from university:  "What do I know, and what will I do with this?”

At the time of graduating from university in 1996, my decision process was pretty simple. I had two children to feed and care for, and my husband was still in university himself. I had to get a job and somehow turn this Journalism degree into a mortgage payment, groceries and dance lessons.  So I set a goal of $50,000 in five years before walking across the stage to accept my degree. Thereafter I was to spend about 20 years trudging up the corporate hill of vision as a corporate strategic planner and writer.

I had more than tripled my income and raised two beautiful young women with no regrets, expect that I wish I would have lived more, worked less, or been able to find a balance of both. Then one day all that was over, and I was on a new path as an entrepreneur, with a strategy and communications consulting practice, to capitalize on 20 years of knowledge, a magazine publishing business with a vision to tell amazing stories, and a book that changes the way we look at work.

As I traversed the challenges living through and leaving behind a soul killing, six digit corporate career to find my way as a soul seeking, four digit entrepreneur, my fitness and yoga practice had become the glue that would hold me together, keep me strong and give me strength not to give up on myself . . . again.

I entered the yoga teaching training program so that I could continue to fortify my journey and my soul. I went in search of the bigger picture and the question that keeps me up at night - who am I?  My yoga practice is very introspective and personal.  It is the one place in my life that I am not a raging extrovert.  It is the one place in my life that I do not feel the need to fit in or perform.  It is the one place in my life where I feel safe.

So there we were at the final ceremony in an Indian restaurant waiting to be released into the world of those who would call themselves yoga teachers.  “Who am I?” I asked myself.  “I am a teacher? What does that mean to be a teacher?”

The term teacher means something to me.   My teachers are those who helped me find my way, who answered the questions that I had, and more importantly the questions that I didn’t know that I had.  My life teachers are those who unknowingly but willingly gave some part of themselves that I continue to carry with me to this day.

I believe that one can only be considered a “teacher” by one’s students.  A teacher gives of oneself to guide the learning of our students. It has been my experience that to find one’s yoga is to find one’s teacher.  For that reason, to be a yoga teacher bears a great responsibility to those who trust in us to be their teacher.

Our teachers addressed each of us, sharing what they thought was the defining moment of our time together.  As they went around the table, I grew more nervous.  Would he mention that fact that my sanskrit is terrible? What did I reveal unintentionally over those months? I disliked being singled out.  Who am I? What does any of this mean?

When it was my turn, my teacher said that during our time together, he often did not understand my questions, until he realized that I was asking but sharing.  He recited something I had recently written in a magazine article about the yoga studio:

“There is a place where people come together to learn, to heal and find balance. A place that gives back to the community. An oasis of warmth, of sunrises and sunsets, of freedom to explore and deliver.”

And then he said, “You will give poetry to your students. That is the kind of teacher you will be.”

I hope so.  







Comments