What A Day

Wow.

Not necessarily the most profound word but it really sums up, in a nutshell, how I feel after just having completed the first component of my education as a yoga teacher, the 200 hour Teacher Training.

Yoga is something I’ve practiced for a long time, not as a main component of my daily or even weekly regime, but something I have at least been familiar with for nearly fifteen years.

I initially began a practice of weekly yoga for physical reasons: I wanted to balance out all the swimming, biking and running I did with something to help build flexibility and to strengthen the core, both of which would serve me well in my sport.

I was lucky enough to find an amazing teacher who played great music and made the class very, very enjoyable and it was with him that I practiced for years.

I was aware that there were other types of yoga but the truth is, every other class I attended felt boring.  I wasn’t getting a workout, I wasn’t sweating and therefore, I felt it was a waste of time.

Sadly, I continued to feel this way for years and  years and when I moved out of the area from where my teacher was, I was never able to find any other class as ‘fun’ as his so I let yoga slip away.

I thought about how cool his class was and realized that if there were no classes such as his, maybe I could create one.  With my background in exercise physiology and my history of sport, I felt like doing a yoga teacher training would be a perfect  fit.

And with a Yogaworks studio less than a mile from our place in NYC, the four week intensive seemed the perfect fit.

I knew it would be tough- just being back in a school type setting in and of itself is something I’m not used to, let alone having to be in the same place from 9-6 Mon-Fri as so many millions of people do.

However, I felt it was a valuable undertaking so I forged ahead and began on July 14th.

And today, four weeks later, I cannot even begin to verbalize how incredible the whole experience has been.

I  have learned so much, not just about ‘how to teach yoga’ but about yogic philosophy, about how much so many teachers I’ve taken classes with didn’t know in terms of safety and alignment and about how yoga is not just something you spend 75 minutes on a mat doing.

I’ve met some of the most amazing people, from all walks of life, all ages, genders, backgrounds, all of whom came to the training for different reasons and regardless of where they started, all left as confident teachers with a wealth of information.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of all of it was the bond the twenty two students and the three teachers all formed.

We were all there for the whole of it, day in and day out, learning as a group in a setting without so much as a mention of anything remotely competitive or negative or unfriendly.

People let down boundaries and broke barriers that had surrounded them for years and today in our closing ceremony, there wasn’t a dry eye in sight.

It’s not about any strange religion or faith or being a hippie or any of the other strange misconceptions that people may have about yoga; it’s about being present, being accepting and truly believing, as our teacher so succinctly put it, ‘there is no wrong’.

And although I initially planned on completing this training and leaving it at that, I will absolutely continue to learn as I practice and I cannot wait to begin teaching to my clients and students.

Paleo and Yoga truly do go hand and hand- even if one (yoga) is only 5,000 years old!