shiva tt conclusion

I have mostly completed my Shiva teacher training experience. As I expected I am walking away invigorated, excited, more in love with yoga and myself, inspired, ready to bring some of this back to my own personal yoga practice, my day to day life and to my students. I came to this training on a whim, and it was a good whim indeed. Last year I went through a bit of life changes which culminated in a pretty painful Christmas time for me. I’ve been sick a lot over the last year and I have been feeling inspired to take better care of myself on many different levels. I have been teaching yoga for just under a year and I really feel like I’ve grown as a teacher and person in this time frame. I was begining to feel bored though, with yoga, and needed a little infusion. I’m thankful I was able to make this training happen.

I wanted to articulate some thoughts about yoga, training, and life that have arisen over these ten days.

I have to send some love to Camille Thom and Baron Baptiste for creating space for me to become a yoga teacher. I feel thankful that I get to teach something I love, that I feel has practical relevance to day to day life (especially compared to teaching math, one of my past loves).

I was feeling a little relief that this training wasn’t like Baron’s boot camp I attended last year (aka the bubble), but now I realize that boot camp served it’s purpose in a different way.

There were things about it I loved, and things that didn’t resonate with me as much. I loved that we did so much yoga at Baron’s boot camp that the sequence he teaches was ingrained in my body and soul. I think that I needed a skeleton to start teaching from to help me get my teaching voice and it was pretty easy for me to teach after his training even if I was a bit robotic at first. I loved some of the personal growth exercises, I had to face myself, my lack of authentic listening, my tendency to bury the past rather than truly let it go. I loved gazing into the eye’s of every single person there.

I love the way Shiva teaches yoga in a creative, dynamic, living way. I love that I always feel so juicy, alive, happy, ecstatic after practicing with her, even if the class kicked my ass in many ways. I have been craving a little more juice in yoga, in my personal practice, and the classes I teach and she has definitely given me some great tools to create the juice. I love how intuitive her philosophy is and how it makes my heart smile. I love what she says during class. I am excited to bring some of this to my classes.

I am not even going to think about what doesn’t resonate with me from Baron or Shiva or anything else for that matter. I have decided that I will no longer say, “I don’t like …” in life. There are things that resonate with me and that I’m drawn to, and there are things that I’m not. I will focus on the things that resonate and try to find something of value in those things that don’t resonate as much.

I am a bit frustrated that I feel so out of touch with my body and what it’s saying sometimes. I have to get sick to give myself rest. I don’t want to do that anymore. I think I need more quiet in my life now than I have in the past to hear the subtle messages my body and intuition are giving me.

Some questions/thoughts to ponder:

Few of us have lost our minds, but many of us have long ago lost our bodies.
My mission in teaching yoga.
Three practical ways that I can fulfill this mission for myself.
Write down 10-20 verbs, adjectives, adverbs related to my mission. I like quasimoto land and tight hips anonymous.
You can measure strength gains in 2 weeks, but it takes much longer to measure flexibility gains.
Our goal is essential verbal queuing, more than 3 breathes and can talk more.