Yoga is my answer to everything. Your back hurt? ? Do you sit all day? Are you a runner? Yoga is a great way to restore, heal the body, and discover tools for being centered and balanced. This is precisely why after practicing yoga for 17 years, I decided to become a yoga teacher.
This wasn’t a decision made in haste. I started and stopped training a few years ago, while in California. For whatever reason that didn’t work out. But I recently found myself in the right place in my life to go after this dream. This time when I enrolled in yoga teacher training — a.k.a. YTT — it was with the commitment to completion.
I’m approaching the end of my first 200 hours, which is the baseline training level for YTT. And most of the time, I’ve referred to myself as in training or “becoming” a yoga teacher. But today, I am a yoga teacher.
This realization came after my second of three “practicums,” or public classes required as part of training. In the first one, I fumbled all over myself mixing up left and right, cuing people to extend through the crown of the spine. The class wasn’t horrible, but I felt very much like I was still training to become a teacher.
Things were very different during my second practicum. I was still nervous, but confident. I had been practicing and refining my sequence and I was ready to share my practice with others. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and when it was over, I felt like a professional.
I was excited.
“I’m a yoga teacher,” I said to my husband as we ate lunch.
He nodded. “You’re a yoga teacher.”
And that’s when it hit me. I only have two more weeks before the end of my 200 and I am ready. Now, all there is for me to do is teach. I might be continuing into the advanced training, but I’m ready.
I am not becoming a yoga teacher anymore. Today, I am yoga teacher.
Image credit: Steve