Becoming a yoga teacher – blog by Jeni
In our next few blog posts we have invited some of our previous teacher trainees to honestly talk about their experience of teacher training…first up a big thank you to Jen Hawke for sharing her thoughts below….
If they ever find a previously unseen comedy skit, by Victoria Wood, of a wannabe Yoga teacher… she will be me before training…..middle aged white female, enjoys a bit of yoga with the girls, likes the lovely stories, but doesn’t really know too much about it…but knows it feels nice, and half dreams she could do it one day.
But then I kept seeing the advert for Yoga TT In Falmouth, no need to go away from home, An instructor I knew and like, just 1 convenient weekend a month. No real excuses not to do it… I filled out the form in between doing my online food shop, sorting the packed lunches and feeding the dogs. Then quickly before I could think too much about it emailed it off.
But then I do think about it, I think a lot about it. I applied dead early which allowed plenty of time for the nerves and self doubt to kick in, fears of being the oldest, would my foggy old menopause brain manage to remember anything, just when would I fit all the study in to my life, and worrying about not being a typical ‘yogi’ although to be fair I’m still not sure exactly what that is!
Just before the start of the course, we got assigned ‘study buddies’, some one to practice with and it felt like, so you have a friend on your first day. Obviously I Facebook stalked mine as soon as I got her name…. only for her to be….a flipping ballerina AND a university lecturer….feelings of inferiority quadrupled…to be fair Amely is lush and our first meeting soon revealed all my fears were mirroring hers.
A Facebook group shortly appeared and we were all invited to join and say hi, this was brilliant as it quickly showed such a wide age range, mixture of people, and so many different lifestyles, so started to feel like I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb after all. The training starts like a punch to the belly…the first weekend was a whirlwind of learning the history of Yoga, meeting a group of new people, learning to sit down for a long time, trying to cram all that was being said into your brain, trying to remember people’s names, chanting , wtf! being told we all had to lead a chant ( holy smiley) , then at last some movement in a yoga session, before …..shit a brick…having to teach a sun sal, which is the hardest thing in the world, just give it a red hot shot was the prompt from Keren. But of all a sudden as I was fighting the urge to say ….ooh sorry, I think I made a mistake, I don’t think I’m as brave i want to be… and I’m still trying to catch my breath from the morning, when i notice someone else looking as shocked as me, I slide over and say, you ok hun? She says….umm I’m not sure…. yep, I say me too…. and we sit in silence… perhaps we will just see how tomorrow goes we agree… But that’s the thing, knowing that everyone else was also feeling like we were stood in a wind tunnel with information coming at us at a hundred miles an hour and feeling like it would never make sense, made it ok to be a tad scared.
The feeling of being in it together grew quickly and the support of each other definitely pulled us through, life long friendships most definitely made. To be fair, the pace of the weekends don’t slow down, they can’t, so much is packed in with philosophy, anatomy, alignment, practice… the weekends are not for the faint hearted. Training is full on, the need to be self disciplined regarding self study and meeting dead lines is drummed in from the beginning. But alongside the study, the practice, the reading, the homework, are 10 months of fun, smiles, memory making, creating the most special bonds with people I probably would never of met if it hadn’t been for 20 minutes of getting a bit brave and sending that email. If I could turn back the clock and do it all again..I absolutely would x
