1
I think I’m supposed to say, “I wanted to share my love of yoga with everyone” but that wouldn’t be true. I love to teach yoga as much as I love to practice it. It’s selfish but my teaching helps my practice as much as my practice helps my teaching and I care as much about my practice as my job of teacher. I’ll think I know a pose inside and out, something I’ve been doing and teaching for years and then, a student will ask me a question about it that I can’t answer right away and I’m forced to understand the pose even more and find a better way to explain it.
There was a point in my first few years of teaching that I felt I had made a really big mistake. I wasn’t intellectually satisfied and I was starting to get bored. Luckily around that same time I started to teach workshops and make them an open forum for questions. My first workshop I think I got about thirty questions and had maybe two answers. But I took everyone’s email down, looked for the answers and wrote to each student. That was when I really started to become a teacher.
2
It’s not an easy job and I like the challenge. When I first began practicing, I remember thinking to myself, “(s)he’s just walking around the room and calling out poses, hell that’s easier than my job…”. My style of teaching is more active than my first few teachers but that’s not what makes it challenging. There’s choreography, good sequencing and, memorization all delivered with enthusiasm while paying attention to as much as you can in any given student without forgetting there are ten-60 other students in the room. There’s explaining weird things clearly and succinctly without leaving people in a pose while you’re yapping away. There’s making things interesting for experienced people while keeping things simple for beginners. There’s history, there’s philosophy, there’s a dead language, it’s awesome.
3
I started teaching before I had a formal teacher training (formal teacher training is kind of new). Now there is so much out there I think anyone who loves to practice should take a good teacher training just to learn more about yoga and just to see if there is a chance you love to teach. Teaching and practicing are two completely different things. You might not decide to teach (and if you don’t love teaching you shouldn’t) but at worst, your practice and knowledge of the practice will have expanded for the better ten fold. There are a lot of yoga teachers out there right now but there is ALWAYS room for someone who is really good at their job.