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The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love

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Like most people, I did not start practicing yoga with the idea that I would teach. Yoga as a practice was challenge enough. I come from a family that values intellect, a child of Japanese immigrants who use the body to cart the... See more » Like most people, I did not start practicing yoga with the idea that I would teach. Yoga as a practice was challenge enough. I come from a family that values intellect, a child of Japanese immigrants who use the body to cart the brain from place to place. Yoga was a door to experiencing my body in ways I had only vaguely sensed before, both kinesthetically and intuitively. My first two years of yoga were an emotional roller-coaster, as I foundered among feelings I hardly understood, previously buried deep in my body. I fell into teaching when a classmate of mine from the Piedmont Yoga Studio Advanced Studies program in Oakland, California, asked me to substitute teach her yoga class for six weeks. I had a lot of fun doing it, the students in the class seemed really gratefulin fact they told me I was a good teacherand this is what made me think maybe I had stumbled into something I wanted to keep doing. But teaching has not come easy. To teach yoga, you must be true to your understanding of the practice. This requires maturity, honesty, and faith. In the beginning, I parroted instructions from my teacher. As I taught more, I grew more confident, and developed a voice of my own, conducting classes with distinct narratives and themes, ranging widely in tonefrom fierce and fiery to fluid and gentle, laced with philosophy and poetry. Even now, however, I succumb to attacks of self-doubt. I go through changes in my own practice and thinking which affect my teaching. Ceaselessly, I ask myself: How do I most effectively communicate what I understand and see? To teach yoga well, you must be passionately engaged in it as a personal practice. T.K.V. Desikachar writes in Health, Healing and Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya (Aperture, 1998), "A teacher of Yoga should live a life of Yogato practice what is taught." And that, he says, is to engage in "continuous practice and self-study." Teaching yoga is a form of tapas, a discipline that requires you to live with as much integrity and compassion as you can muster. A love for yoga, and a commitment to the practice, is the first prerequisite for any yoga teacher. However, the fact that you love yoga does not mean that you should teach. A well-known yoga teacher once said to a small group of yoga students (one of whom was me) that the worst thing you could do to your yoga practice was to become a teacher. That was bad news, as I was already teaching. I believe she meant that teaching can hamper, possibly even undermine your development as a yogi. Richard Freeman, the well-known Boulder, Colorado-based Ashtanga Yoga teacher, speaks to those concerns when he states that receiving money and gaining devoted students and status can lead to the inflation of one's ego. This, in turn "...can get in the way of your own practice, which is the greatest teaching tool you have. To be a good teacher you have to teach from your experience." Thankfully, you do not have to be enlightenedyet. Desikachar writes, "Like all individuals, teachers of Yoga will exhibit every conceivable kind of personality, temperament, and human problems. They experience failed marriages, personal suffering, and stress." I teach as one person on this side of the veil speaking to another on this side of the veil. One day, I taught class while still battered by the ill effects of having downed a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream for breakfast the day before. We started quietly. As my students lay on the floor, sensing their breathing, I told them about the binge: how driven I was by craving, how dull after indulging itand how reassuring, even redemptive, it was to practice afterwards, in accordance with my body's needs. "You start where you are," I concluded, "The practice will meet you there." In the subsequent weeks, two students separately mentioned that story; it heartened them to know that I, too, was subject to such runaway hungers. If you do not think that you should be a yoga teacher because you are too old, fat, clumsy, or stiff, think again. Almost invariably, the best teachers are the ones See less »

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The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love

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