the whole beautiful

If a yoga teacher quits doing postures and no one is witness, or if everyone is there and they shake their heads in disbelief, or if they ask for real yoga, wistfully, like the old days, and if she has students now but feels as if she has woken from a long held spell cast upon her by unknown forces and is now awake for the first time in many years, well what is she then?

From the beginning, and I started teaching yoga in the winter of 2005, I wrote vignettes captured along the way about students, coworkers, my own personal growth and practice. I was learning as I went, looking for definition, poorly equipped I think in retrospect to help people in many ways and sufficiently equipped in others. I wrote about trainings and fallings-out with employers and business challenges, keeping intermittent diaries about various confounding and often troubling aspects of the work.

It’s often a job with very little support. There are no peer reviews or supervision and likely few fellow teachers to interact with especially if you’re entirely self employed.

Most of the teachers I’ve known have had a primary earning partner and teach a handful of classes at most. Career teachers are few and far between and must now compete with a saturated market both in person and online.

This podcast tells this story in the form of essays, notes, journal entries and stories as true and accurately as I can remember. Names have been changed, identities disguised. All stories filter through individual lenses but I aim to be fair and generous in my telling and never to assume clarity where there is none.

My personal stories surely intersect and overlap with common and universal ones, capturing similar under and over tones as yours, representing archetypal themes. Ultimately we tell our stories to feel part of something. To represent and re-examine the human condition.

Yoga itself is complex and the job of contemporary teaching is also wildly varied, slippery to define, rewarding and exasperating in equal measure. There is a revolution going on right now in the field and I am only one of thousands asking probing questions of its intention, efficacy, promise, history, underpinnings and tackling the subsequent questions about where we go from here? This podcast also provides a window in my process of questioning, wrestling, exploring and discovering.