Look at this beautiful group of women! Can you tell how much fun we had at yoga school? This is Anna Guest-Jelley, and the students I studied with in Nashville. It was such an empowering, enlightening, humbling, and inspiring experience.
I started with a lot of fear. I actually only committed to the first module, in case I couldn’t do it. What business did I have going into yoga teacher training? I was big and slow and insecure. Why would I drive thousands of kilometers to Nashville four times and spend a week doing yoga with total strangers? I know some family and friends thought I was a bit crazy. After the first week, I drove home feeling stronger and lighter than I ever had before. I felt like I had found my people, I had found my place, my voice, my strength. It was an amazing feeling. Of course, the universe wanted to keep me grounded, and between modules one and two my knee blew up. I went very quickly from enjoying a new confidence in my body to feeling like it had completely betrayed me. A combination of arthritis, a Baker’s cyst and a small tear, left me in pain, and with a new reality of what I could and could not do. It was hard. Old doubts and insecurities started to creep into my thoughts. I seriously considered not completing teacher training. Somehow, with the support of the class and Anna, I managed to push through and keep going. I am so glad that I did. It was hard, but it was so worth it. Two years later, two years after graduating, I am teaching and finding my own yoga. Teaching was never my goal, I just wanted to learn as much as I could, and I still do. I loved opening Facebook this morning and seeing memories from so many of my fellow students. I love that we are still there to boost each other up. Grateful. Grateful. Grateful.
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I can’t wait to read Lindy West’s new book, Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, which will be released next week. As a librarian, I don’t actually buy very many books, I embrace the fact that I can borrow them from the library, and I really try to minimize my possessions. This book, however, along with Roxane Gay’s forthcoming Hunger, are books I just know I need to own. I preordered them as soon as I possibly could. While neither of these books are ‘yoga’ books, they are about self-acceptance, self-awareness, and body image. The Guardian published an excerpt from Shrill this weekend, and it has made me even more eager to get the book in my hands. It resonates with me so profoundly: “The “perfect body” is a lie. I believed in it for a long time, and I let it shape my life, and shrink it – my real life, populated by my real body.” Read the article, it is worth your time. Do NOT read the comments attached to the article, they are definitely not worth your time. Let us all go forth and live big, happy, adventurous lives. |
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