Yoga teacher training I

Last week I started a 200-hour Yoga teacher training course in San Francisco. It will last 10 weeks for an average of 20 hours a week, which is a part-time job as my friend Zach said to me. This training is an introduction to instructing yoga classes in the Vinyasa/Flow style, taught at the Yoga Flow group of studios in San Francisco, owned by Kathleen and Steve Holms. There are thirteen in the cohort.

We’ve been given journal prompts as part of the training; but I don’t need a prompt to journal, and yoga is commitment to one’s own duty, not someone else’s. I wanted to write about it on the blog.

When I was a kid I practiced tae kwon do with Joe Connelly in Chicago. I advanced through the examinations to the step below a black belt, but I never achieved black belt because I never committed to it fully: I compromised it too much for Science Olympiad. Then I stopped when I left Chicago for high school and never picked it up again.

One issue was that I didn’t like and wasn’t good at sparring, and tae kwon do, as a martial art, involves sparring. One could imagine other applications for the movement patterns, and the “patterns” or sequences of movements to fight imaginary enemies, entranced me the most.

That, and the repetitive exercises.

I had achieved red belt (I believe), which is two before Black belt, first degree, as he had it at his school. He invited me from the public all-levels class to the high level class, which was on a different night of the week; ideally I would attend both. But that night of the week we were doing Science Olympiad. Master Connelly: “you’d better have a time machine that’s this close to working,” and I said “we’ve got a plane that’s this close to thirty seconds of air time.” I perceived that he was satisfied, but I’m wondering now whether I misread his reaction.

During a yoga class yesterday morning with Neil at Yoga Flow, I realized that exercise has been a kind of self-harm for me. During high school, the physical work of crew was a way for me to hurt myself. I would get so angry at myself during the workouts; I would force myself to move harder and harder to keep up with people around me. The act of rowing crew is very similar to doing power cleans over and over, one every several seconds. I have tight hips and hamstrings, and at the time I made up the lack of flexion in the hip joint with the lumbar spine, reaching down and heaving up. I inadequately engaged the glutes and made up for it my applying force with the muscles around my lumbar spine.

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I miss being in high school. I really did like it there. I liked our life-style, the cohabitation, the place and facilities. I miss the faculty and staff. Even if I had made it all the way to the end and graduated with the rest of my class, I would still miss it. It would still have been over too soon.

One of the counselors was a yoga teacher, and she would do a Wednesday morning practice before class. There were never too many people; I think three was the most at one time. But when she ran the classes, I’d go. The sun wouldn’t have risen yet and it would still be the chill before dawn when I walked over to the arts building where she had the class in one of the dance studios. We passed through the gray morning light back to the dorms after class. The grass was wet and still snoozing.

When I stepped into my hostel room last night after a shower I was sent back in my mind to my dorm room in high school: similar thin carpet, light wood and black-coated metal bunk beds, slimy black foam mattresses. The window ajar looks on to the lawn outside, lit by light the sky reflected from the sun that’s already sunk beneath the horizon. It’s quiet. I smell like a soap I didn’t realize wasn’t unscented when I bought it.

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I want to teach yoga classes. I don’t have all the knowledge, and I never will; but I don’t have to be the know-all seer, I just have to suggest and enable people to learn on their own.

Yoga is also just another form of exercise and wellness. It’s a body-weight set of exercises defined by a relatively small number of named postures and the transitions between them. The breath is emphasized, both when moving and in separate breathing exercises done with the rest of the body still. We cultivate awareness of the body and breath during poses and when flowing between them.

There’s other exercise I want to do, too, and teach: Yoga, like all bodyweight exercise regimines, struggles to work the pulling muscles of the arms, shoulders, and back. That’s why bodyweight exercise routines often involve pullups: it’s difficult to engage the pulling muslces on the mat, because there’s nothing to pull. If there was a bar in the yoga studio, you bet I’d be doing dead hangs as poses.