Saturday Morning

I wrote this this morning and then posted it and went on with my day. When I got home the screen said ERROR and so the post did not happen like I thought it had. OOOPS. Here is what I said this morning about yesterday. Tomorrow morning I will post again about today.

The second day of training went well. (You know it is a good day by the glazing over that was happening by 4:45! Can you say overload?! I do have this fantasy of a Teacher Training group that would met for 2 hours a week over several months rather than 30-hours in 4 days, but that is a different story.)


These trainings are intense by nature. It takes a lot for the students to have to go from listening to me, writing their own ideas, processing the information for a pose in the own bodies, articulating it to someone else, switching partners continually, and saying the same things in different ways and then going back to try out a concept in their own experience and reflecting on it. Each thing I mentioned requires a different kind of brain activity and so you have to constantly switch between certain 'intelligences". Not easy. Definitely tiring after 6 hours. And we took one lunch break midday and only one catch-a-breath break. WOW. The ability of the group to stay present and focused has increased 100-fold since the Immersions began.


We worked a lot with Instructing with the Breath and with articulating the Primary Flows yesterday. We had a brief foray into the ever-present-question of "how to teach this to people who are not young and able." I think this question gets asked in every teacher training I have ever taught and in every teacher training I have ever been in. I have yet to answer it to my own satisfaction or heard another teacher answer it very well. And in some of the videos I have seen over the years, this is a weak area of knowledge within a lot of aspiring Anusara Yoga teachers.

I actually think I am very good at breaking this stuff down and teaching it to the older, the stiffer and the not-so-young-and-able but it is hard to communicate all of what is involved with that in a few short sentences or in a brief summary. So I often get frustrated- not because people want to know this information or because they asked. That makes sense to me and I want them to know and I want them to ask. I get frustrated because I feel like my answer always is short of actually being helpful or in anyway preparing people to actually shift into really understanding "how to keep this basic, simple, safe and accessible."


Partly I think it is because the forum of TT is a limited forum to convey all that is involved. And most of what I have learned about that aspect of teaching and continue to learn has been taught to me a little at a time in classes (largely in the Iyengar Yoga School) and workshops and through trial and error with my own students, seeing what works and what doesn't work. It is a funny thing because a lot of that is outside the scope of a Level One Teacher Training and yet it is the questions that everyone has when they come to Level One Teacher Training and what they need to know to begin teaching Anusara Yoga.


So I want to do a lot of that in our Sequencing workshop in July. How to explore sequencing and class planning for different levels and populations. But also the thing is that Level One is still really about making a good basic Pound Cake. Good articulation is like the butter. You have to have that completely "in your mixing bowl" no matter how you are going to apply the method to any population. And it is these articulation skills that we practice in Level One. So there is more that could be said on all of that (And will continue to be said.) Also I think this is why John is making the standard for Level One TT curriculum 100 hours rather than 30 hours at this point! There is just a lot that needs to be covered.

One fun thing this weekend that I have done is take a few yoga classes after we are done. Mopac is so busy at 6:00 that if I was to drive home right after class I would easily sit in traffic for over an hour. So I decided to take Sanieh's 6:00 Flow on Thursday and I took Eriko's 6:00 Ashtanga class last night. I enjoyed both classes a lot. (And I clasped in M-4 last night that and garbha pindasana is a whole other pose when you are drenched in sweat. I have never been able to do it and I realized last night is it not because my leg muscles are so bulky like I have always thought but because I have never been sweaty enough!) I particularly enjoyed both teacher's teaching presence and obvious dedication to their method. It was fun going from deep Anusara Yoga Land into these other classes and systems. Nice exercise in contrast. And thanks to Brent last night for coming with me to class and Kim, Jill and Brent for coming on Thursday.


Okay then- see everyone soon.