Friday Morning

Well, Friday is here and it is Anne's wedding weekend. This afternoon we have the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. Tomorrow we have the Group Practice (12-2:30 at Castle Hill Annex- be there! Everyone is welcome!) and then the wedding and reception. It will be full weekend of fun. And hopefully this rain we have now will come for a while, cool everything off and then go along its merry and wet way.

So, I had a pretty uneventful day yesterday- All my usual morning practices, a nice long hip opening practice and lunch followed by some errands, a mani/pedi date with Gia and a lovely Ayurvedic dinner at home. I spent some time working on Teacher Training workbooks for future trainings and then went to bed. So in general, I am doing my best these few weeks to rest and rebuild and get all kinds of things in order because I leave town again on September 17th and I am basically gone until October 12. (I will be back for one day only- the night of YOGASM- October 7th!) Then I am gone the whole month of November and 2 weeks of December. So now is my time to catch up and get organized here at home.

So, if you want to see me, these are the weeks to do it and the last two weeks of October! Oh and the workshop with me and Noah is now open for registration so please sign up soon so we can get a sense of enrollment and I can tell Noah to go ahead and buy a plane ticket! I am so excited to be offering programs of this caliber here in Austin and I know the weekend is going to be really awesome. Noah is one of my best friends and favorite teaching partners and this will be an awesome way for us to all be together. If you want more information about Noah and his work, visit him online at www.noahmazeyoga.com.

Click here to register!

And anyone from out of town who wants to come, let me know and I can help you find local housing. And all you local teachers, please spread the word to your students and connections. I would love for this event to branch out well beyond the borders of Anusara Yoga and be a way to bring the Austin Yoga community together for heart opening asana and I need your help to make that happen.

I have lots on my mind these days relative to the world of teaching and mentoring teachers but mostly all of my musing is along the lines of the amount of time it really takes to mature and grow as a teacher. It is just not very hard anymore to become a yoga teacher. I mean, toss a rock around here in Austin, TX and its gonna land on a yoga teacher. Someone told me that Austin has more yoga teachers per capita than any other city in the country! So obviously, the challenge is not in becoming a yoga teacher. Anyone with 12 weekends free and $3000 can become a yoga teacher it seems. (Wow, sounds harsh. I am not trying to be disrespectful. I am just sayin'.)

So that being said, what seems to be a bit harder than becoming a teacher is skillfully engaging the phases of maturation and development that come after the initial foray into teacher training has been made. I mean, truth be told, 200-hours of training is the tip of the iceberg in terms of preparation. The seasoning that happens as we stay in place, nurture our students and communities and serve one another in growing beyond our patterns and perceived limits is where we really get trained. This is where I believe that we really hone this craft of teaching. And I am not sure that I people really know how long it takes. I didn't.

Once again, we see the yoga timetable of slow, reliable, steady and painstaking growth at odds with the Western consumer mindset of fast, quicker, bigger, better and easier. Seriously, I am not trying to preach here or anything. Really, I am not. I am actually saying this because no one ever told me such a thing 12 years ago when I started teaching yoga. No one ever told me that I would actually begin to feel proficient as a teacher after about a decade of doing it. I am not sure I would have found the news comforting then and perhaps someone actually did tell me just that and I was not listening. (this, in fact, is highly likely... but I digress.) Anyway, I make sure I say it to the teachers I train because it can feel so daunting to manage all the different aspects of teaching Anusara Yoga and many people feel discouraged when they are struggling in the early stages of teaching. So the real truth is that although we can train you in 200 hours but you can't necessarily do it well after that!

Anyway, my spiritual teacher always says that as a guru, he sees absolutely no need whatsoever to test his students and devotees. He says he does not need to test anybody because time will test everyone. All he does, he says, is watch for how to maximize the tests that time is already going to give his students. Time, he says, will reveal our weaknesses, our blind spots, our discipline or lack there of. It will patiently assist us in growing and strengthening our will. It will reveal to us how hard we need to work and whether or not we can go the distance and sustain our efforts beyond the immediate and initial thrills of inspiration. So that's the thing-- long standing, repetitious, devoted efforts.

So regardless of endeavor- healing, maturing, learning, teaching, loving, etc.- time just takes, well time. I know, its another blinding flash of the obvious with Christina Sell this morning.

So anyway, like that.