Yoga teacher? Why?

There is a yoga trend at the moment. Many studios offer yoga teacher training and courses to teach you how to teach yoga. I had seen these promotions for a long time until I decided to enroll. Why? Because I felt I had to learn how to explain to others the wonders I had been discovering during my yoga path. Also, I wanted to learn the expressions I could use to safely guide someone who wanted to practice yoga with me (family and friends, for example).  Ultimately, I wanted to expand my job options in the market doing something I truly enjoyed and could make a difference in people’s life. However, teaching yoga goes beyond these 3 things. During my yoga training at Samadhi yoga studios – Dublin, I discovered only the peak of the iceberg and I realised that there was (and still is) so much more underneath the practice of yoga.

Life has been teaching me that my yoga path will always be different to any other yoga path. For instance, I won’t be able to teach my yoga path to anyone. Each one of us will experience their own yoga path and awakening process in their own special way, through one or more yoga teachers signaling the beginning of that inner path (perfectly made for us by the universe). However, we will always share that mysterious energy that lies within this practice. We cannot define it in words because yoga is an abstract concept and a personal experience… but it tends to awake that same “thing” in every one of us. There is something divine in it, and as yoga teachers, we must be clear that we are only channels of something much much bigger than us. Something that we cannot fully explain in words, but sometimes begins with physical exercises and transform itself into something greater than that.

Being a certified yoga teacher gives you a tittle, and at the same time, your ego is challenged because you get a label. Being a yoga teacher becomes part of who you are. Is that even real? At what point do you really become a yoga teacher? Is it when you teach classes regularly? But what happens if you teach once in a while? or if you stop teaching because you are injured?

Yes, being a certified yoga teacher gives you a label in society, but whether you teach classes in the outside world or not, you will always be a yoga teacher as long as you continue teaching yoga to yourself (you can choose any or all the 8 limbs of yoga)… Then you become your own teacher and student at the same time, no matter where you are or what else you do for a living.

That is, to me, the beauty of what we know as yoga.

Namaste

15-minute audio recorded by Lady Jerez