What I learnt from teaching
One year on with Om Improvement, I feel a sense of things having come full circle. Especially when some amongst the students I have taught have expressed an interest to learn more about yoga and how to teach yoga. I was in those shoes more than a year ago.
Nothing prepared me for the adventure that was teaching yoga and making all of my life part of yoga. There are many things I have learnt since I started on this path. Not the least are the simplicity of yoga's message and the profundity of the consequences of choosing to live in this simple way.
An experience of teaching yoga is a deep form of yoga practice for yourself as you try to epitomise the teachings. You grow so much as a person and learn to overcome fear, to keep an open mind, to live simply and in equanimity, to feel connected to all others, to give without attachment to any returns or any outcomes, to experience that the really important things in life are already in your grasp and to trust that life will always provide you with all that you need in each moment. I have never felt so nakedly exposed to life as when I started teaching fulltime. Everything I experience, good and bad are experiened directly -- I feel I'm really living!
Once you realise that there are no other reality than that which we are already experiencing in this moment -- illusions of an idealised past or a fantasied future fall away -- and you live so RICHLY within the present. I feel I am living 3 minutes in each minute -- within all the wonderful colours of each moment. Before, I always had felt somehow that I was "postponing" my life -- "I'll be finally happy when I finish this project to my satisfaction, I'll be more happy when I'm on that long awaited holiday at the end of the year, I'll someday get my own company and then I'll be able to be happily doing projects that interest and inspire me and make me lots of money! etc!"
Now, I don't know what's going to happen next. No one does! But this does not cause me too much anxiety nor excitement anymore. I know the pattern well. I'm too absorbed in the present moment! Right now, I'm happily writing what I am feeling and enjoying the delicious breezes coming from the sea, the windchime's merry tinkling, the comfort of good health.
Ultimately, the lesson of teaching for me is that there is nothing really that you can teach anyone. All that you can do is to help others uncover their own wisdom. You can help them experience the joy which is inherent within themselves and encourage them to build their confidence from this to live a cohesive, complete life -- a good, happy life -- in the present.
Om shantih shantih shantih....
Nothing prepared me for the adventure that was teaching yoga and making all of my life part of yoga. There are many things I have learnt since I started on this path. Not the least are the simplicity of yoga's message and the profundity of the consequences of choosing to live in this simple way.
An experience of teaching yoga is a deep form of yoga practice for yourself as you try to epitomise the teachings. You grow so much as a person and learn to overcome fear, to keep an open mind, to live simply and in equanimity, to feel connected to all others, to give without attachment to any returns or any outcomes, to experience that the really important things in life are already in your grasp and to trust that life will always provide you with all that you need in each moment. I have never felt so nakedly exposed to life as when I started teaching fulltime. Everything I experience, good and bad are experiened directly -- I feel I'm really living!
Once you realise that there are no other reality than that which we are already experiencing in this moment -- illusions of an idealised past or a fantasied future fall away -- and you live so RICHLY within the present. I feel I am living 3 minutes in each minute -- within all the wonderful colours of each moment. Before, I always had felt somehow that I was "postponing" my life -- "I'll be finally happy when I finish this project to my satisfaction, I'll be more happy when I'm on that long awaited holiday at the end of the year, I'll someday get my own company and then I'll be able to be happily doing projects that interest and inspire me and make me lots of money! etc!"
Now, I don't know what's going to happen next. No one does! But this does not cause me too much anxiety nor excitement anymore. I know the pattern well. I'm too absorbed in the present moment! Right now, I'm happily writing what I am feeling and enjoying the delicious breezes coming from the sea, the windchime's merry tinkling, the comfort of good health.
Ultimately, the lesson of teaching for me is that there is nothing really that you can teach anyone. All that you can do is to help others uncover their own wisdom. You can help them experience the joy which is inherent within themselves and encourage them to build their confidence from this to live a cohesive, complete life -- a good, happy life -- in the present.
Om shantih shantih shantih....
