YOGA

It took four years, but this summer, I finally started teaching yoga. 

There’s a part of me that wants to feel ashamed that it took so long for me to find my way there – and then I remind myself of what I shared in my last post. I trust that my body and I will always arrive exactly on time.

For anyone who hasn’t been around since 2018, here’s a quick catchup: in the winter of 2018, I decided to do an intensive yoga teacher training. At the time, I was photographing and taking yoga regularly at a studio that I could walk to from my house. The decision was kind of spontaneous – I was facing spending three months of winter alone and rather than be cold and depressed, I found a yoga studio that I had been to in Tulum that was hosting a month-long teacher training in Sayulita. This was one of those serendipitous moments that I look back on and still can’t really believe that it actually worked out and I got to do it, but here we are. 

And then five months later, we moved from Annapolis to Austin. And then there was a pandemic.

I feel like I’m supposed to tell you why I’m an awesome yoga teacher and how much yoga changed my life. But what feels honest is that I don’t feel yoga has to be a lifestyle or solve all of my problems or is the secret sauce that makes me a better person in order for it to be a wildly valuable tool. And there’s an asshole voice that says I can’t be both a photographer AND a yoga teacher – I have to pick one. 

I have struggled for most of my adult life with religious trauma. There are parts of yoga that trigger that for me. And I am cautious around those parts. There are parts of yoga that I am afraid I am appropriating, being a Western white woman teaching an ancient Eastern tradition, especially by not including the religious teachings in my practice. Yoga is a process of learning for me, a place of exploration rather than expertise. It is an invitation, not a possession.

And. I believe in this practice. Long before I ever took a teacher training, I wanted to teach yoga that felt like a hug. I still marvel at the ease at which the breathing and poses and postures bring me back into my body to find peace and space and a self. Learning how to reliably come back to myself is the center of yoga for me. Yoga was the first place that gave me space to set down all of the swirling thoughts and spiraling shame that I’ve identified with and carried around for so long. I will forever remember the moment, sitting on a yoga mat, when I realized that my body is all that I truly have in the world and that we are in this thing together. Yoga has been one of the ways into trusting her.

That was the piece that I needed before I felt ready to teach. I wanted to be able to trust myself to do it, and to find a space that felt aligned with how I wanted it to feel – slow, gentle, restorative. The place part worked out better than I could have imagined. Again, it feels like I’m supposed to talk about how wonderful teaching is, but the truth is that for the first few classes I taught, preparing for them wrecked me. I wildly over-engaged and over-prepared, repeating my old pattern of not trusting my body to lead with her wisdom. Yoga is a practice of finding the space between control and surrender, but in the early days, I believed I had to memorize all of the poses and sequences and cues and control my part perfectly so that everyone in the class would be able to let go. That didn’t turn out to be true at all, and I’ve been so grateful for the people who tell me about their experience afterward – it helps so much.

The hardest parts of being new at this are beginning to wane, and now I’m facing the voice that tells me this doesn’t fit with everything else. About three months into this new adventure, I had the realization that there is a similarity between teaching yoga and taking photos, and it’s that they both rely on guiding people to move their bodies into distinct shapes. I’d actually like photo sessions to feel more like yoga, where the awareness of how the body feels is the place we focus our attention, rather than the body as an object to be seen from only the good angles. But that’s a topic that I want to explore further, and for right now, I have more questions about it than answers.

For today though, I am taking a moment to honor this journey. It was so, so slow. There were seeds that were planted that took years and months to grow – and they did eventually bloom. It was not a straight path. There were a lot of days where I legitimately questioned if I would ever teach yoga or what place its practice would come to hold in my life. For now, it is a source of joy and expansiveness to get to invite other people into their bodies with kindness and curiosity, to make space for being and openness, and I intend to stay for as long as that remains true.