Helping people find True Will; part of teaching Bikram Yoga
Brilliant contrasts in my life at the moment. I can’t say I mind it. I have my city job, tech support. I have my Yoga Teaching, healing and connection to my fellow humans. Both are about connection - and yet one feels pretty disconnected until you put my personality into it. I think city government has its share of disconnection. Or maybe that’s how I feel about all the changes happening here at the city. A lot of disconnection… Stressful times here, I can’t deny - and my department isn’t even under the heat. I think it is the fact there is a new city administrator and he has now begun implementing changes that a massive 1 year long brainstorming session has brought to him.
I want to be here, that is certain. I’ll continue to roll with the intuitive sense that has given me everything, and I mean everything - I needed in the right time. I’m just here to say it’s a little bit of a stressful time to be an employee here. Layoffs, people butting their heads’ into different places, cut throat “I’m important, look at why,”s all over. That’s all I will say on this, specifically. And I feel it. I go all over the city; I touch every department in my work. I like it that way - a lot, but sometimes it has its downsides.
Drama and relentlessness. I have been here 10 years now.
When I leave and go directly to teach some yoga - it amazes me the feelings I have. Starkly contrasting. Maybe that’s where the contrast is. I just love how it feels to connect with students and I love how when I have a rough day at Issaquah, it turns around the moment I step off the podium from teaching. It erases everything, resets everything - even if the things that come out of my mouth aren’t as smooth as they could be, I find myself smiling anyway and not taking a single thing seriously - as long as my students get their yoga and I am doing my best, that is enough to make me smile, to make me relax. It takes energy, definitely - but it’s a labor of love. And when I say a labor of love, I mean all dimensions of this. There’s not quite a way to put it into words.
I’ve taught quite a few classes now - not quite as much as the full time teachers who came down from my training - but more than some of my fellow trainees also.
I’m accepting myself as a teacher and what I have to offer and my personality that shines through the dialogue and the methods that work for me when I am up there. Maybe sometimes I lose the words at times, but most of the time I find I step up there and the dialogue is behind me, ushering me forward and giving me just what I need to give my students what they need.
I love it, I love it, I love it.
This even so - I am not particularly keen on the notion of leaving my position at the City for this job. It is not the path for me right now - if ever. A lot of people think it must be all or nothing. I know I went to a more than average intensive training to do this. This was for me, and also for my students. Weekend certifications linger all over, but what good is something that you don’t work for? HIGHEST LEVEL OF QUALIFICATION - is key for me. And an actual Yoga lineage.
I can say with utmost certainty I worked harder than I’ve worked for anything to get this Bikram Yoga Teaching Certification. I gave more sweat, tears, ups and downs, self realization moments than anything else I’ve ever tried to do. I gave more of my personal time and cash, disconnection from my whole universe… I kept a few threads of ties back home, but for the most part I did allow myself the immersion of the YogaPlanet that Bikram, Rajashree, Emmy, and his staff creates at every training.
So while I did this, and it’s unusual - it was never the idea for sure to leave my day job and go do this. Do I want to drive all over this area to catch classes at 5 different studios, push push push to make it happen and earn 1/3 busting my ass doing that - 1/3 of my income than I do here? I learned for the first time ever the “push, push, push” element of life flow, is not the same as pushing in Camel pose. At all. Or would I rather be busy in the happiest, predictable ways - earning even more money than I would at Issy alone - helping me recoup the financial burden that going to training did pose? Pardon the pun there.
No, the Karma Yoga aspect of teaching without feeling I must rely on it for full time income really takes a lot of pressure off in certain aspects - and is in alignment with what I want to do right now. And in other aspects, it creates more for obvious 1.5 jobs reasons. But then again - envision that I have now diversified my skill-sets and this is one more piece of insurance for the rest of my life I carry. I have another skill outside of IT should I ever need to make it on that alone. It’s not about leaving the IT industry… it’s not about sticking with it… it’s just about taking myself where I feel is right, and right now everything is happening Right for me.
I’ve invested a long time waiting for shit to align. It was in 2007 when I first started feeling like shit fell apart and needed a course correction. So I thought I would train to enter police academy. I gave this my 120% effort. Until in 2008, early - right before I went to test and would have passed because I was a fucking workout machine (in every way you can imagine, seriously - fuck modesty, I had it going on) - the knee injury happened. April 2008. This changed everything. The real course redirection happened. 2 years of holding pattern, frustration, very slow and steady shifts that would one day take me to the notion that I should give up on later going to teacher training. Only for 2011 to come along and blow me out of the water with the opportunity of 10 years vacation time and the off chance my boss APPROVED and his bosses - the vacation from the last 10 years remaining on the books - to be taken at once, giving me the open and clear way to head to Teacher Training Fall 2011.
Now everything is referenced - as before TT Fall 2011, and After. Well! I’ll be damned!!! Rather, Blessed.
So my course re directions kept me here at Issaquah and I had no idea why, for a long time. Hind-sight, sitting in a hotel room (room 453, Radisson LAX, to be precise) I pieced together some mysteries that eluded me for months and months and maybe painstaking weeks in the years prior.
I’ve learned from this. Things are how they are sometimes - to set you up for a better deal than you could have imagined. I don’t fight for shit, but work with the flow and push at the right times, now.
Some of my friends at TT bitched and moaned, but I was just in awe of what was happening to me, in spite of some of the worst moments of TT. There were some hum-dinger shitty moments, and without my external threads, the support networks, I might have literally gone insane. Flying Jim in for weekend #4, I think it was… who knows. It was well worth the cash to do that.
At times I wish I hadn’t been so hard on myself during the TT process. At times I wish I really knew how to let things go and stop worrying about how fast everyone else learned and how slow I learned… but hey, that’s a major issue I have.
I think I’m slower than everyone else. But I have some shit together and I can’t complain and now I’m a teacher and people thank me and smile on their way out the door from my class with genuine appreciation behind those smiles. I’m changing lives through bringing the yoga to people so they can change their lives through their own practices.
This is why I wanted to become a teacher. And I’m doing it.
Maybe that’s why I feel so much joy - I know I’m doing what I wanted to do, the underlying alignment behind it all. I’m growing, myself - the whole time and I can’t help it. I love being around people, I love talking to people, working with people. Sometimes people hurt me, a lot - because I care so much about people. I’m not one of these folks doing the Yoga Teaching for my aggrandizement … it’s a form of generosity that I specifically feel is my Karma Yoga.
The generosity of Bikram Yoga is that it frees people up to live their True Will, as I see it. It’s 110% this. And if standing up and giving people my energy with the dialogue and my heart with the dialogue is how I can affect people to reach their True Will………..
This is what makes me so very happy.
-Angela
I want to be here, that is certain. I’ll continue to roll with the intuitive sense that has given me everything, and I mean everything - I needed in the right time. I’m just here to say it’s a little bit of a stressful time to be an employee here. Layoffs, people butting their heads’ into different places, cut throat “I’m important, look at why,”s all over. That’s all I will say on this, specifically. And I feel it. I go all over the city; I touch every department in my work. I like it that way - a lot, but sometimes it has its downsides.
Drama and relentlessness. I have been here 10 years now.
When I leave and go directly to teach some yoga - it amazes me the feelings I have. Starkly contrasting. Maybe that’s where the contrast is. I just love how it feels to connect with students and I love how when I have a rough day at Issaquah, it turns around the moment I step off the podium from teaching. It erases everything, resets everything - even if the things that come out of my mouth aren’t as smooth as they could be, I find myself smiling anyway and not taking a single thing seriously - as long as my students get their yoga and I am doing my best, that is enough to make me smile, to make me relax. It takes energy, definitely - but it’s a labor of love. And when I say a labor of love, I mean all dimensions of this. There’s not quite a way to put it into words.
I’ve taught quite a few classes now - not quite as much as the full time teachers who came down from my training - but more than some of my fellow trainees also.
I’m accepting myself as a teacher and what I have to offer and my personality that shines through the dialogue and the methods that work for me when I am up there. Maybe sometimes I lose the words at times, but most of the time I find I step up there and the dialogue is behind me, ushering me forward and giving me just what I need to give my students what they need.
I love it, I love it, I love it.
This even so - I am not particularly keen on the notion of leaving my position at the City for this job. It is not the path for me right now - if ever. A lot of people think it must be all or nothing. I know I went to a more than average intensive training to do this. This was for me, and also for my students. Weekend certifications linger all over, but what good is something that you don’t work for? HIGHEST LEVEL OF QUALIFICATION - is key for me. And an actual Yoga lineage.
I can say with utmost certainty I worked harder than I’ve worked for anything to get this Bikram Yoga Teaching Certification. I gave more sweat, tears, ups and downs, self realization moments than anything else I’ve ever tried to do. I gave more of my personal time and cash, disconnection from my whole universe… I kept a few threads of ties back home, but for the most part I did allow myself the immersion of the YogaPlanet that Bikram, Rajashree, Emmy, and his staff creates at every training.
So while I did this, and it’s unusual - it was never the idea for sure to leave my day job and go do this. Do I want to drive all over this area to catch classes at 5 different studios, push push push to make it happen and earn 1/3 busting my ass doing that - 1/3 of my income than I do here? I learned for the first time ever the “push, push, push” element of life flow, is not the same as pushing in Camel pose. At all. Or would I rather be busy in the happiest, predictable ways - earning even more money than I would at Issy alone - helping me recoup the financial burden that going to training did pose? Pardon the pun there.
No, the Karma Yoga aspect of teaching without feeling I must rely on it for full time income really takes a lot of pressure off in certain aspects - and is in alignment with what I want to do right now. And in other aspects, it creates more for obvious 1.5 jobs reasons. But then again - envision that I have now diversified my skill-sets and this is one more piece of insurance for the rest of my life I carry. I have another skill outside of IT should I ever need to make it on that alone. It’s not about leaving the IT industry… it’s not about sticking with it… it’s just about taking myself where I feel is right, and right now everything is happening Right for me.
I’ve invested a long time waiting for shit to align. It was in 2007 when I first started feeling like shit fell apart and needed a course correction. So I thought I would train to enter police academy. I gave this my 120% effort. Until in 2008, early - right before I went to test and would have passed because I was a fucking workout machine (in every way you can imagine, seriously - fuck modesty, I had it going on) - the knee injury happened. April 2008. This changed everything. The real course redirection happened. 2 years of holding pattern, frustration, very slow and steady shifts that would one day take me to the notion that I should give up on later going to teacher training. Only for 2011 to come along and blow me out of the water with the opportunity of 10 years vacation time and the off chance my boss APPROVED and his bosses - the vacation from the last 10 years remaining on the books - to be taken at once, giving me the open and clear way to head to Teacher Training Fall 2011.
Now everything is referenced - as before TT Fall 2011, and After. Well! I’ll be damned!!! Rather, Blessed.
So my course re directions kept me here at Issaquah and I had no idea why, for a long time. Hind-sight, sitting in a hotel room (room 453, Radisson LAX, to be precise) I pieced together some mysteries that eluded me for months and months and maybe painstaking weeks in the years prior.
I’ve learned from this. Things are how they are sometimes - to set you up for a better deal than you could have imagined. I don’t fight for shit, but work with the flow and push at the right times, now.
Some of my friends at TT bitched and moaned, but I was just in awe of what was happening to me, in spite of some of the worst moments of TT. There were some hum-dinger shitty moments, and without my external threads, the support networks, I might have literally gone insane. Flying Jim in for weekend #4, I think it was… who knows. It was well worth the cash to do that.
At times I wish I hadn’t been so hard on myself during the TT process. At times I wish I really knew how to let things go and stop worrying about how fast everyone else learned and how slow I learned… but hey, that’s a major issue I have.
I think I’m slower than everyone else. But I have some shit together and I can’t complain and now I’m a teacher and people thank me and smile on their way out the door from my class with genuine appreciation behind those smiles. I’m changing lives through bringing the yoga to people so they can change their lives through their own practices.
This is why I wanted to become a teacher. And I’m doing it.
Maybe that’s why I feel so much joy - I know I’m doing what I wanted to do, the underlying alignment behind it all. I’m growing, myself - the whole time and I can’t help it. I love being around people, I love talking to people, working with people. Sometimes people hurt me, a lot - because I care so much about people. I’m not one of these folks doing the Yoga Teaching for my aggrandizement … it’s a form of generosity that I specifically feel is my Karma Yoga.
The generosity of Bikram Yoga is that it frees people up to live their True Will, as I see it. It’s 110% this. And if standing up and giving people my energy with the dialogue and my heart with the dialogue is how I can affect people to reach their True Will………..
This is what makes me so very happy.
-Angela