First step

I taught my first yoga class Thursday night. Even though I had anxiety tummy all day, I was not overly hyping it up in my head. My thoughts were these:

1. It does not have to be the greatest yoga class ever
2. I just really don't want anyone to be injured
3. There is something "more" that isn't quite there yet, and the only way to figure it out is to teach. So enough already, start teaching.

And just like that, an opportunity came up to fill in as a volunteer teacher for a group organized through Americorps for people without health insurance. I am both an Americorps grant recipient (paid off my expensive grad school degree!) and a person who doesn't always have health insurance. Plus the class was 10 minutes from both work and home.

I got there early, did the aura kriya, had my usual when-are-they-coming am-I-in-the-right-place-even-though-I-asked-and-was-told-it-is-in-this-room head thoughts, meditated, and the volunteers showed up. Granted I only had 4 students, but that's a good number, sufficient to watch and see what they're doing.

It was a little not-real, in that it was in a cafeteria. So it didn't feel yoga-ish. They didn't say "namaste" back to me, but then, why would they. Still. They did good work, didn't get hurt, and even though I forgot about 5 minutes of my sequence (It was right on the floor next to me, but I was looking at my students, not my notebook, which is probably how it should be if a choice has to be made) and wondered why my class ran so short, they'll never know that I left something out.

What I understand from my first "real" class is that there is a continuum. That I have started on this journey. That I have made the leap from yoga-teacher-trainee to beginning yoga teacher, and that it's only going to get better, more natural, and more me from here.  The only way to do it is to do it.

By Ciro Duran from Caracas, Venezuela (Master Yoda) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons