Signing up for a Yoga Teacher Training was a bit of a Fuck it, why not? moment. I played it in my head: [Hey Val, what do you do for a living?] I'm a Yoga teacher! Sounded good to me!
I've been a director of an environmental NGO for over a decade. Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, some days I love ranting on about it, other days I feel like an oyster sprayed with lemon juice. Here's what happens:
1) Er... nope I don't hug trees for a living. [What about the plastic issue?] Well there's a lot to do already with trees... [Isn't the Congo dangerous?] hmm, less than drinking too many G&Ts. [Have you met Greta?] ... [what about saving whales?...] etc, etc. As grateful as I am to have a funky job, I sometimes need to take a break from talking about it. Just like a doctor asked how to sort someone's piles at a Christmas do, or a binman about the worst smell of last week's trash.
or....
2) I lie bluntly and say I'm an accountant. This one is brilliant to get the conversation moving quickly on to other topics. To be fair, I'm not sure why because Oh, the buzz one gets when figures add up after a week slogging through ten dynamic worksheets reporting for five country projects in seven different currencies!
or....
3) More often than not I huff and puff pfff Ummm onpfff fff grumff hmmm (grumbling comes naturally to French people)... dont' ask, bad day... but hey, what do YOU do?
On top of this, checking requirements for an Australia work visa some time ago I was interested to see that being a director gives you 0 skills points whereas a plumber gets the maximum. Practically, I do agree with this. How nice would it be to have a proper job? Something that could be directly useful to a living person in front of me, not just nebulously, 'the world'?
Facebook algorythms sensed my glum pre-menopausal mood and put the YOGABODY® TEACHERS COLLEGE Trapeze Teaching Course in my feed. Possibly because of my profile picture upside down from my breakdancing days, but also because of exponential clicks on yoga related things. How did I get to Yoga in the first place? Partially because there is only so long you can throw yourself on the floor pretending you're in the 80s without seriously injuring yourself, then thing starts to hurt. Really hurt, everywhere...
But what really got me to yoga was plunging over a cliff during an off-road motorbike trip in Spain which now bears my name and shame forever. An Aloe Vera saved my life by stopping the bike from falling over my head but I injured my shoulder badly when I flipped over and crash-landed on rocks. I had this stereotype idea of yoga being about hippies chanting and stretching, yet more and more people were saying how much it had healed and strengthened their body. It seemed logical as a last resort attempt to help sort out my shoulder after 5 years of failed physio and strength building. The extra pull factor was the HotPod. Yes, HOT! In Cambridge! Best way to defrost when you live here.
Then, yoga did its magic. Yes great stretch, but also more strength, joints unlocked, less pain, no chanting, skilled teachers, soothing music and welcome darkness so noone could see I had no idea what I was doing... Floaty feeling coming out of the pod, I completely fell in love with this fitness 'yoga no dogma'. I started going 3, then 4 times a week, then at home too, and felt so much better, mind and body...
Still, after clicking on the Trapeze course ad, I'm not quite sure how my mind jumped from Oh that's cool, perhaps I could sign up to a 50 hours Yoga Trapeze training course to Hey, why not sign up to the full 200 hours YOGABODY Yoga Teacher Training course in Barcelona! Must have been one of those dangerous G&Ts. Or perhaps just how thorough and interesting the training seemed. Suddenly it seemed like a good idea, a brilliant idea even, and BAM, life plans changed.
After months of online training on anatomy, yoga postures, teaching skills, history of yoga, I am just back from the first teaching immersion in sunny Barcelona with a group of amazing and supportive trainees from all over the world and fantastic inspiring teachers. I'm catching up with the 'other' work, and flopping on my sofa to recover from the intense mental and physical training we just received. Stay with me for the write-up of how that went, especially if you're thinking this could be something you'd like to do but think you can't, you should but you shouldn't.
I'd say why not, yes you can!