Feeling and Teaching

So, yesterday was the final day of the teacher training. It was beautiful and bittersweet and the gentle culmination of 10 days of experiences, feelings, and realizations for me.

I just met you, and I love you very much :)

I just feel so blessed and so incredibly grateful to have had this experience, and to have come home. Being with such honest, open loving people touched me deeply, and has begun to transform and heal some wounds and insecurities around self-consciousness, authenticity, and relationships. Thank you

I could go on and on about the changes within that have been nurtured by this experience, but that would be a different topic than what I would like to share at the moment.

The experience of the course gently nudged me toward challenging my fears and stepping out of my comfort zone. Though true on so many levels, I wanted to talk about what happened during the course as we were encouraged to share our voices and begin teaching as a group.

The first time we were asked to do this, I was somewhat terrified. Though I was in a group of supportive folks in the same relative predicament as myself, it felt more intimidating than if I were to try teaching a group of people who were actually there as "students". I think this feeling was because of the vulnerability of being in a group of my "peers" and 2 teachers, as opposed to being in the role of "teacher". Recognizing this feeling of greater vulnerability among "peers" than in the "teacher" role is something to really examine more closely because it suggests a level of comfort and security being derived from a sort of power or authority dynamic that would be present in the latter situation of teacher and student. This is potentially problematic because it is a dynamic that I have no interest in perpetuating, and want to actively work to dissolve, but that I find myself drawing some level of security from.

This tendency showed up again at the very end when Kira was suggesting that we be upfront with people that we are just starting to teach and that we will receive generosity of understanding as a result. My response, colored by my fears and assumptions, was that I figured people would be more critical if they knew you didn't have it all figured out. Not that we should pretend to know things we don't (because we shouldn't) but to put ourselves blatantly out there as "new" "inexperienced" and not really so sure--vulnerable-- strips us of some sort of authority that would protect us from people's judgments. It is really funny because I really, truly don't want that dynamic of authority or specialist, I want people to listen to themselves, not to me, but I come from a culture that values authority and specialization, and it is revealing itself as deeply imprinted, even though I consciously don't want it.

This fear of vulnerability and the idea that I need to appear as though I know enough manifests again and again in my life in different forms, and has definitely been a force keeping me in patterns and getting in the way of growth. It is something that I have been processing during the training on a different, interpersonal level which has been just incredible to watch, and without my really noticing, it was also transforming on a more gross physical level as I began to get comfortable with these issues through teaching in the group. Even though I only actually lead the group through a sequence either 2 or 3 times, the way I felt the first time versus the last was remarkable. And that final experience on the final day of the course was what I really wanted to talk about here...

I was the third person to add on to the sequence, following Wanda's opening and Joe's standing sequence. When it came to me, I wasn't sure what to do. So I paused and I waited and I got the go to do a particular sequence that I enjoy. As I started, sweeping the arms up and swan diving in, half arch, fold, half arch...I got the feeling to stay hanging in uttanasana for a bit, so I did. Then, I felt like bending a knee and grabbing that ankle with the opposite hand, stretching through the straight leg side of the body-so i did. Then I continued with the sequence, but added in arm circles in lunges and a couple of breaths of extending and folding in the pyramid and the mini pyramid (does that have a name when you fold over the front straight leg from a low lunge?) as I felt into it. Then, when I ended in dog, I found myself asking that we roll to up dog, down to the earth, into locust, then bow, back down with a thigh stretch holding the feet toward the butt, back to locust, through cobra, to extended childs stretching through the sides of the body, and rolling up, none of which I had pre-determined that we would do.

The first time I led, I just did the salutation variation that I had planned upon doing, the way I'd planned on doing it. This time, I was able to relax and listen and do what I felt. Everything that I did that was not part of the sequence or that was an embellishment on the sequence happened spontaneously in the moment without thinking ahead at all. When I was unsure, I just paused, had them pause with me in a pose, and listened and breathed, and then did as I was guided to do.

Besides this being an indication of how my comfort level had changed in regards to the earlier discussion of vulnerability with others, it really raised another point that was the original reason I set out to write this today.

During the training, Kira had encouraged us to try leading a sequence or teaching a pose without actually doing it ourselves. This was because it is harder to teach without doing it yourself, but is obviously useful if you are to be able to see what is going on in the room and respond to that. And though she said that doing it with the group is useful in the beginning, I think the encouragement was toward beginning to learn to teach it without doing it.

I feel though, that if I had not been doing it with the group today, I would have been cut off from the place I was leading from, and would instead have been leading from a somewhat intellectual place where I would have been teaching what I had planned-- and sticking to it--rather than feeling and allowing what was asking to come through.

I recognize that this would not always necessarily be the case, and that people like Kira and Uschi who have been doing this much longer are able to access that place without being in the practice physically themselves.

So the point is that it seems that doing the practice with them in the beginning can be beneficial not just because it is easier, but because it allows it to also come from a more authentic place of spontaneous flow--at least initially--at least for me.