a 100% guaranteed wedding-free post

Starting from now and going backwards:

1. I slept all afternoon, from about 2:00 to about 5:45. I really needed a nap like that and I feel great. Well, I feel sort of great. I’m achy and painy because…

2. …I taught a double header this morning, my class at 8:30 and a class I subbed for at 10. The subbing class was a real challenge, because the class was full of stiff baby boomers and the normal class is incredibly slow and gradual and gentle and I am not particularly good at teaching either of those things. But I did my best. I was still told that I moved too fast with the transitions. This one lady came up to me after class and said I would not understand until it happened what it was like to be so stiff, because I was so limber! I showed her what my body was like before I started yoga, and secretly remembered the unending humiliation of the President’s Fitness Challenge back when I was in middle school and couldn’t reach beyond my own shins to save my goddamn life.  I mentioned this to BF when I got home and he said “Yeah, and good thing that wasn’t a formative moment or anything.” I got lots of other feedback, because I’ve learned that if there’s one thing middle-aged people like to do, it’s give advice. Most of the feedback was something along the lines of “You’re good, but you’re not our regular teacher.”

3. Class at 8:30 was pretty good. I had four people, including one older lady who had settled in to doing down dog the easy way and had to be reminded at every turn to puuuuuush back through her hips. I got feedback from one of those students that seemed a little upsetting, and I was trying not to be attached to it but BF read it a different way than me and I felt better about it. She said that I don’t always fully instruct on poses and she has to look at me sometimes to figure out what to do. This part is fine; I’m not sure that you can teach such that you’re fully instructing on every pose, or you’d be talking at the speed of light through the whole class. I will try to do better at it, though. Then she said “It certainly isn’t consistent,” and I thought she meant that my teaching wasn’t consistent, and the tone of that comment seemed much more frustrated than she seems in class, but BF said she probably meant that my error wasn’t a consistent one. That is nicer and seems likely.

I really love teaching. I don’t want to stop doing it, ever. The problem is that my home practice has totally left my life, and when I try to do it just to work on classes I need to write, I don’t get any enjoyment out of it. I need to try to get back to taking classes, which is the first step to enjoying practice again, but things have been so stressful for so long that I’ve let yoga slip away from me. I also have been (and am) so excited about teaching that my perspective on how I practice and how I ought to practice has changed. I don’t know how to get the old perspective back so I can enjoy the solitude of being inside myself as I practice again.

I’m also enjoying teaching a lot more now that I’m getting a few more students coming in. This week I had four. I’m actually worried about getting a bunch more next week from my moderate success at subbing, because the folks in the 10:00 class probably would not enjoy my class at all. I talked to BF about this when I got home, because the studio I work at has an audience of mostly baby boomers, and the yoga I teach is simply less appropriate for the majority of them. I wondered whether I should try to alter or slow down my class to accommodate them if and when they show up in my class. My feeling is no, that I should teach the class that I’m best at and that I enjoy the most, and the people who want to stay with it will stay.

I’m finally able to gather feedback forms again. I’ve taught a couple dozen classes at this point, but I haven’t been able to get the required feedback forms to submit to White Lotus to get my damned certificate, so I can actually be certified to teach yoga by the Yoga Alliance. I need twenty, and they need to come from group classes of more than 3 people, which so far I have barely taught compared to the number of classes where I had one or two people. I now have nine of these forms, two of them from today’s classes, and I am so relieved to have accelerated that, because I want my certificate! That whole aspect of my training feels unfinished, and I’m starting to feel tetchy about that, and want closure.

4. Yesterday I spent at the Thai massage workshop. I don’t know if it was my mood, or if I’m really not meant to do this program, but by the middle of the afternoon I badly wanted to go home and see BF. None of the people in the class were terribly friendly and I felt lonely. I enjoyed the information, and I sort of enjoyed the bodywork, but my partner was a massage therapist who did mostly deep tissue work so her touch was somewhat painful most of the time. The work we did on each other’s necks has made mine feel quite frail.

The subject matter was interesting, and I really liked the course leader. Like the one-credit massage course, though, it didn’t really help me decide whether I want to do the full-on workshop. I think the answer is yes, although I don’t know if I want to spend the money and the time on it in 2010. It might wait until next year, or it might wait indefinitely. I’m pretty sure that if I do get the training, I want to go back to White Lotus and take their weeklong Thai yoga therapy training. The two will go nicely together, I think, and I’ll get to go back to White Lotus.

The problem is, if I take the day option of the Thai massage training, I miss a week of work and have to commute to Arlington for a week, which SUCKS. If I take the weekend option, I miss two weeks of yoga classes, which also sucks. It’s a little thing, but that’s part of what’s keeping me from deciding, because neither option is particularly good.

5. On Friday I took the Degas to the UPS store and spent $150 to send it to my father. I put $5000 worth of insurance on it and asked the poor guy three times to be careful with it. I do not know what will happen when Dad receives it. Possibly nothing; he hasn’t written me back.

I have an empty space on my wall now. I think I’m going to have my college degree framed (finally) and hang it there. BF has his framed already and I offered him the space, but he said that it was not the lack of space that had kept him from hanging his degree up in the four years we’ve lived here together. (He didn’t have a bad time in college, but he has little pride associated with the school he went to.)

That’s all that’s happened since last we spoke. I’m going to go stick a pizza in the oven. I hope you’ve all had a wonderful weekend. I pretty much have, what with the sleep.