yoga teaching reality check

Last night I saw one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, bar none. It was an enormous, bleached-white fluffy cloud, which against the navy blue sky already looked bizarre and Photoshopped. But the cloud was full of lightning. It kept appearing under the folds and seams of the cloud, skittering above the outside edges, lighting it up within and without. It was so marvelous, and it was exactly the kind of thing you couldn’t capture on film without a world-class photographer. I called BF excitedly on my way home from class, telling him to go out and look at it, which he did. The show was still going on when I pulled into my driveway, so we leaned against his car outside and watched it for about 10 minutes. I didn’t really want to go inside, to tell you the truth. Truly remarkable.

Last night I taught at 7:40, and before class started, I called BF to whine. I really am not enjoying this class, as I told him. It’s not working for me to teach so late, and to teach classes straight from Thursday to Sunday every week. I’m having a few different sources of conflict with this teaching thing: 1) I feel like I am complaining too much, comparatively, because in reality teaching does not take up very many hours in my week; 2) I feel like I am complaining too much, because after all this was what I wanted; 3) I don’t know why I am so reluctant to teach, when after all this was what I wanted; and 4) most problematically, I have totally lost track of what my goals are in teaching yoga, and indeed in doing yoga, in the first place.

1) I teach four classes a week, with a fifth class on Saturdays once a month. (July was funky because I taught at Lululemon for three Saturdays, with a bonus class thanks to my studio’s not getting their ducks in a row.) Thursday is an active class, 60 minutes. Friday is a restorative class, 60 minutes. The once-a-month Saturday is a semi-active class, 60 minutes. Sunday morning’s is an active class, 75 minutes, and Sunday afternoon’s is a slow class, 60-75 minutes (I want 60 but have not discussed it with the studio owner, so it’s 75 on the schedule). In total, with commuting and preparation time, it is 8.5 hours a week, and on weeks with the Saturday class it is 10.5 hours a week. That doesn’t take into account any of the time I spend during the week making iPod mixes, writing classes, reading yoga books, reading online stuff, etc. – although that time used to be significant enough to bring my total to 20 hours a week, easily, I have been doing a lot less of it lately, mostly using classes I’ve written in the past rather than writing new ones, and pretty much never trying them out before I teach them. In any case, about 9 hours a week on average is not a significant amount of time, it’s probably less time than I spend preparing food, and I complain a hell of a lot less about doing that. I realize that the time spent is concentrated, physically tiring, so it’s a little different than if I were working 10 hours a week in a different office, or something. But still – it’s just not that much time.

2) I begged for help with my teacher training expenses, and I got it, and it makes me feel terribly guilty that I’m not more in love with the result, if not for my sake, then for all the people who helped to send me on this journey. I worked hard to earn the money that I did manage to contribute to it on my own, and I worked extremely hard at the training itself. I didn’t expect that every instant of teaching yoga for the rest of my life would be sunshine and roses, but I did not expect that I would dread teaching certain classes every week. I didn’t expect that certain students would make me so soul-weary and ready never to roll out my mat again. I’m reminded of a Dear Abby wherein a woman wrote that she had been working towards being a social worker for something like a decade, working really hard, telling everyone that was her goal, and now that she was finally a social worker, she hated it. (I may have mentioned this story before, but it really had an impact on me.) She felt so embarrassed and small, and had no idea what to do. If she had asked strangers to contribute to her cause to become a social worker, and they had, I think she would have felt even worse. I don’t think it’s somehow spoiled of me, or that I’m squandering any opportunities; I am teaching, after all, and teacher training was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I just feel like if I’d given me $10, I would be reading this and thinking “You big baby. I want my money back.”

3) This one’s related to 2. I seem to want to teach on my terms, rather than at the times that students show up and want to learn. This is not the way it works in a service industry. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to want to drop back and teach fewer classes – I would probably not be so resentful if I was teaching less – but I do think it’s pretty bratty of me to have gotten the opportunity to teach so often and to drag my feet going into it.

4) I actually opened up this post with the intention of kneading through this issue only. I feel a certain existential hopelessness about teaching, at this point, because I have no idea why I’m doing it. Back a ways, my intention was to teach yoga part-time and peddle paralegal part-time, but I have reevaluated this goal. BF will have to be making a lot more for this to work; knowing now what the pay scale is like in reality, there’s no way that any income I get from yoga would be able to supplement half of the kind of salary I make as a FT paralegal. (Unless some extremely rich person asks me to be her personal yoga teacher five times a week.) I think for this plan to work, BF would have to be making enough to mostly support both of us, in case one or the other of my PT incomes was unreliable. This is our collective goal – he would love it if I could pursue my creative life more fully. But I would feel terribly selfish doing so unless he was completely happy at his job and we were making far more than enough to get by.

So that idea, of teaching PT while working a day job PT, has sort of slipped away being as it is not feasible or even fully desirable. The other goal was to have as much yoga in my life as possible, and to share it with as many people as possible. I have learned that this is less than perfect, too; the more I teach, the less I enjoy the practice. I haven’t done a home practice in months. I enjoy helping people, I really do – and something I haven’t said often enough in this post is that I love teaching, individually, each class, it’s just the collective amount I’m doing it that’s taking the toll – but in truth, the fulfillment I get from teaching as often as I do is less than the fulfillment I got from taking classes. I think the balance needs to be more tipped towards student than teacher for me to be happy in yoga. I’m tired of it, to be honest; I would not mind taking a nice long break from yoga, teaching and doing, for a couple of weeks or even a month.

I have lost my joy in the practice. It used to be the best part of my week, stepping onto the mat, the place where I could most fully be myself. It’s not that way anymore.

I begin to wonder, therefore, what I’m doing it for. I have taken on more classes because I thought that was part of my goal, to teach more, to get more exposure as a teacher, to help it to take up more hours of my week. But it turns out that my goals were misplaced, and this will not bring me enough money or happiness to live on. If it brings me little pleasure, then it’s just a second job rather than an avocation. It’s almost like the paralegal certificate, an activity I was doing to prove something, theoretically to better myself, not 100% or even 60% willingly. I am still teaching voluntarily, however; I am in charge of it, and if I ask the studio owner to drop back to fewer classes a week, she will surely agree. I will suffer nothing but the loss of a little money every two weeks, money that is providing extras but not essentials. Of course, I have come to this conclusion shortly after handing out flyers to a dozen or more people with the classes I teach at this studio each week, one of them being the Thursday class. Dumbass.

I want to find a solution to the Sunday problem, too, because teaching twice on Sundays (especially so far apart) isn’t working either. I definitely want to keep yin on the schedule and in my life, but Sunday afternoon is just not a good time slot for yoga, and there isn’t really another one open on the schedule that works. If I was teaching a dozen or twenty people on Sunday mornings – which is what I expected when I started teaching that class, it’s what another studio in town gets at their 8:00 Sunday classes – then I doubt I would be considering giving it up. But I am. That class has been so uneven. I can never get subs for it, which means I have major difficulty every time I consider going away for the weekend or going out on a Saturday night. This limits my life in a way that I’m getting kind of tired of. It would be a cosmic joke if the class that stayed consistently popular for me was my restorative class, because I was so certain I’d never teach (or even enjoy doing) that kind of yoga when I started at this.

What am I doing it for? Like I said, I enjoy each individual class. Some days I don’t feel like teaching, and I feel better once I get started; some days I walk in not feeling like it and I walk out not feeling like it, but I know I taught a good class and I feel satisfaction. I also believe that anything I can do to bring yoga into other people’s lives will be a positive thing. But overall, the larger experience of teaching 4-5 classes a week is not satisfying. I think if I taught less, I would rediscover joy in it, and perhaps even rediscover purpose and goals. Right now it’s hard for me to nail down those things. Although I find myself with screaming jealousy for dancers and people who are incredibly flexible, I am comfortable with my abilities as they are; I’d like to be able to do graceful jumpthroughs and hanuman, sure, but it doesn’t keep me up at night. I don’t feel the need to work harder, do more, meet physical goals. The purpose used to be an end in itself, to get on the mat; now it’s a mystery.

So, I guess the conclusion is, I need to end the Thursday class and reevaluate the others as well. I told BF I’d like to give the Thursday class until the end of August or the end of September before I give it up, to see if the summer drop in attendance makes a difference in the number of students I’m getting (one or two, generally; I once had three). He asked me if getting more students would make a difference as to whether I’d want to teach it. I said no, not really, but I’d be getting more money. Would that make me happy? he asked. Well, I said, money is happy. He laughed. I was kidding, it’s true; money is the smallest reason that I’m doing this, and the least important. I just have so few important reasons, it seems, and it’s getting harder to justify my fatigue and unavailability. How can yoga, such a wonderful thing, be so closely associated with exhaustion, with unwillingness, with irritation?

…Yeah. I’m teaching too much.