Passions

I have a few passions:  art, comic books, books, movies, my pets (& dogs & cats generally), & yoga. I’ve found through the years I’ve had some passions that have come & gone (smoking, mountain bikes, photography, kinder eggs) to varying degrees but the previous are ones that have stuck around the longest. All bar yoga have been, to some degree, constant since childhood. I didn’t know an awful lot about yoga until I got more into health & fitness in around 2010, I’d heard of it but didn’t know what it really was! Even at this point I only took it for the surface – an asana (pose) based practice that would aid my weight loss & give me some calorie burning on my rest days from weight lifting (weight lifting/strength training is also a fairly well enduring passion, there is little quite like a heavy deadlift to boost your confidence).

My first forays into yoga were purely online, using apps & YouTube, part of this exploration I found a couple of yoga teachers who have helped shape both my approach to yoga & spurred me on to become a teacher. Bad Yogi, Erin Motz spoke to me as yoga student who wasn’t Vegan or even Vegetarian, who liked a drink or two & enjoyed red meat from time to time. She also provided a lot of free, excellent, classes on YouTube to follow along with. I bought a number of her longer classes & still revisit them today. The other I found was Tara Stiles & her company Strala yoga. Now while Tara is more of a “stereotypical” yogi, I loved the way she broke down poses, her videos of headstand were epically helpful for me! As a learned more I grew to love the Strala approach to yoga, focusing on natural movement & ease rather than a structured set of postures.

So these yoga teachers guided & inspired my, deepening my knowledge & passion for yoga as a practice beyond the physical. I didn’t keep up the weight loss, as so often happens, but yoga became an enduring part of my movement & self-care practice. As I grew as a yoga student, & more generally as a person I began to more critically look at both the yoga teachers I was exposed to & the wider social media I was engaging with. I cleared out those things that didn’t serve me anymore & looked for people who fit more with the mind-set I was striving for. I can’t remember how I can across Dana Falsetti, I think someone posted a video of her on Facebook by Cody, but I loved both her look, as a bigger bodied person doing yoga, & attitude to yoga generally. Through her I found Jessamyn Stanley, then Amber Karnes & Dianne Bondy &then more & more yoga teachers that buck the thin/white/blonde/middle class stereotypes who try to make yoga accessible for as many people as possible.

But that is kinda another story. So! Having seen that yoga could be more than just a physical practice I started to look into Yoga Teacher Training (YTT)be couldn’t find anything accessible (within an hour commute) or affordable (that didn’t meaning having to pay thousands of pounds to take a couple of weeks for an intensive training). So I didn’t get anywhere & pushed it on to the back burner. Back in 2017 when looking at some big life type goal becoming a yoga teacher was on there! I saw a Facebook ad for an online training course (which I didn’t think was a thing!), Facebook know everything, I was doing research & found Aura Wellness (via the Bad Yogi Facebook group in fact). By this point I’d done a couple of short intro classes (through the Center for Excellence) on Yoga & Kundalini Yoga, so knew I wanted to do a more traditional style in my teacher training. I used 5 seconds of courage (okay it took me a super long time to commit, it was still a fairly big chunk of money) & I signed up for their 200+ Hatha Level 1 course, as it was a. the cheapest b. digital so I could start straight away & c. a style I knew something about.  That was April 2018 & I completed my training in August 2018, I’ve taught throughout my training, to see if I enjoyed it, I was considering if I didn’t at least I’d have taken time to deepen my knowledge of yoga & its history through the course.

Obviously I liked it! I started teaching classes “professionally” in September 2018. I also signed up for a 550 hour Vinyasa Level 1 & 2 course which I am currently working through & should have completed by February 2019 (finger crossed!)

So teaching has layered on as a passion. As a way to guarantee I get in movement each week, encourage my personal practice & a joy, my students are awesome, I feel happy & energised after each class – even the ones where I didn’t want to leave the house beforehand!

What are you passionate about? It doesn’t matter f you don’t know exactly what it is, exploring things to uncover a passion is also wonderful  & can be great fun. You don’t have to make your passion your job, there are too few of us who have that opportunity, but having things that bring joy & happiness into our lives makes life worth living. Look for your passions, the things that excite you, that you anticipate & look forward to. Enjoy them every second you can & allow them to nourish your soul, body & mind.