Teacher

The “ease” in Easy


Kevala Jnana of Mahavira

Image via Wikipedia

The business of yoga enveloped me the past couple of days. In many ways, teaching yoga and teaching public school has much in common. Paperwork. Association dues. Insurance, though I have to admit I never once carried a liability policy in my twenty years of teaching and coaching children.

And there is the money side.

Yes, yoga isn’t all asana and heavy breathing. Perhaps the yogis of Patanjali‘s time wandering like minstrels or jongleurs, spreading enlightenment for table scraps and a night’s lodging, but yoga teachers today would have a difficult time getting anyone to take them seriously if they wandered the streets of Edmonton pushing shopping carts and setting up their mats on the sidewalks of Whyte Ave.

It’s interesting (my catchall phrase for when I don’t have all my opinions in a row on something) how the yoga teaching has fallen into place. I’d anticipated filling in here and there and maybe having a class at the studio in town to call my very own. Not what has happened.

I have three classes at the studio and two more to start at the community hall across the street in October. I’ve turned down other offers for work since yesterday afternoon. Stuff I would have taken if not for the fact that I have other stuff already that conflicts.

Another graduate of the training who I keep in touch with remarked on how lucky I am to not have to run work down and I am reminded of something related to the practice of asana/poses – that we are to find “ease” in each posture.

If that is the goal of yoga than it is also the goal of life because I have learned that yoga and life have nearly everything in common.

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Coming Out of Retirement


How Yoga Teachers Hang Out

Image by sarahfelicity via Flickr

I resigned from my teaching position of twenty years in the spring of 2007. At the time, I had vague notions of rolling over my teaching certificate and working as a classroom teacher in Alberta. I still think about the license – need to get on that really – but the idea of teaching high school again doesn’t warm my insides.

So I semi-officially retired from teaching. I still read about the horror known as “reform” down in the states and I write about it (none too flatteringly which would make it hard to secure a teaching position down there again, methinks), but I don’t harbor any notions of returning.

When I left the building, I didn’t look back.

Okay, I still love office supplies, but that aside, I don’t miss the job of it. And it was a job. A thankless and mostly mind-numbing job as the years ground on.

I blogged. I wife’d the house, mothered the child and poured myself into myself and my husband. And life was very good.

But somewhere along the line, yoga arrived and then the urge to teach it followed, and now I am not exactly retired anymore. In fact, I am working – more and more.

What started with filling in at the studio here and there became an employment opportunity when I was offered one then two and now three classes of my own. Quickly on the heels of this came an offer to teach two nights a week at the community hall across the street. Add to this the fact that I’d already agreed to take every third Friday teaching a class for figure skaters in the next town over.

Between this and the Care2 gig – I am working again.

Not that I could pay the mortgage – which isn’t an issue because we don’t have one anyway – but it’s an exchange of skills for money. I haven’t done this in a while and it’s … interesting.

I had to shop. My yoga attire is not exactly Lululemon. I gave her up a while ago because the pants are too low-cut and the fabric doesn’t breathe enough for my comfort level. I am a capri’s and leggings type with long t’s and sweaters. Layers is the middle-aged woman’s best friend.

I have a lesson book. I write out sequence plans. It’s like the old days only everyone who shows up wants to be there and pays attention.

Not that many are showing up. It’s not my studio. People who come expect Jade. And why not? She’s good. So my classes have a couple of folks here and there. It’s a bit disappointing in the first few minutes but once I start to teach, I lose myself in the instruction and forget about the numbers.

The community hall class will be bigger. Nine registered officially and a few more who’ve verbally committed. Perhaps I can lure a few into the studio? It’s a goal; I won’t deny it.

Someday I will have a studio. Somewhere. I don’t think it will be soon or here, but the future – as Yoda pointed out to Luke – is a difficult thing to pin down for prediction purposes.

For now, I am a working girl again. That’s all I need to know.

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Writing


A black and white photograph of the Scottish t...

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My four year old loves to write. She will sit with a notebook and pen quietly scratching away in a language that is half letters/half symbols, and I wonder if she is mimicking me through example or DNA. When I was her age my stories were more of the performance art variety, told to invisible audiences via dolls or dance. Although I loved books, it hadn’t occurred to me that my stories could be written down for others to read.

 

I know I have written about this before, but my first written story was about pirates. Sister Rita, a tiny prune-faced thing who was barely taller than the shortest fourth grader and painted her meticulously filed nails bright colors that I am sure the Pope would have disapproved of, took the red pen that all teachers must have been issued with their licenses back then and buried my artistic endeavor under editing marks she never taught us the meaning of. If I had not been born a writer that might have been the end of my authoring days but for the fact that Sister aside, people liked to read what I wrote.

 

I began to write obsessively in the fifth grade.  Writing filled up the days while I was waiting for the other kids to “get it” so we could move on and was a way for me to look productive while I hid from the subjects that bored or perplexed me.

 

By high school, when the education process had progressed from the merely tedious to a test of my endurance, the idea that I could build a life and even make a living from writing was starting to take hold and was probably one of the bigger reasons I ended up in college. I thought, incorrectly as it turned out, that I could learn how to be a writer there.

 

University is a piss poor place to learn about writing much less become an author. Long story short, I became an English teacher instead. An English teacher who knew less than zero about grammar and couldn’t spell.

 

It was teaching grammar to thirteen year olds (who had no idea I was a mere chapter ahead of them every day) that taught me to love the language as much as I loved to see myself think on paper. But I still wasn’t a writer.

 

Ironically, it was graduate school that made me  focus on my writing  again. By treating it as a craft, I had many opportunities to test my abilities in an impartial setting . That and watching someone I loved beyond logic die right in front of me for months and years finally tipped the scales. I guess that is why the Palahnuik quote jumped off the page at me. I became a teacher only partly because I loved it. The other reason had to do with losing my confidence in myself and my gift and succumbing to the idea that one’s life work is about security not passion.

 

I began to blog about six months or so after my husband, Will, died. It was much the same as the writing that I had done as a teenager. Just thinking on “paper” but now I was very conscious of the process and the  idea of writing as a life began to flicker.

 

It was Rob who fanned the flames again and continues to do so. I think he will understand the quote, and the photo as well.

 

I envy those who can do what they love from the beginning.