Once upon a time, I seriously considered going back to school to become a certified yoga instructor (or Registered Yoga Teacher, as they are officially called). I looked at all the different options: the nights and weekends classes, the month-long intensive getaways. Originally it was something I retreated to when work as a regular teacher was getting to be too much. After I left the early education world and started teaching tai chi, I realized how much I enjoyed teaching something physical to adults -- how calming it was for me -- and I realized that yoga teaching was way more than an escape route from a toxic environment.
Then I found out that my favorite yoga studio was hosting a teacher training for 2014. The teacher in charge came down to our studio to run a Saturday morning class (along with a Q&A about the training afterward). I went in only for the class, as we had just purchased a house (with a sudden and unexpected jump in our closing costs), I was only teaching a few classes a week (and the model jobs were sporadic at best), and were gearing up to buy a second car. It made little sense to spend thousands of dollars on yet more classes, especially since that was what I had did three years prior to become certified as a teacher in Massachusetts (and look where all that additional education led me). I enjoyed the class, joked around with the other yoga students I knew, and left.
But leaving felt wrong, to be perfectly honest. I went back feeling like I departed from a party just as it was about to get good. Gut feelings don't put money in the bank, but I couldn't ignore it.
Even though you can't ignore your gut, you can forgo any actions based on your gut. The deadline for enrollment came and went and I was still very much at home, not signed up for the teacher training. I thought, "Next year, next year," and then I thought about how, next year, there's a very high chance that I'll be trying for children, and there's nothing more frustrating than having to drop out of something because of a pregnancy. I shrugged my shoulders, realizing that the timeline for "things to do before kids" was getting unmistakably short, and decided that maybe yoga training would just be on the back burner indefinitely.
Two weeks after the deadline, we finally bought our second car. We went to Target, bought a big red bow (big for presents, but comically short for cars. Because Lexuses get the big bows and Subarus get the Target ones), and declared Merry Christmas. We decided that the car was essentially "our" Christmas present, and vowed to get relatively small things for each other come actual Christmas time ("small" being the relative term, as both my husband and I tend to go overboard on presents if we're not given parameters).
Cut to Christmas. My husband received a bunch of comedy books, as well as a Star Wars sound effect machine (which coincided nicely with what his brother and wife got him, but that's for another time). I opened my box to see a pile of textbooks and the new student questionnaire. I read the page over, not really processing what I was reading, and promptly looked up at my husband with tears in my eyes.
"Is this the teacher training?"
As my husband so puts it, he gave me the gift of homework. I had to chuckle, because a homework assignment was actually sent out two weeks prior for the first day of school -- which happens to be next Saturday, the 4th. It reminds me of college, getting a huge reading assignment to finish in days. It's going to be a lot different than college was: science was never my strongsuit and teacher training focuses heavily on anatomy. But I'm ready for it. I'm ready to read and take notes and do what it takes to become a registered yoga teacher.
Namasté.
No comments:
Post a Comment