Day 197 of 365: Yoga Sequencing

I finally finished my first full yoga sequence.


I've been trying to make my own sequences since before I even started training. I would improvise, I would plan, and I would always end up short, or my sequences didn't feel like they had any cohesiveness to it. I started my teacher training classes and suddenly I was having the opposite problem: my sequences were getting too long. And while it's admirable to "accidentally" do yoga for two hours, no student in their right mind wants to be on their mat for two hours (unless they're part of some crazy retreat).


And then sometime last weekend, I finally put pen to paper and wrote out my sequence. I kept with one main physical theme (spinal movement - twists, turns, backbends, etc), prepping where I needed to prep and building up where I could build up, and finding a nice 1 hour to 1:15 practice on my hands. I smiled to myself, put the paper to the side, and began drafting notes for a second sequence, this time for shoulder strength and flexibility.


I was downright giddy that I was finally making out these lessons. It was one thing to have a few ideas swimming in my head. It was another to actually write them out.


Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice said, "It's almost like you're doing lesson plans again."


After my teaching burnout, I wanted nothing to do with education. It got so bad that, for the first few months, I didn't even want to read or play with my friends' children. The dojo that I ended up not working with suggested a tai chi for kids class and I felt my skin crawl. I didn't even want to look at the artwork that my students had made for me. I was burnt out in a way that I thought I would never recover from.


My current realization was needed on two separate levels: one, it proved to me that the aftershocks from quitting are slowly starting to fade, as I'm remembering just how much fun it was to construct lesson plans from scratch (even though I was usually flying by the seat of my pants, scribbling them down before my students woke up from nap). Two, it showed that maybe, just maybe, I'm not as a loss for passion in terms of a new career.


I was so passionate about early education, I devoted so much time and energy to just the idea of that career field, that burning out essentially created an inverse of those emotions. I worried that there would never be any type of practical career that I'd ever be that passionate about ever again.


But here I was, slowly figuring out how to make yoga sequences, and feeling a glimmer of that giddiness. I know I still have a long way to go: this is essentially the first date after a nasty divorce, and I'm still cognizant of the suffering I went through. But it's a step forward, and a step in the right direction.


Namaste, bitches. Om shanti, shanti.