This blog post is to hopefully inspire another person to step into their power as a leader and become a yoga teacher.
I have had a slightly different yoga journey than most. My journey began years before, as a competitive cheerleader. In high school I stumbled into our schools competitive cheer practice. I LOVED seeing them flip around and throw each other through the air, I thought I was SO COOL. Quickly I found myself competing and loving every second of it. Soon I found myself teaching younger cheer teams, tumbling and learning everything I could about the industry. After a few years of teaching cheerleading, I wanted to build on my knowledge and decided to teach and learn about gymnastics. As I made my way through the structured world of gymnastics, I found that I was only interested in the floor aspect of gymnastics. And this folks, is how yoga entered my life.
After a few years of completing in high school and college, cheer took a toll on my body. I had practiced yoga off and on since I was about 16. All of those injuries left my body weak and sore. Yoga was the only physical activity I could do that allowed me to access my strength and flexibility in new ways. As I got older I practiced yoga more and more. One day I decided that I wanted to add yoga to my teaching repertoire.
Yoga teacher training was…..different. After years of on-the-job training and learning, I was in a room sharing experiences and learning new things in a group. I thought that it would be a breeze going through training, however that was not the case. Yoga teacher training taught me a lot about myself and what I kind of instructor I wanted to be. I had spent so many years absorbing everything I could about cheerleading, tumbling and gymnastics that it had never occurred to me that I should stop and review the knowledge I had accrued over that time.
There are various avenues to travel down as a yoga instructor and even more things to specialize in. Coming out of yoga teacher training, I was able to question my own ability and reshape the way I teach and what type of teacher I wanted to be. As I made my way through finding a studio that felt like home, I realized that I was learning to teach ALL OVER AGAIN. Teaching with new eyes is something I encourage all instructors to do from time to time. Teaching can be so exhausting because we are consistently giving ourselves to others as a service. Often times we forget that we need to make sure our batteries are full before we can give to our students.
Learning these lessons did take time, however, they shaped me into the leader I always wanted to be. Finding confidence as a competitive cheerleader pointed me in the direction of instruction and there comes a time when the student must take a step forward and become the teacher. But never forget that a forever student will always have more tools to pull from. And sharpening those tools can help you become more than you ever realized.
Until next time TumblingYogis!
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