Week 2 Yoga Teacher Training – Aligning My Intentions with My Practice

As it turns out, I have a lot of barriers. I thought I had an open mind about yoga teacher training, just with a lot of “buts.” I like yoga, but not the meditation. I prefer Anusara yoga, but I didn’t buy into a lot of what made it what it is. I want to learn the correct way to get into and hold a pose, but I pretty much thought I knew how after a decade of yoga practice.

Like I said, I have a lot of barriers. And the more barriers I have up, the less I’m going to get out of this experience. As I recently wrote about our meditation workshop in teacher training: I’m investing a lot of money and a lot of time into getting my 200 hour yoga certification, and if I put up barriers to the experience, I won’t get nearly as much out of it. What’s the point, then, to all this time, all this sacrifice, just to keep doing what I’ve always done the way I’ve always done it?

Letting down my barriers to meditation doesn’t mean that all of a sudden I’m a different, more peaceful person, but it does mean that I recognized a big personality flaw that could have affected this whole experience. By addressing it early on in the second week of teacher training I opened up in many different ways.

The second week focused on many of the principles of Anusara Yoga that I didn’t really understand, and therefore wasn’t terribly open to understanding – namely, the alignment principles of spirals and loops. It felt like a really complex way of queuing poses, but ultimately doing it the same way as I’ve always done. Once again, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Once I really listened and practiced and demonstrated poses using these alignment principles, everything felt different. I can feel my muscles working harder. I feel more grounded in my poses. I feel stronger in my poses. And I feel humbled in my thoughts.

One of the things I also learned is that just because I’m flexible, and can therefore get into a lot of poses easily, it does not mean that I’m strong nor that I’m using my muscles correctly. I practiced every night at home, as well as attended yoga classes throughout the week after learning the alignment principles. I not only noticed a difference on the mat, but I also noticed how sore I was after practice, which tells me that I’m using my muscles in a different way than I had been. I’m working harder and getting more out of it.

Part of my decision to go through this yoga teacher training was to not only learn more about yoga, but to learn more about myself. I’m grateful that I am learning to be more open and to let down my barriers so early in the journey.

Five things I learned the second week of yoga teacher training:

• How to meditate (even if you don’t believe in meditation)

• That I don’t know everything and that’s why I’m taking these classes

• Just because it’s not the way I’ve done something, it doesn’t make it wrong – it actually makes it better (and more correct) (Isn’t that why I’m in this class, after all?)

• How the Anusara alignment principles work and apply to poses, and how much of a difference they really make in my practice

• That I’m really excited about what I’ve learned so far and I can’t wait until next week to learn more