Making the "Blog" Official

Somewhere along the way I got the notion in my head that I will write a Blog while I am at Teacher Training. There are two thoughts behind this. One, that I would like to journal about my experience and secondly, as a way to keep in touch with friends and family in the outside world. Of course, this decision comes some intrepidation.

1. Firstly, will anybody be interested in reading my rantings about my daily experiences? I'm guessing that unless you have done Bikram yoga, that hearing detailed accounts of what the postures in each of the two classes per day were like it would hardly be nail biting stuff. (Yet for those of us that practice on a regular basis the daily insights and smallest of changes are fascinating to observe and discuss :-)


2. Secondly, how is the fact I'm making my Blog public going to influence what I write? It is hard to describe what yoga has done for me as the journey to date has been filled with many emotionally highs and lows. Its amazing how yoga makes things "come up' for you both in the studio and outside of it. And though I try to just "observe and let go" it sometimes brings up distinctive insights into why I am the way I am and so I wonder if as much as I want to record these thoughts, whether I will feel comfortable expressing them to the outside world. I guess time will tell.


3. Lastly, I am anxious about the fact I have never "Blogged" before and therefore I wonder if people will go to my site and see glaring mistakes or obvious things that should be changed. Note: I have not spent any time reading instructions on how to set up your blog etc etc, but rather have done it by the seat of my pants and just fudged my way through it. Hmmm.... a trait of the impatient Leo that I am.


4. So, for anyone who is interested........ here goes. I'm making it public. To those who take the time to follow and read, I thank you. Please do leave comments so that I know you have been here. I hope that within the posts that follow you find some interesting reading and maybe even some inspiration to take up yoga. Namaste Stephanie xx

Officially Unemployed!

Today is my last day of work. Which of course I can't even pretend to be upset about. But the realisation that I am actually going to TT is starting to hit me.

Finishing work today will be the first major change in my lifestyle that is a tangible indication of things to come. Up till now, I've been taking more classes, studying the dialogue, etc, but other than that its still been work 5 days a week and things have ticked on as they always have.

So by the end of today I will be unemployed, have no company car, phone or laptop. By the weekend, I'll have no fixed abode and all my possessions will be in storage, just leaving me with my yoga mat and the ever present dialogue under my arm.

I am officially on my way to becoming a yoga teacher in training. Wow! SO exciting. I am crapping my yoga pants. But wow! And for now, its off to celebrate :-)

The Art of Procrastination

So I, like many other fellow yogis bound for LA in a few weeks, am trying to learn as much of the dialogue as I can before I start TT. ( "Dialogue" being the very specific instructions for each 26 postures that we must be able to say during class.) The thought behind this being that the more I learn now, the more sleep I get in training. We have all heard the stories of how much sleep deprivation we have to put up with for the nine weeks - mostly due to the fact Bikram doesn't need more than 3-4 hours sleep per night and therefore thinks the same for us. Oy! Even after 3 years of practicing, I am still waiting for the magical "needing less sleep benefit" to kick in. For now, I'm still an 8 hours a night gal.

Anyhow, so in light of this you'd think I'd be pretty motivated to get studying eh? Yeah well, for the first few weeks, yes, but I'm now 5-6 weeks into it, (and I'm not even half way through the damn dialogue) and though the rationalle is still there, the motivation is waning. Call it whatever you want, but the voice in my head, my monkey mind gets distracted by anything, and I mean ANYTHING.

Oh look, a bird just flew by...............................

(You're starting to get the picture eh :-)

It is amazing what one will do in lieu of what you "should" be doing. My house has never been cleaner, things never more "unnecessarily" organised. I've googled everything imaginable about yoga, and spent hours on the Yoga Training Facebook page, talking to fellow yogis about REALLY important things! lol

I'm procrastinating now even as I write this post. Gee I feel like I could write for hours. Hey its better than studying that bl**dy dialogue. But I really should sign off and start memorizing that Bow Pose. Hey look, another bird just flew by.....................

One Month to go

One month till Training starts! Counting the days now. The past month has been a blur of yoga, yoga, and more yoga. And then, any spare time outside of yoga classes has been spent studying the dialogue. Oy. What a task that has been!

I worked out that based on the fact, I would practice on average say 5 times per week, x 3 years, it makes for 780 classes. Now you would think that having heard the dialogue 780 times that I would already know it by heart! But No. Yet, I can remember every damn word to songs on the radio, even the ones I don't even like? Huh?

The only good thing to come with realising this, is that it means when I'm in class, I am truely present, and not anticipating what the next movement will be, but rather waiting until the instruction is given. Well, I am hoping this is the case. Either that, or I have managed to kill off some of those handy memory cells by too much partying in years gone by.

Of course the fact that the dialogue has been loosely translated from Indian into English doesn't help. The grammar is neither American or English and some of the phrases leave you wondering. How do you, "think very deeply about your standing leg"? Or bend your body in half to look "like a Japanese has sandwich"? Strangely enough though, it all seems to make sense when you're in the room doing the posture - with your "smiling happy face" of course! :-)