My birthday was last week and it was a quiet one. A nice dinner and a "flight" of 5 ounce craft beers at a local brew pub was more than enough party for me. I cannot remember the last time I had more than a few beers, it has been a long time. My daughter did bake me a no flour chocolate cake. It was most delicious. It was so good that I had a small piece the next day.
As I grow older, I have come to the conclusion that from a physical side, I am now in long term maintenance. I feel more aches and pains than I used and it is not easy to do a challenging pose I may have done a year ago but have not done much since then. The alternative, however, is not to do anything and let myself go. That is not going to happen. I will continue to walk, hike and practice Yoga until my last breath..
Weekend two of teacher training is over and it was pretty intense. There was a focus on anatomy on both days and we spent much time working on poses and flows that focused on the points of anatomy we were discussing. Both days involved lots of yoga and I was exhausted after each one. We also started our study of the Yoga Sutras.
On Saturday, we broke into small groups and we were required to "teach" one pose to our group. We then got feedback from them and our teacher about how we taught the pose. I was pretty nervous to do this even with a small group and I forgot some of the "script" that I had written out beforehand. There is so much to remember for each pose about preparing, giving cues and adjustments. I had written out a whole list just for the fairly basic pose that I chose to teach. Preparing for the single pose made me realize the depth of the challenge that teaching will be. I will really have to learn my subject and how to teach each and every pose that I present to a class.
This upcoming weekend we have to teach everyone the first five minutes of a class. I have prepared two scripts (one quiet and easy, and the other more intense) and I will decide the day of our class which one to teach. It all depends on the mood of everyone and what has been done before hand. Much of my thought that went into the preparation was not how to start the poses but how to start the class verbally and make sure people begin breathing properly. I probably have fretted too much about the preparation but that is my nature. I of course will be nervous.
Namaste..
