Accidental yoga teacher Part 1

Welcome to my first Blog!
Where to start? What to write?

Perhaps a ‘few words’ on how I even came to be in position of writing about yoga.

Wellllll, I knew from an early age that I was destined to travel a Spiritual path…I still remember the day I felt this amazing vibration emanating from my heart chakra I was filled with love, and this knowingness, that Nirvana was my goal in life….
No not really.
I didn’t really know anything about yoga until a girlfriend, back in 1995, asked me if I’d like to come to a yoga class with her at the gym. Although ‘gym yoga’ now has a very limited appeal to anyone who is serious about learning, back then it was pretty much the only place to go. Apart from a limited number of notable exceptions of course.
I already went to the gym and spent a good 20 minutes stretching in the warm up area, so I thought I’d give it a go.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

A bit more detail?

OK.

I really enjoyed the classes and was happily going twice a week, which I thought was pretty good going at the time, and it coincided with a period in my life when I was looking inward for personal direction. It was inevitable that sooner or later I would want to embark on a big clichéd journey to find myself. Being rather unoriginal in such matters, I decided on India, and began planning my trip. That is to say I started talking a lot about it without making much headway. After all, going to India was a bit of a mission. Especially back in ’96. (If you’ve only visited India for the first time in recent years, believe me when I say it’s gotten a little more tourist friendly since then.)
As it happened I wasn’t destined to travel to India for another 2 years. Something else came up. Something that seemed like a better idea with regards to finding some inner direction. One day whilst I was hanging out with the aforementioned girlfriend, she showed me a leaflet for a yoga teacher training course in Canada, and said she was thinking of doing it. What did I think?

A light bulb lit up in my brain! A little voice said ‘this is what you need to do!’. Forget India, it’s way too much effort. No it didn’t really say that last bit.
‘That’s what I’ll do!’ I exclaimed.
‘You what? This is my idea! Back off’ she (possibly) replied. Oh I didn’t mention, we were ex’s by this point.
Less than a year later I travelled to The Laurentian mountains North of Montreal to spend the most freakishly wet Summer in my life’s history, in a tent, with an ex (how on Earth that ever seemed like a good idea I will never know) studying harder than I had ever done in my life. Not that I’m saying I’d been a slacker through school and college. Although that would be true, I totally was.
Why? I hadn’t found anything that interested me enough to really want to learn about it in any depth. But now here was a subject which took me deeper with each new thing I learned about it. It challenged the limits of my understanding. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. And to this day that hasn’t changed.
Even so, looking at the way things have panned out, it’s ironic that at NO POINT DID I PLAN TO BE A YOGA TEACHER.
Nope, I went only to gain a deeper understanding of a new physical practice that calmed my mind and left my body feeling relaxed. It was only after I’d returned to the UK and reflected, that I decided it would be a terrible waste of so much study and effort to allow it to merely fade away. To disappear from memory. That was when I decided to practise what I’d learnt on the only people who were willing: my friends and family.

That was way back, ’96-’97, so you’ll be happy to hear that these days I walk the path of hatha yoga with far more dedication.
I’m sure you’ve read enough for the time being, so…to be continued at another time.