Still Learning: 10 Things I Know After 10 Years of Teaching Yoga
Some things you can only learn by breathing through them.
This year marks 10 years since I first became a yoga teacher.
I could say a lot about what’s changed in that time- but mostly I’m thinking about the things that have stuck.
The lessons that keep whispering to me whether I’m in the middle of a class or flat on my back wondering what the hell I’m doing.
So here are 10 things I’ve learned in 10 years of teaching yoga. I’m still learning. Still showing up. Still figuring it out. But here’s what’s made it worth it.
Teaching yoga is a two way street. If I’m sharing space with someone, they are teaching me as much as I am teaching them.
Early on in my yoga practice, I fell down a flight of stairs and injured my shoulder. That meant I couldn’t practice poses like downward facing dog or even bear any weight on my shoulder at all. This led to an intensive study of my shoulder girdle and to this day I’m perpetually curious about how it works and how all the other parts of my body stitch together to make it do what it does. I think that’s the point of any posture or injury or incident- to shine a light on the parts of yourself that you would otherwise ignore. Were it not for catastrophe, I wouldn’t pay close attention to the mechanics of my body. I think what your body can’t do is an invitation to learn about what it can do.
Other humans are just reflecting your light back at you. No one can know you better than you know yourself.
Change is inevitable. It’s better to roll with the waves then try to stop them from coming in.
I think compassion always seems like it’s supposed to be about being nice to people, but sometimes the most compassionate moments can be really fucking mean. Sometimes the moment doesn’t call for being nice- sometimes the only way to grow is through something (or someone) being harsh and mean. I do think Kindness is incredible but it is impossible to get there without being kind to yourself and I think a lot of us don’t know how to be kind to ourselves.
Enough said. It’s not your responsibility to play a role in somebody else’s movie.
I think a lot of grief in life comes from an inability to accept this truth.
Love is so much bigger than what can be written in a card or pretended in a movie. Love is everything. It’s the cosmic energy of the universe. Recognizing its omnipresence is the greatest spiritual relief I am able to experience in my human body.
The poses are just vehicles to get you to look within yourself. Simply existing in your body is itself a yoga pose, and that one pose is enough for this entire lifetime. We practice yoga postures to release the myriad of tensions that come into our bodies because of the bullshit we put ourselves through on a day to day basis. But you don’t have to practice a bunch of yoga poses to prove yourself as a yoga practitioner. Just being alive is enough.
Jessamyn Stanley is the author of Yoke and Every Body Yoga,
limited signed copies are available here. You can find unsigned copies on Amazon, Bookshop, and published in German here.
