I am a Bikram Yoga Teacher, who hasn't been practicing yoga for like a year now.... it's really weird to teach something that you haven't been doing yourself. I've gotten like one class a month in for a while now, but that is in no means a regular practice. And I'll admit, my body is feeling it! How does this happen you may ask...
After I went to teacher training, I came back and started teaching yoga full time, which is 10-12 classes per week. I was also practicing yoga about 4 times per week. For those of you who don't know what Bikram Yoga is, it's the original hot yoga, and we do a 90 minute class in a 105 degree room at around 40% humidity. So every time I was in the room, I was sweating a lot! By this I mean dripping constantly for 90 minutes! After about a year of sweating that much around 20 plus hours per week, my body started to give out on me. I was having all kinds of horrible symptoms everyday and I admit it was getting hard to get out of bed in the morning. I'd never felt that way in my life before! I knew it was due to the constant sweating that I was doing, so I decided to cut out practicing, decrease my class load, and when that didn't work, I quit all together. Ugh!
I was out of the studio for two and a half months, and it was actually a friend's emergency that got me to get back into it. After teaching a few for him, I realized how much I missed teaching. I love bringing that peace and health to people every time I go into the yoga room. I was still a bit scared of the sweating, so I limited myself to 2 classes a week...last spring I increased it to 4 classes and I feel great. As for my own practice, I still had that fear resistance to it. Due to my experience last year, I had formed a bunch of beliefs around why Bikram yoga was dangerous for me. My ego/beliefs were trying to protect me from my own previous inability to listen to my own body by blaming it on the yoga itself. It was not the yoga that was hurting me, it was the fact that I didn't listen when my body said STOP! I cleared the beliefs which made me feel soooo much better, but still wasn't quite motivated over the summer (my guess is because of the heat in TX)!
As the temperatures outside have cooled down over the last week, I've gotten such a strong drive to get in the room! I took class this morning and was SOOOO happy! My body is happy, my mind is happy, and my spirit knows that it's time to get back into the hot room. I'm meeting friends to take class tomorrow too! It's my goal to practice at least 2-3 times per week again to get my body functioning more efficiently again. This is pretty cool for me to experience myself because it's actually something that I tell my students at times. When a student expresses that they feel like they need a break, I usually tell them to take it, and that they'll come back when they're ready. I've seen my students do it, and now I feel with all my heart that it is true. It's the guilt, responsibilities, finances and expectations that make the choices for us that go against our feelings and intuition. If we listen to our own intuition and body, it will tell us exactly what we need to do and when we need to do it.
Yoga sense :-)
Jess
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