I really couldn't have asked for it to happen any better than it did. I wasn't really feeling in tune with the ONLY yoga studio in town, so imagine my happiness when I saw a new studio opening in September, and not only that, but HOT yoga, my true love! Oh yes.
I started going, almost obsessively. The studio is just gorgeous, clean, bright, beautiful. The owner is this total light of smiling joy and happy. Plus she knows her stuff (you know how annoyed I get at instructors that think an abs class with downward facing dog intermittently is "yoga"). She's completely knowledgable and uses it, love it. And people know it, I've seen zero advertising and she's turning people away at the door at max capacity, FOR A SUNDAY NIGHT CLASS. Yeah, that's what's up.I was trying to play it cool, get well integrated before I brought up teaching, and before I knew it, October rolls around and she brings it up herself! I didn't even have to have the awkward ask for a job moment! It's just her teaching, with another instructor taking 2 or 3 classes a week (out of 20some). So the arms were wide open for another instructor!
I started the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, probably ideal, I figured since the holiday would give me a smaller class. WRONG. 17, first class ever. Including the owner, who of course was awesome, but it's still that much more intense.
I thought I would have a heart attack that morning at the gym beforehand. Literal panic attack. But I got to my car between the gym and the studio to find Tim had left me a good luck present. not that I could even look at it without wanting to throw up. I could barely breathe. Let alone keep my mouth wet enough to practice AND talk through a 105 class for an hour. It was brutal, I kept tripping over leg versus arm versus right versus left. But I made it through and got plenty of compliments at the end.It's been a month of teaching Mondays and Wednesdays, including a Saturday fill in. It's taking longer than I thought to get acclimated. Getting rid of dry mouth talking in that heat is hard, impossible when you factor any nerves. I still trip on right versus left a lot. And your arm has three parts. Placing your knee at your hand is very different than your elbow in plank....
But I haven't had any haters! Only compliments. A lot of them are regulars, so that's awesome, but I have at least 1-2 new people in each class, meaning new to yoga, not just new to me. So that's a struggle to teach a class that is good for someone of my level (or to be honest, probably better than me) but yet good for someone who literally can't get from there hands and knees to standing in under a solid 60 seconds.
My first was for sure my biggest. Gone all the way down to 6. But I feel more comfortable every time. It's not even a public speaking thing. It's trying to remember the sequence I created, hoping its hard enough and takes up the full class. I'm getting better at adding stuff on the fly dependent on how I think it's going, but it still needs work. I have heard that my classes are more challenging though, so that's good in my mind. The more practice I get before the New Years Resolution crowd, the better.
I gotta say though, a perk of teaching, you get to call your own shots. We were starting a balance series last week, and I was like, geeze my neck hurts, I want to stretch it out. *lightbulb* "Ok, before we go into our balancing sequence, we're going to come to mountain and do neck rolls." That's right, because I CAN!
Because I am the yoga instructor. :-)
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