Lonely Adventure #1 Yoga Instructing at a Winery

I haven’t taught a 60 minute yoga class in 3 years. The biggest reason is because of all the disciplines I instruct, yoga is the one where I feel most like a fake.

The reality is, I revere yoga instructors. They glide through classes…no stumbles, no notes, no Cyrano. Somehow, someway, they always have a quote on the ready, that speaks directly to me like a random fortune teller from Jackson Square, New Orleans. It’s like they KNOW me…and YES KNOW me with all capital letters. Their words travel time, across the ages, directly from the throat chakras of ancient gurus and straight into all seven of mine.

Honestly, I feel my inspiration sounds more like that morning’s motivational quote from Dakota the influencer who took 5 online yoga classes from her fellow influencer friend, Sage.

So, I stopped. I simply hated the stress. I was so distracted by my own insecurity that I felt it best to use my yoga skills in a way that best suits me…for the last 20 minutes at the end of a 60 minute class. In this format, I didn’t need my fancy pose vocab, I didn’t need to come up with sudden sparks of wisdom. All I need to do was make it challenging and stretch them to a savasana.

I continued to learn by going to classes on my own and developed my own style. I don’t know what you’d call it. A cross between losing balance while demonstrating eagle to adding reps after holding a pose for already to long to changing on the dime because I’ve learned feel the energy of the room. Sometimes I’m pretty inspirational, if only because I’ll forget where I was in the sequence and I make others feel better about themselves. Whatever kind of instructor I am, I am who I am. So when of our frequent members, a a manager at a gorgeoussked is I would like to teach a 60 minute outdoor at a winery she manages, Quarry Hill Winery, that I decided to give it a go again. I mean…check this out...

Photo credits: Emily Specht, Wine Tasting Room, General Manager

Woke up the next morning and went - on the way their I remembered a phrase I always used with my kids. Let’s get our wiggles out. And what I realized was that getting the wiggles out resets, even if briefly the nervous system. It’s a bridge from whatever you were doing and feeling into something new.

I tend to have to dive deep for a little while to work things out…it’s not pretty in the depths but fortunately I’ve always had an ability to rise out of it. This time though I dove too deep and it took about 1.5 years to start to climb back out. That’s what I’m doing now. I have a sneakin’ suspicion I’m going to be a beast when I emerge. I wrote a poem about this