For the past three Decembers, I’ve hosted a yoga art challenge. Every day during the challenge, I posted a drawing of a yoga pose (or asana) and invited others to post photos of themselves in the same pose. At the end of the event, those who participated would receive a prize. This annual event was a pleasure but had a low participant rate; maybe I shouldn’t have held it during the busiest month of the year.
There will be no yoga art challenge this year, but the drawings from past years will live on here! However, before we get to those, you may be wondering, “Why yoga art in the first place?”
Well, gang, in 2014, I underwent my 200 hours of yoga teacher training (YTT) and became certified to, you know, teach yoga. This is a little off-brand, although leading the 5:30 AM fitness class at Curves is perhaps even more unlikely, yet I did that too. I want to tell you about my yoga teacher training journey, which led to my yoga art journey!
Why Yoga Teacher Training?
I had never had an interest in teaching anything; public speaking is not my jam. But in early 2014, I was practicing yoga all the time (often in my living room), and I had nothing really special going on in life. I still struggled with the aftermath of a breakup with someone who was intensely confident in his life trajectory, which influenced my lost, lonely feelings. I needed something to feel passionate about.
A yoga instructor encouraged me to seek out YTT when I told her I’d a mild curiosity about a yoga-related career. I would often dream up ideas for instructional videos, like a yoga routine for mermaids, and what yoga in space might look like. I wanted to create fun theme classes that made yoga playful and accessible. (All these ideas I had, yet I hadn’t considered yoga art!)
The teaching aspect made me anxious, but another instructor was like, “Of course you’re nervous! If you weren’t, I’d be like, ‘You’re an egomaniac and probably won’t get anything out of this!’” Yet another instructor chimed in, saying how teaching yoga was like a performance, so yeah, it can be nerve-wracking. Howevs, I’d be seen by others as an expert so if I mess up, who cares, just go with it.
All right then—let’s pull this trigger.
Yoga Teacher Training
I started YTT in January 2014 with six other gals. We made for an interesting group, and oddly, most of us found each other familiar, which blew my mind. I felt like I’d seen all of them before in some capacity, but I had no idea how or where we would’ve met. Furthermore, they felt the same way, making it all extra trippy.
Anyway, most of us were going through some dark shit. Half of us cried during our introductions, which involved drawing a picture of ourselves and what we hoped to get out of the training. (This, and still making yoga art did not occur to me.) I drew myself with my eyes closed, hands toward the sky, and surrounded by colored electricity. I said, “Here’s me essentially as a wizard.” Then I said there were a zillion things in my head, so many reasons to be there, before my voice broke and I burst into tears. It was scary to be vulnerable in even a situation where it was safe to be vulnerable. It just wasn’t what I was used to.
But I had to get used to the vulnerability because there was a fuck ton of that! We reviewed yoga styles, chakras, doshas, meditation, chanting, mantras, breathing exercises, and how to cue poses and perform adjustments. But we also had to learn how to hold a physically and emotionally safe space for others. This required us needing to know how to be physically and emotionally safe ourselves.
Such lessons didn’t nudge me out of my comfort zone. Rather, they shoved me out, threw me in the back of a van, and drove me out to the middle of the desert and were like, “Have fun getting back to your comfort zone now!” before driving off in a cloud of dust. Okay, that was a long walk for that joke, but yeah: emotions = hard.
Contact yoga (or partner yoga) was especially rough for me. I paired with a woman I barely knew and we had to breathe together, do poses with each other, and make so much eye contact that I thought my head would explode. Have you ever had sustained, wordless eye contact with a total stranger? Even thirty seconds is too long with someone you know without doing something about it. Try it for five minutes with a hand over your heart and a person you’ve had a handful of conversations with! Meanwhile, someone in the background says things like, “Like me, this person has known suffering and pain. Like me, this person just wants to be loved…” It was so insanely stressful I think my eyeballs were sweating. I felt so seen—too seen!
All that said, experiences like that shined a flashlight around the dark, dusty spaces of my mind and heart and taught me a lot about myself. They helped me more fully understand who I was and better articulate what I need, which was amazing. I loved that so much.
And at the most base level, the experiences taught me I could be a teacher, a leader. I forgot this about myself, or maybe never fully recognized it because I felt so very unlike any other teachers or leaders I knew of. Speaking strictly about just teaching yoga, I worried about how to cue poses using a mellow, calm instructor voice while adjusting students and saying all sorts of juicy spiritual stuff—you know, that wise, philosophical filler in between vinyasas.
But what if I was just myself though? “Play it honest”—isn’t that usually the answer to keep yourself from going nuts? As for my teaching style, I was told that while my sequences could be hard (so many Chair poses!), I was also funny, playful, and cute, which sounds like the opposite of what I thought I ought to do in order to be considered a good teacher. But maybe I could teach a fun, sunshine-y, groovatational yoga class to a Led Zeppelin soundtrack with a braid in my hair while I cracked jokes and everybody just enjoyed themselves. What’d be so bad about that?
I graduated from the 200-hour YTT five months after I started. On that last day, one of our instructors graced us each with a “yoga name.” Mine was Dakshina, which means “gift” or “offering.” It’s apparently financial at the heart of it, a cycle of giving and receiving. I don’t quite know how that was decided upon, so it’s difficult for me to really get behind.
Furthermore, the instructor assigned us traits in a very Fight Clubby way. For example, along the lines of saying “I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection,” the instructor referred to me as her “humility.” This, too, I still don’t understand. It makes me feel like I don’t understand the definition of the word “humility.”
That confusion aside, I sobbed the entire time while taking my yoga teacher oath. This graduation was way, way more meaningful than any of my other ones have ever been. It felt like I’d actually go on to make some kind of difference and change my life.
Furthermore, for a graduation secret Santa present, one of the gals wrote an adorable poem about me that began as “There lives a young woman, so kind and so fair / even though she puts all of us in Chair.” Oh, I just about died. I felt so happy to receive such a beautiful, kind sentiment from someone I’d connected with. Such a lucky me I am.
Yoga Art
In a future post, I chat about actually teaching yoga classes. For now, though, I’ll conclude this post with why you’re probably here: the yoga art! It was important for me to show diversity throughout the drawings to enforce the idea that anyone can do yoga if they want to. Even though the yoga challenges are over, I still intend to publish yoga art here as I create it. Enjoy!
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