"From wanting to quit, to feeling like a failure" - here's 3 years on.

This was a weirdly vulnerable blog to write. I’ve been teaching for 3 years now, and I qualified as a 500hr RYT almost three years to the day after teaching my very first class. Over these three years I’ve completed hundreds upon hundreds of hours of teaching, in private sessions, class settings, teaching courses, supporting non profits, and offering talks - a richer, deeper business than I could have imagined when I started my initial training. 

I’m a completely different teacher and person now to who I was when I first started. Sometimes that has meant learning lessons I would never have anticipated, but often it has meant learning lessons I had processed logically, but not emotionally. Lessons I'd heard without really listening to. Most of the the following musings are personal lessons I’ve learned through the lens of teaching that just happen to apply to me in a business context too. 

So, from wanting to quit, to feeling like a failure, to feeling entirely isolated in the yoga world, here are a few musings on what my experiences of teaching have been like over the past few years. 

1. Stop trying to be a palatable teacher 

Not everyone is gonna vibe with this style of teaching. That's okay.

Not everyone is gonna vibe with my political views or loudness on these views. That's okay.

When I first started, I did what you're told to do - tried to find my own voice! Who did I want to be as a teacher? How did I fit into the current landscape of yogic offerings? What was my USP? I failed here when I tried to figure out how to fit this new voice into a mold that would be palatable, that wouldn’t see me challenged or judged. Quote of the year here - ‘perfectionism is wanting to be unharmable’. I tried to create myself into a teacher who was unharmable.

So let me be clear - I am an angry person. I hold insurmountable rage, grief, and fight. None of this felt appropriate in a yoga teacher, so I quashed it in yoga settings, and instead presented a calmer, chiller version of myself that didn’t experience so many ‘unacceptable’ feelings, just the ones that are already accepted in a yoga space - joy, gratitude, perhaps sadness and tears. 

But to be honest, that person is boring and unrelatable. That person sets students up to always feel less than. Being a messy, real, human teacher lets me and the people I serve relax a bit, and actually show up authentically. This work became infinitely more rewarding when I brought all the messy sides of myself forward, rather than trying to present myself as a perfectly calm and regulated person. 

2. Yoga is political. (and so is everything)

I heard a wonderful quote recently (I cannot remember the source) - 'Devotion to innocence is a control tactic.' I’d take this further: Dedication to regulation is a control tactic. Commitment to purity is a control tactic. 

If your yoga practice keeps you well behaved, it is a control tactic.

Yoga has become massively westernised and whitewashed, and often takes us further from our true selves rather than closer. It's branded as a calming and relaxing tool - which it can be! Let me be clear, there is MASSIVE value in learning tools to keep yourself grounded and calm. There is nothing more crazy-making than feeling continuously at the mercy of your emotions without any ability to control or change them.

Judith Herman’s three stages of healing come to mind here - stability and safety come first, far before we do any turning towards pain, far before we try to integrate these learnings back into the world. But, and this is a learning I’ve had to sit with over the last few years, there is something to be said for the over reliance on regulation tools. They are tools and should be treated as such - tools to support us in the longer journey of building our emotional capacity and learning what true agency and embodiment feel like.

Sometimes we can use our agency to move away from an experience, sometimes we can use our agency to move with, or even towards. If your practice insists you always move away, it is incomplete. Our practice should also keep us connected to and able to feel our rage and our grief, should keep us connected to our communities and our purpose, should teach us to trust ourselves fundamentally and at a bodily level. Our practice should ask us to engage critically with who teaches us, what they teach us, and what they gain from teaching us this. If we are being taught exclusively to ‘calm down’ and ‘regulate’ - who gains from this? 

3. Exponential growth can fuck off. 

This is a business one, but (I think) it’s relevant beyond just business owning so stay with me. 

I was scaling up my business for two years before I realised that I had grown my business beyond where I actually wanted to be. I was exhausted, my own yoga practice felt like a drain rather than a place I longed to go, and after two years, I felt the first urge to quit. So I dropped classes and scaled back. This instigated a bit of a war with my feelings and my logic: logically I knew this was the right choice for me, emotionally I felt like a failure. I was supposed to want more than this, no? Why did the idea of scaling back fill me with relief then? Refocusing on what I actually cared about - showing up for communities who are typically unrepresented and unable to access wellbeing, inviting and challenging people about what a yoga practice is and can be - the more invigorated I felt, and the more confident I felt about my lack of desire for business growth.

The challenge now is not growth, but staying aligned and always shifting towards a business I'm passionate about and that serves the people it's here for. This doesn’t just impact my business, but also me as a person. It prompts me to ask the question - for whom am I doing this? (As promised, not just for the business owners.)

4. It's important to be wrong. 

I cannot state enough - the need to remain curious and wrong has been so vital. Starting out in this career I was slightly terrified of getting things wrong (lets hark back to ‘perfectionism is wanting to be unharmable’). I think it’s honestly a reasonable fear when dealing with real people’s lives, bodies, nervous systems. You don’t want to be getting shit wrong there, it has real impacts. But you really lose something when you are too rigid in your framework. I am perpetually reading and learning about what I do, and this means changing the way I teach and how I show up. It means sometimes I realise I've been wrong about something, be it a theory I stood by, language I had been using, an approach I’ve taken with a client, down to the boring business structure that might not reflect my actual views. The first few times this happened, I was shaken. It has taken me time to approach this as a humbling and exciting moment - proof I'm growing as a practitioner. The power of an integrative approach comes from this continuous refreshing of knowledge, and the creativity of connecting new theories that creates a rich foundation of knowledge that you can pull from. People are too complex to fit into a single theorem or set of ideas, and you'll lose nuance if you try to force them to.

5. I'm allowed to be on my own healing journey alongside supporting others in theirs. 

This comes last because it has been the hardest to square away. I am in a continuous process of unsquaring and resquaring this (technical terms lol). It ties in with most of the other points I’ve explored here, because to be honest most of what I’ve learned comes back to trusting myself, and accepting that I am good enough to hold this position in a way that works for me. 

I'll be transparent here - I started this work because of my own desire for a space that offered the kind of trauma care that I was desperate for. I didn't come to this work as a finished product (nor will I ever be for that matter). Healing journeys aren't linear, and steps 'backward' are part of it. I'm allowed steps backwards too, and that doesn’t make me a bad or worse practitioner. It does mean, as it should for all practitioners regardless of trauma history or diagnoses, that I have to be in reflection about what I’m bringing to my practice, how my own pain is reflected in the way I teach, run a business, feel about doing both those things (see again for the final time: perfectionism is trying to be unharmable). I look forward to reflecting on this in three years time and seeing how far I’ve gotten with this. 

There are a million other things I could add to this list, but the throughline is: this has been a journey that I am so incredibly grateful to have had the courage to step into, one I am consistently humbled by, and one that changes me now and hopefully, forever. To all the people who allow me to be here doing this work - students, clients, friends, colleagues - thank you.