I love practicing in yoga classes where the teacher creates harmony and balance between connecting and holding space for me to set my own practice at the center of my drishti. This is also the kind of practice I aspire to create and hold space for in the yoga classes that I teach. From my perspective, both as a practitioner and a teacher of the ancient art of yoga, I approach my teaching as an opportunity to empower my students by meeting them where they are and really seeing them.
The purer and simpler our vibrational field, the more we can observe, explore, and expand across the spectrum of subconsciousness, consciousness and superconsciousness. - DAAJI
Space has been the answer for me. As a yoga teacher, my intention is to create and hold a space full of empowerment, presence, connection, awareness and possibility. The more I center my students in my drishti, the more present I can be in order to be of greatest service to the most people. When I started teaching yoga, I feared that I would need to be someone that I am not in order to have the students like me. I was afraid I’d have to fill the entire 60 minutes of flow with a perpetual chatter about me and what I think about yoga and what my lineage is, and who my teachers are.
I changed my entire life around because I didn’t want to continue traveling down the path of materialism, superficiality, competition and petty manipulation. I didn’t want to spend one more moment of my life being a hypocrite. Yet, the yoga teacher examples I had at time experienced as “successful” where basically holding a circus performance during each class working hard overtime to entertain their students and ensure they are liked by all.
I invite you to create space for the sake of space and embrace self-inquiry, svadhyaya. Are you acting out from your ego-desire for external validation? Are you refusing to take accountability for all of your contributions to your life? Are you still blaming others and acting out of victim consciousness? Are you confusing manipulating with connecting? Complaining? Gossiping? Competing? Comparing? Guess what? Your ego might be masquerading as a yogi.
Create space and time for grace.
I realized that when the words “I”, “Me”, “My”, and “Mine” saturate my regular expression of beingness, my ego might still be running the show. This was an uncomfortable insight. So uncomfortable in fact, that I decided to risk integrating silence and stillness with physicalness during my yoga classes. Emptiness is not nothing. Emptiness is a powerful something that sets us free once we learn to see it, hear it and feel it. And the leap of faith has yielded sweet fruit. I enjoy knowing that my students appreciate what I am sharing with them and that they also value it. Space has integrated a true connection between me and my students.
Space has allowed yoga to do what yoga does, create unity.
Practice + Light Up The Dark
Om.
