Teacher training, day 10

Ten days of yoga, altogether 60 hours of yoga is now behind me.

I started at nine this morning with Janet's fabulous morning yoga classes that I absolutely love. They are hatha and very gentle, but to be honest at nine am there's not a lot I'm even capable of doing.

After the class we got down to business - Kelly was with us once again and we went through some last touches on the last poses. We also discussed what was going to be going on with the levels 2 and 3 of the course in six months time - getting into more advanced poses, anatomy, yin, marketing and Kelly dropped the bomb that by the end of third level everyone would teach a real class at the studio - what a fantastic opportunity.

We then had Dan Clement of Indigo Yoga come and hold us a mini-work shop about "Physics of Flight", about jump-backs, jump-throughs and handstands. This was very interesting - it's a fairly complicated area and in a normal class there just isn't enough time to go into them. Dan had beautiful balance and stunning vinyasas, but he had slightly different philosophy on some asanas than Jason and Kelly. For example, I've been taught that in dow-dog my elbows should be pointing downwards to open my shoulders - I like that, it works for me quite well. Dan was saying that elbows should point to the sides and he was quite adamant about it and saying that it was the way to create a stable foundation for handstands. He also told us to lock the elbows in handstands - I can't do them because of my wrists, but it sounds wrong... I've been taught that one never locks any joints - however I don't really know much about handstands so he could be right. I also found out that what comes to jump-throughs I'm severely limited by my short arms, it's not about strength as much as about proportions - if my arms are so short that I can lift myself off the floor while sitting down, then nothing is going to change that. I'm slightly disappointed with that, but it is what it is, and there are other things I can do to compensate.

Lastly, we had the opportunity to pair up for the last time and teach the whole routine to each other. This time I was partnering with Trevor - normally in advanced classes I always practice next to him, he has a beautiful practice - he complained in advance that he was terrible, but turned out to be just inexperienced. He says he doesn't enjoy teaching and only did this class to deepen his knowledge - I think though that he could be a wonderful teacher. Anyway, I think I did my best run so far - clearly experience is the key here. I also find that I like it... physical adjustments were beyond the scope for this course, so we only did verbal adjustments which forces you to verbalize your thoughts which was difficult but also very useful.

Some more photos of the last day. I can't believe it's back to work tomorrow morning.

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