Teacher training, day 8

More teaching today, we finished up with the seated series and taught the whole thing to each other in pairs. Today I paired up with Thara, a lovely girl who has a wonderful practice and a great sense of humour, so I was happy to partner with her. I find starting difficult, I feel flustered and scared - but after couple of breaths it starts going. Obviously, I'm still not comfortable doing it, but that's nothing unusual at this point of course. And still, so much to say, so little time. My weakest points are left and right - I can't tell the difference on a good day, so that's where I constantly stopped: "And raise your..." [vigorous thinking, pause, pause] "...right arm up...". Jason's tip was to use landmarks in the studio - "pivot on the back foot towards the mountains" or "hips pointing towards the windows" - I think that's going to work better for me. I don't find postures difficult - I know my asanas, I know my breathing, I know the instructions - difficult bit is to relate this information to the student. I believe I will have a lot to give, I just need a way to verbalise my inner workings.

Afterwards I took a class of one of our new teachers at the studio, Eila (who - despite the name - is not Finnish, but British) as everyone had been going on about how great she was. She was different, for sure - very flowing practice but completely different from Jason and Kelly's "more traditional" approach - and I wouldn't have described them like that before. Slow, but beautiful - I can understand why people like her. She had an interesting way of not using the Sanskrit names for asanas but the English ones - I took this to mean that she wasn't comfortable with them, but when we were laying in Savasana she sung us a beautiful Sanskrit chant. So one never knows.

I wonder if from now on I will always be listening to a teacher with my own teaching in mind? Now I was constantly thinking what she was saying - and what she was not saying - and what worked and what didn't. When I wondered this aloud with the girls, Suli pointed out that after a while it probably becomes that you pick out the things that are good and different and "ignore" the rest. She's probably right.

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