First class!

So yesterday I taught my first yoga class.

As you might remember, my colleagues at work asked me to start teaching yoga to them at lunch time - after making sure that they weren't joking I asked around how many people would be interested and managed to book us a meeting room, I finally got down to it yesterday. First of all, people were actually exited about it! For several days beforehand they came up to me and told me how much they were looking forward to the class! The put some pressure on - I had planned out the class weeks in advance so I was relatively calm about it (that must be the first - me, relatively calm about something I'm doing for the first time!), but that being said I did get some butterflies in the stomach beforehand.

We don't have a proper room to practice with mats or anything like that, so what I wanted to teach was some gentle stretches to the upper body and back people can do while sitting or standing up, and some quieting down and breathing. Patanjali is ever my inspiration, and he defined yoga as "the cessation of mental fluctuations" - asanas are important because it's impossible to quiet your mind if your body is screaming. So we did some neck rolls, elbow pulls, open chest stretches, torso circling and a standing rag doll pose, finishing with few minutes meditation - total of 25 minutes.

So first impressions about teaching: when talking, I totally lost the sense of time. When I'm doing poses I can pretty accurately estimate the same time for both sides, and especially what is a good amount of time to do a stretch - not so when teaching. I was still doing the poses, but I had no idea. I was also scared that people wouldn't feel the poses or would be hurt - I talked in the beginning about the difference between pain and discomfort, but I was still struck by the whole responsibility for these total beginners.

By the end of it, they looked happy. At least some of them did - the Chinese are so polite it's sometimes difficult to tell, but I overall I think it went well. Vlad pointed out afterwords that it might be useful to show them how to do the poses first, then let them do themselves as they are beginners with no previous experience - that was a very good point and I'll do that next time. I guess the real proving point is to see how many people are coming back next week!

It was good though, I enjoyed the experience. I think it's a really good way to practice teaching and reassess some of the basics for me, and I feel I'm doing something very useful for people who spend far too much time in front of a computer.

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