Why an Experienced Yoga Teacher Keeps Practicing
Recently I earned my E-RYT 500 designation. Woooooo!
On paper, it’s another certification. Another acronym. Another milestone. Behind those letters are hundreds of hours of formal education, thousands of hours of teaching, and nearly two decades of showing up to my mat through seasons of inspiration, grief, travel, injury, growth, celebration, and everything in between.
The designation itself isn’t what matters most to me. What matters is what those years have taught me. If you look at my social media, yoga isn’t plastered all over it. It isn’t my identity. Never has been. You won’t find me chasing impossible poses or building a brand around looking like the perfect yoga teacher. Because that was never why I began. I started yoga because my back pain. Most people who know me personally know I’ve lived with chronic back problems for most of my life. Pain has been a familiar companion for many years. Some days are easy. Some days aren’t.
Even as I write this, I’m hunched down in one of my New Brunswick stays, waiting for my flight to Montreal this afternoon. I’m already thinking about the toll that twenty hours of flying from the Middle East to Eastern Canada takes on my back. This past week, I made sure to stay somewhere I could practice Yoga and train other methods that help relieve the tension and keep me functional. This is the reality of my body—and exactly why I continue to practice.
Without my practice, I have no doubt I would be living in a much different physical—and mental—state today. Yoga became the system that continually brought me back to myself. It taught me how to breathe when I wanted to tense. How to lengthen against gravity instead of collapsing into it. How to notice my body before it screamed for attention. How to move intelligently instead of forcefully. Over time, it became far more than stretching. It became maintenance.
