At the end of June I completed a 230-hour yoga teacher training with Root Center for Yoga and Sacred Studies. I’m about to add to that intense 32-week swim into the broad and endless ocean of yoga.
I will continue with a 50-hour apprenticeship during the coming months. It’s a path to deepen and refine my yoga practice. I will receive continued support and guidance that will help me to solidify my confidence as a yoga teacher.
Yoga. It’s so much more than poses and memorizing instructions. It’s a philosophy, a spiritual approach to daily life. Awareness, gratitude, love, compassion. It’s application of a better me. As a teacher, it’s a practice of me helping you be the you you call better.
The RootEd training I recently completed graduated began with Jessica Patterson, owner/director of Root, is about empowerment and realizing the tools in each of us to be our authentic selves.
It’s about exploring the landscape within ourselves. It’s about cracking ourselves open, seeing what’s there and figuring out how to move forward with it.
So, there is discomfort. There is uncertainty. There is a lot of treading water among waves I’ve churned up to figure out who I really am and how I will walk in the world, the artist and teacher I will be am, the dad and husband I am.
The map is for me to create, as I feel out the terrain within.
That’s a significant part of why Humanitou has evolved beyond the one project of publishing conversations about creativity and humanness. It’s about that terrain and that map, about sharing what I see and inviting others to see their true selves.
The current tagline in this Humanitou evolution is “the yoga of humanness + creativity.”
Yoga means union. It’s the connection of mind, body and spirit. It’s the realization of wholeness within us. It’s the uniting of me with me, you with you, me with you and beyond.
Through Humanitou, I connect with others and their stories of being raw and real, and how they express it without, or despite, fear.
Sharing yoga along with those stories of humanness and creativity on Humanitou is my using writing as a tool to process my practice of all that is yoga. It’s a platform to share it forward with those who also ask questions of themselves. It’s service. It’s contribution.
My writing yoga is a form of learning and, for those who see it as such, teaching.
Who I Am vs. Should Be
I have spent much of a lifetime catching hints of who I am while living who I “should” be. I was raised in the ultimate setting of convention, a son of teachers and preachers in a small Midwestern town of conservative non-questioners. Toe the line, do as you’re told.
And I have questioned and questioned and questioned. In church as a child. In classrooms and corporate “principals’ offices.” While standing in Army boots, facing shiny collars that empowered the gods of my existence.
I’ve not fit in.
Emotion swells as I face that feeling: I’ve not fit in …
And now I do.
There is a place for my questions, teachers who open-heartedly accept them, and a community of souls for me to explore them with.
The fit, however, is less about that spiritual community, or satsang. Or the extraordinarily creative community I live in and am growing into. It first is about the realization I’ve lived more than 40 years feeling disconnected from the me I am meant to be.
And now I do not.
Through more than seven months of immersive, soul-opening work with teachers and peers, I’ve come to a more peaceful, grateful place than I’ve ever known. I am ready to share that, in writing and on the mat.
The truth for all of us is: I am (so ham). I am worthy. I am whole. I am yoga.
