14 episodes
the whole beautiful Erin Jade
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- Society & Culture
If a yoga teacher quits doing postures and no one is witness, or if everyone is there and they shake their heads in disbelief, or if they ask for real yoga, wistfully, like the old days, and if she has students now but feels as if she has woken from a long held spell cast upon her by unknown forces and is now awake for the first time in many years, well what is she then?
From the beginning, and I started teaching yoga in the winter of 2005, I wrote vignettes captured along the way about students, coworkers, my own personal growth and practice. I was learning as I went, looking for definition, poorly equipped I think in retrospect to help people in many ways and sufficiently equipped in others. I wrote about trainings and fallings-out with employers and business challenges, keeping intermittent diaries about various confounding and often troubling aspects of the work.
It’s often a job with very little support. There are no peer reviews or supervision and likely few fellow teachers to interact with especially if you’re entirely self employed.
Most of the teachers I’ve known have had a primary earning partner and teach a handful of classes at most. Career teachers are few and far between and must now compete with a saturated market both in person and online.
This podcast tells this story in the form of essays, notes, journal entries and stories as true and accurately as I can remember. Names have been changed, identities disguised. All stories filter through individual lenses but I aim to be fair and generous in my telling and never to assume clarity where there is none.
My personal stories surely intersect and overlap with common and universal ones, capturing similar under and over tones as yours, representing archetypal themes. Ultimately we tell our stories to feel part of something. To represent and re-examine the human condition.
Yoga itself is complex and the job of contemporary teaching is also wildly varied, slippery to define, rewarding and exasperating in equal measure. There is a revolution going on right now in the field and I am only one of thousands asking probing questions of its intention, efficacy, promise, history, underpinnings and tackling the subsequent questions about where we go from here? This podcast also provides a window in my process of questioning, wrestling, exploring and discovering.
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Yoga Nidra For You
An 18 minute basic yoga nidra, guided relaxation for your restoration and recalibration
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Origin Stories
The group fitness and I came of age together and when I started paying attention to it again some twenty years later there was Nia and Zumba, mat Pilates, step-aerobics, Hip Hop and yoga. Rodney Yee appeared on Oprah, leading hundreds of live viewers through a simple Iyengar style class replete with breathing and shivasava and the gravitas of Oprah’s testimonial; her life enriched by what was still something a few people with armpit hair did in their living rooms.
When I first started teaching a small handful of students in 2005, I tried to figure out how to rotate Scott’s inner elbows outwards in downward facing dog because that was what I was I was taught in my teacher training: Legs at hip width, arms at shoulder width and inner elbows facing forward. Scott was a globally tensioned body type whose morphology and shoulder girdle mobility dictated that his elbows would neither straighten or rotate. I was remarkably ill-equipped to lead large groups of people in what was perceived to be safe therapeutic mindful exercise, but at least I knew to say don’t do it if it hurts.
Playlist:
Springfish: by Gillicuddy
Dirt 1: by Joachim Nilsson
Dusk til Dawn: by Henrik Andersson
Dual Controls: by Martin Klem
Get Into It: by Johan Hynyn
Crows: by Dust Follows
Runaway Deer: by Arc De Soleil
Teenage Color: by Niklas Ahlstrom
Tape Eater: by Pietnaska
Variation on a Theme by Rilke
by Denise Levertov
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task, The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
Playlist:
Springfish: by Gillicuddy
Dirt 1: by Joachim Nilsson
Dusk til Dawn: by Henrik Andersson
Dual Controls: by Martin Klem
Get Into It: by Johan Hynyn
Crows: by Dust Follows
Runaway Deer: by Arc De Soleil
Teenage Color: by Niklas Ahlstrom
Tape Eater: by Pietnaska -
What Do Children Need to Learn
1. Song: Alright Lover / Artist: Snow Wave
2. Song: Sad Cyclops / Artist: Podington Bear
Ending quote by Erin Clabough, PhD from her book Second Nature: How Parents Can Use Neuroscience to Help Kids to Develop Creativity, Empathy & Self Control