Sitting at the Edge...

So I originally said that my training weekend posts would be short but I just have to get some of this stuff off my chest! These weekends tend to be a bit of a mind blow that I come home and am completely frazzled.  Something that I loved and was so natural to me is now flipped completely upside down, inside out, round and round and back upside down again. It feels like it never goes back right side up again.

I have never thought about each pose with such depth and I just knew I was enjoying what I was doing.  Now, when I am being studied in a pose, I am being told to do too many things at once. I thought it felt good before but I am being told it can feel even better. I am also being told that although my pose isnt' wrong, it's just not optimal. It could lead to the pose causing me more harm then good if I try to expand to the full expression of the pose. It's like thinking you know something, then being told to go back to its original foundation as maybe your foundation was initially laid wrong. 

Now when I go to public classes I don't think I am actually doing my practice to my optimal or how I am being taught in my training. I get angry with myself but I am so fresh to learning about all these new areas of the bodies that I tend to get over whelmed in a public class and go back to my old tenancies. I go back to my good, comfortable familiar.  I know, in a forward fold, I should inner rotate thighs, hug shins, anterior tilt the pelvis, tuck the tail bone, micro bend the knees, keep spine long and elongated...but it just so fresh and so raw and so new, I  just fold. When I just fold, I now know I hyper extend my knees, I don't tuck my tail. I reach for the floor when maybe I should be reaching for a block instead. Before I didn't know this but now I do and I have to make a choice to choose the fullest potential of a pose or choose what's familiar.

Its really frustrating. I feel like I am sitting at the edge of a cliff.  I am not ready to jump off and go right into the future.  The past is so easy, comforting and mostly just familiar. The thing about sitting on the edge of a cliff though is that its uncomfortable. If you have gotten to the edge, you now know that either way you fall there is going to be an asset and a peril.  Go back to who you were before and not have to deal with the unfamiliar. In the same regard, you go back to the safety of the familiar and you never grow. If you jump off the cliff you are defiantly going to have to face new roadblocks and challenges. But if you jump, you may soar.

When it comes to the teacher training, the poses are one thing. Deep inside, I know that that is just going to take time to practice what I am learning so it becomes second nature. I will choose optimal because optimal will be my new familiar.  I also am beginning to understand that optimal is always changing.

What  I am really finding is how much this relates with my life outside of yoga. I am really embracing this training as an opportunity to see the pose as more than just the pose.  Yoga means to 'yoke' the body and the mind together.  I really want to find out who I am and who I am to become. Who will I allow myself to be? I don't want to stay in the past if I am being given these wonderful tools to fully embrace the most optimal person I can be. At the same time, do I have the energy to venture in the new and unfamiliar when things have been so comforting back here? Was there anything wrong with back here? Could there be more I can do and things I can unlock about myself if I can get past the discomfort of being uncomfortable? I think that answer may be in the next chapter...

Namaste xo.