Thursday 20 June 2013

Teaching yoga with Autoimmune

I have thought about this quite a lot recently and have been just now as I plan to teach yoga for a few hours this evening. There is this idea amongst many students that yoga teachers have to be paragons of health, that somehow yoga makes us immune to any illness or disease, catch a cold and the reaction is "oh I thought you did yoga" this has made me quite worried and reluctant to be open about being ill, I don't for example talk about it a huge amount on facebook. I don't want to put people off coming to class, it is after all my livelihood.

Then this afternoon I realised it should make people more keen to come to class, I have had this for ten years. It has taken that long for the doctors to actually figure out what was going on. During that whole time I practiced and a lot of it I taught. There have been good days and bad days as far as practice goes and weeks were I was bordering on comatose and couldn't practice. However I have consistently continued and am utterly convinced without it I would have been far, far worse. That I hope will lead people to realise that yes they can do it, you don't have to be a twenty years old gym body to be a yogi. Anyone can practice to their own degree, I have days where I have to slow it down, other days I can romp through a very strong practice. It's about listening to your body and doing what is right rather than following a set of rules. I hope that as I become more open my students will realise that I my personal experience puts me in a unique position to understand their struggles rather than it putting them off.


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