I resisted during the first round of lock downs taking my yoga classes online, after a difficult week of putting together a youtube video and editing and compressing and all the things I am still learning about, I threw my hands up and said that home schooling and this level of stress was not going to work. It also just felt like a special time, a time when my son needed my full attention, all of me. I enjoyed the slowing down, the pace became peaceful and we were all aware I suppose that this was a rare moment in history. I write about my experience here. I had the opportunity to connect with my son on a level and in a way that was kind of magical, not without its difficulties and its “on my knees” moments of course.
Resistance is futile
This spin on the lockdown merry-go-round I felt I needed to keep in contact with my students and offer something that could be of service. This time the effects have felt different, deeper, darker maybe. With Winter on our doorsteps and the looming reduced and redacted “new normal” Covid Christmas, it felt like the time was right or maybe more now or never. And so just like I imagine the Christmas day swimmers feel leaping in for their first breath of sea frigidness, I leapt into the online teaching ocean. I imagine, like those brave swimmers, who find they in fact adjust quite quickly to the temperature and find the experience both exhilarating and refreshing, I have found myself adapting to online yoga teaching with much less fuss and floundering than I anticipated. And while I know that many yoga teachers have gone this path and many have been in fact doing it for years, it is yet another notch in my belt of “things I never imagined doing”, that started with traveling the globe alone, continued with teaching my first yoga class and now sees me taking an intrepid trek into technology. One thing we can agree Covid has done is push us out of our comfort zones, unwillingly and not without protest, yet here we are, as humans, simply adapting, as we always do.
Your Vibe Attracts Your Tribe
I think of myself as old fashioned in the respect of knowing the energy I hold in the room for my students is a large part of the my job as a teacher, creating a space for people to come and find peace and ease in their bodies and minds, giving people permission to feel whatever they feel without judgment is as much yoga as the asana and yoga flows I construct with my students in mind. Yet I hope that through wifi and a screen I still bring a hint of my own vibe to my lovely yoga tribe.
To be honest I have been blown away by the support of some of the beautiful souls who have joined me on my online teaching journey, many of them just as daunted as me to be begin. I know it is not for everyone, I know it is unfamiliar, I know the resistance that comes up all too well. How could it be the same? And simply put it’s not the same, it is different, but it works. It has its advantages, no cold evenings in a freezing hall, no dark nights traveling the roads home. Students can practice in their pj’s, have a hot tea and a comfy sofa to rest on immediately after they’ve finished or just lay down on their mat half way through and say ‘I’ll just take it easy today’ with no one to care, cameras off. It’s not the same, yet the feedback has been awe inspiring. “Keeping me sane” is a common remark from students. And knowing, simply, that people get something, anything, that they need, that they can take from an hour in a zoom class to get them through, at this the most unusual time of our collective experience, is enough to keep me wading in to this ocean of online teaching. We will have other moments in our studios and halls, together in the same room again, feeling that wonderful yoga community energy we all crave, and it will be all the sweeter when we do. So for now let us indulge in the advantages zoom offers, enjoy the cosy evenings in, the rainy days where we don’t have to leave the house or even take a shower to get on our mat! Plus we get to do yoga with our pets.
