"I Want You to See Other People"
I realized something over the past couple of days that I want to say. One of the worst things you can do as a teacher is to deceive your students. Your students should be able to trust you and I hope (I know) my students trust me. They can trust that I've been practicing for many years, have never "taken time off from yoga" and, that I fervently practice anything and everything I would ever preach. But not deceiving my students begins with not deceiving myself.
This is one of the hardest things about being a teacher AND one of the greatest things about yoga. You don't get to teach this beautiful practice without fully being its student. For a couple of years now, I've tried to be a better runner (I'm failing, I'll always try, I don't care :) I know that running will tighten my hamstrings (duh). But I've always thought "I don't need to do anything different, I practice all the time, movin' on." This is deception. I decided I was "flexible enough" and that I didn't need to balance my "extra" running with anything else "extra" in my practice. Yoga doesn't let you do that. It might take a while, poking you here and there, "Feel that? How about this?" until finally yoga punches you in the face, "You feel me now?" For me, through talking to a good friend, I realized that ignoring my tightness finally affected my progress in handstands (something I loooooooove.) So I've humbly taken some steps back, looked at my practice and fixed it. But this deception in my own practice has come through in my teaching. It's small, it's changed now and forever and may never even be noticed by my students but...IT WAS A THING.
My point is that, I have my favorite teachers that I would be happy to practice with exclusively every day until the end of time but, I know they're human. I know that sometimes I have to listen to others because its what we all need. If I serve as that to you, if I'm your favorite teacher, I want to see you every day. But I can't. You have to see other people (sometimes :) If you read all the way to this point because you thought I was a free-thinking, "you can date me and lots of other people at the same time" person, um...shove it up your asana, I'm all about monogamy :) xoxoxo