I’ll be honest with you…

My teaching had become uninspired. I was feeling the monotony of teaching the same styles and formats of classes, and it was getting harder and harder to get myself amped up. The fast and furious yoga wasn’t suiting my body, and I was starting to feel like I was lying to my students.

No one told me this was a normal part of teaching yoga – I thought I was inherently flawed.

(You’re not flawed if you feel this way, too)

I needed inspiration from a completely different kind of teacher, with a completely different kind of yoga. When a friend invited me to study with Bernie Clark for an extended training in British Columbia, I jumped at the chance. I wasn’t even very excited about Yin Yoga, I was just exhausted and uninspired, and I was grasping at straws.

The training changed the way I look at yoga.

You see, I think that a balanced practice is more than sun salutations and vigorous or heated classes – a balanced practice has elements that address muscles, bones, connective tissue – it includes breath work and asana, movement and stillness.

There is something sacred about stillness.

It feels so much better than the rat race – faster, fitter, more efficient, more robotic.

Yin Yoga has changed my practice and my life. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Bernie Clark, and I’ll be the first to say if he’s offering a training, you should take it. Forget mine. Take the plunge. Go spend a week in the wilderness with BC in BC. Bernie and I are similar in many ways – we both have a “hard science” background and a storyteller’s heart, and I hope that I carry his intention forward.

I never intended to teach people how to teach Yin Yoga…

…but my friend and co-teacher Jen Wilking of Anatomy for Yogis asked me (a few times) to put together a program based on what I had learned. So I sat down and created an eight hour training based on Bernie’s book The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga, which I used as a required text for my program. I had eight wonderful students, who raved about what they had learned.

So I did it again.

And again.

And the rest is history.

Except.

My students started teaching Yin, and sharing their inspired teaching with the world. They asked for more, and Level 2 was born, intended for those who have already been teaching Yin but wanted more.

And now it is your turn. Is this a leaf you’re ready to turn? A flavor you’re willing to try? Because once you experience what a balanced practice is, you may never go back to your bump and grind practice again…