Antojos #2 and #3: Teaching the Yoga Sutras to Celebrate 1000 Yoga Teaching Hours

The last few months have flown by, with so much in my life changed or in the process of changing.  In the last year I've lost my maternal grandfather (who was, and in fact continues to be, a role model for how to be a good friend to all in my life), helped my mother recover from surgery (which came on the heels of my grandfather's death), and incurred two serious and, at least temporarily, debilitating injuries that brought my Ashtanga-Vinyasa yoga practice (something which has been a staple in my life for almost 15 years) to a complete halt for a while.

Looking back, they each struck the same chord, forcing me to step out of the busyness of life to contemplate the little time we actually have in this world, that we are all in the process of breaking down, and that we won't always have the means to accomplish what we'd like.  For a while, it was easy to feel directionless; too much going on to wrap my head around, let alone make sense of any of it and take direction from it.  But it turns out that the antojos I built this blog around are powerful drivers, perhaps because they function at a deeper level than reason.

When I finally had a moment and returned to my list of 40 Antojos, I realized I had, without thinking much about it, completed more than a few of them already and, if not on schedule to completing them before my 41st birthday, I'm at least not that far behind.

My yearnings fall into various categories, Yoga being one of the most prominent.  And two that I am especially proud of are having achieved 1,000 teaching hours since my yoga teacher training in 2009, and teaching the Yoga Sutras, the text that establishes the foundation of Classical Yoga.

Antojo #2: Achieve 1,000 Yoga Teaching Hours

What we know as the "yoga community" (whether U.S. or worldwide) is comprised of many different traditions, which have some things in common but which can also vary significantly in their language, practice and emphasis.  As such, there hasn't been an easy or elegant solution to the problem of certification and training.  Some traditions, like the Iyengar method, require years of practice, training and apprenticeship before you are allowed to teach.  The Ashtanga-Vinyasa method itself is highly dependent on the level of achievement in your own practice rather than in the number of years you've been practicing, honoring the Classical Yoga assertion that the level of effort and knowledge of a student translate to achievement.  Many modern methods, especially since the commercial boom, require only weeks of training and do not tie your ability to teach to the level of your practice.

The only effort (for many years) to establish a common criteria for teachers from all traditions came from Yoga Alliance (YA), which was established and popularized in the 90s with their 200 hour and 500 hour training requirements. YA required yoga schools to register their teacher training programs, providing details on the material that would be covered to make sure that it aligned with YA's philosophy of including training in physical practice, adjustments, yoga philosophy and human anatomy and physiology (until today, there is no requirement for teaching pranayama, or breathwork, meditation, or chanting, each of which is significant in many traditions).

YA has five different levels (http://www.yogaalliance.org/Credentialing/Credentials_for_Teachers) at which you can register:

• Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) 200, which means you've completed a 200 hour training in any tradition
• E-RYT 200 (the "E" is for "Experienced", which means you've completed the RYT 200 training AND since your training you've cataloged 1,000 teaching hours
• RYT 500, which means you've completed a 500 hour training in any tradition
• E-RYT 200/RYT 500, which means you've completed a 500 hour training AFTER having achieved your E-RYT 200 status
• And E-RYT 500, which means you've completed your RYT 500 AND 1,000 teaching hours (at least 500 of which came AFTER the RYT 500 training

I became a RYT 200 in 2009, after having trained at Infinite Yoga, the Ashtanga-Vinyasa shala in Little Italy I'd been training in since 2007.  Because of my day job, building up to 1,000 hours was not easy.  But I always valued it immensely.  I think most people look at the RYT 500 as the bigger contrast to the RYT 200.  But, for me (and to a great degree for YA), that credential of being "experienced" is the more important one (it's in fact the requirement that allows you to teach other teachers and give them continuing education units to maintain their YA registration), since it requires you put in your own effort on your own time.  It is not easy to complete a 200 or 500 hour training.  It's challenging physically, intellectually and emotionally.  It requires that you remove yourself from your daily routine and commit time to training.  But you enjoy the benefit of a support group in the fellow trainees in class who motivate you to continue and remind you of your goal when you forget.

Picture of Ashtanga Yoga Center San Diego

When you're tracking hours and teaching others trying to develop your observation skills, your style and your voice, it's all you and it's something that confronts your insecurities about doing the right thing, moving in the right direction, and about what you are worth as a teacher.

In June, I met my 1,000th hour and the YA representative who answered my call, whether or not she was picking up on my own enthusiasm, seemed as excited as I was for this achievement.

Antojo #3: Teaching the Yoga Sutras

As I approached my 1,000th teaching hour.  I decided to mark the occasion by having a donation based class.  My hope was to share that moment with my closest friends and students.  I imagined us working through a satisfying asana practice and then finishing off with fruit, chocolates and champagne.  

But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of a bunch of sweaty stinky people sitting down in a stuffy, hot and humid room to eat and drink.  So the idea came to me to instead teach a lecture.  Afterall, teaching yoga does not mean teaching asana only.  

So the idea of giving a lecture on the Yoga Sutras was born.  

The Sutras, if you have ever tried to read them, are often simple and to the point, but can just as easily slip into intensity and mystery.  My first exposure to them was in 2006, when I pursued my first yoga teacher training.  Not that I had any aspirations of teaching then.  I simply wanted to deepen my own practice.  And the Ashtanga Yoga Center San Diego (not to be confused with Tim Miller's Ashtanga Yoga Center in Encinitas; the San Diego center was based in Hillcrest and later Point Loma as well), which had been my second home for 5 years, was about to close its doors.  I felt like I needed to take the training to continue to teach myself what I wouldn't be able to learn with a teacher, at least for a while.  Tim's shala was 30 minutes away and that seemed a long way to drive and an expensive daily routine for a guy who had only a few years before moved from the Midwest, where gas prices weren't nearly as outlandish as they were (are) here.

The Sutras provide the foundation for what we understand today as Classical Yoga.  Their timing, origins, and authorship are not precisely known.  The best estimates we have suggest they were written within a few hundred year span that can be as early as a 250 B.C.E. to about 250 C.E.  It's content suggests something of the origins of the Sutras.  The style in which it was written is typical of many sacred texts, designed as manuals to be memorized and deciphered with the help of a teacher and personal practice.  It is general enough that the many different yoga factions that existed at that time, and which were often in conflict about specific techniques and the worship of personal deities (or the denial of a personal deity), would've found nothing to contest in them.  The Sutras don't mention even one asana (posture) and, though they mention the surrender to God as a useful spiritual practice, they never mention a specific personal deity (India has many, and factions often fight over them), and even suggest it is an optional practice (this has been attributed by many scholars to the presence, and competition, of Buddhism with Yoga).  

The author of the Sutras is the most mysterious of these, of course.  The Sutras are attributed to the sage Patanjali, whose own origins are not verifiable through documented history, and instead are described in poetic language.  This is consistent with India's approach to Truth, which does not require that it be relayed with facts.  In his most visually stunning depiction he has 1,000 radiant heads that emanate like the fanning crown of a cobra and likened to the cosmic snake, Adishesha, who serves as the meditative seat of Lord Vishnu.  

The Sutras have been translated and commented on for years, by yogis who adhere to Classical Yoga, swamis from the Vedanta school of thought, and even non-practitioners of yoga, most prominently among them Buddhists (who despite the many similarities in modern practice to modern yogis, have a fundamentally different philosophy and metaphysics) and Sanskrit scholars (who tend to adhere to literal translation).   With so much room for interpretation due to the sutra format, and so many different perspectives contributing to translations and commentaries, the Sutras have been no stranger to disputes, and are a notoriously difficult topic to cover well, let alone thoroughly.  

So the decision to teach them was not something I took lightly.  On the contrary, I spent a month preparing for it.  Having accepted that this was a ballsy undertaking, though, I figured I would go all the way and teach them in a very different way than I had been taught.  Rather than approach the topic sutra by sutra (which would take forever and would drown an unsuspecting audience in yogic metaphysics), or select the best known sutras and relay them (which might not have the proper context), I settled on creating a theme that would be appreciated by most people in the world of yoga: how the Yoga Sutras instruct we should conduct our practice.  So yes, some very popular sutras would be covered, but also some much less popular ones.

In addition, rather than sitting infront of a class with a white board, I also decided I would bring some of my engineering world influence and teach them via Powerpoint.  I hope the traditional yogis I know who are reading this were not in the middle of drinking something because I'm certain it either came out their nose or they're choking on it right now.  But hear me out.  There's alot of beautiful art and imagery alluded to by the Sutras, and I thought slides would be a good way to include that in the lecture.  Think more art history lecture and less business meeting lecture with bullet points.  

Here is the image that I chose for the title slide of the lecture on the Sutras:

I felt it represented the heart of the Sutras specifically and of Yoga Philosophy in general (care to guess why in the comments?).

I tried to get time at the studio where I normally teach, which is appropriately an Ashtanga-Vinyasa shala.  But schedule conflicts made that impossible and I instead asked a friend who owns a Kundalini studio (Mystic Water Kava Bar & Yoga Studio http://mysticwaterkavabar.com/), which ironically comes from a different tradition, if I could use her space to teach a donation based class.  Sometimes things work out differently than we planned but better than we expected.  The space was nothing short of ideal for the small class of friends and students who came to learn about the Yoga Sutras and then enjoy some sparkling apple cider, Eclipse Chocolat (http://eclipsechocolate.com/) truffles, and fruit.  

I won't say that it was easy.  I was definitely nervous.  But during the lecture everyone was engaged, and a number of students and fellow practitioners attending seemed especially excited to be exploring an aspect of yoga they didn't know even existed.

I'm not sure it made an immediate difference.  But yoga doesn't give instant results.  It plants seeds that, much like antojos, grow and bloom in their own time.