Leaving Yoga

I left yoga today--well, teaching yoga anyway. My request for a leave of absence was accepted today, so come November 1, I won't be teaching any longer.

For those of you who've known me for a number of years, you might find my decision to take a leave of absence surprising. Once, I lived and breathed yoga. I loved teaching it and sharing my joy for it with others. Now? Not so much. Was it burnout? Perhaps. I'd say my decision to take a break is a combination of many factors.

What Is a Good Yogi?
For the past few years, as I've bounced between jobs and taken on more responsibilities at home (i.e., overcame the fears that drove me away from the role of mother), I've made less and less time for yoga when, if I were a better yoga student and practitioner, I'd have been making more time for it. But instead I began to doubt my practice as it diminished, and I began to seriously doubt my effectiveness as a teacher. As I moved further and further away from yoga, I seriously began to doubt my worthiness to be a yoga teacher and to even call myself a yoga practitioner.

But I'll say in my defense that I haven't exactly twiddled my thumbs during the times when I might once have been practicing. No, that time I spent on other pursuits, other interests. Am I a bad yogi for finding other things to pursue? Does that mean my interest in yoga was just a passing thing? No, I don't think so--or at least that's what I tell myself. Yoga has given me too much, has helped me change my life too much for it just to have been a passing fad. And considering how much I struggled with the decision, agonized over the choice of whether or not to continue teaching, I don't think I'd have expended that much energy over a passing fad.

What made me finally decide to take a break from teaching is my kid, who just so happened to be the reason I pursued yoga teacher training in the first place. Yup, that's right, Gentle Reader: I put my name in the pot for a teacher training scholarship because I wanted to get away from my infant son because I doubted my abilities to be a good mom and figured he'd be better off if I weren't around much. And now I'm walking away from teaching for a while because I believe he needs me around more--or at least I think that if I spend more time with him helping him learn some of the things I should have been helping him learn much earlier, I won't be burdened with so much guilt over being a bad mom.

Plus there's the whole issue of a household that needs to be run. Let me tell you, trying to get laundry done along with perhaps a little light housecleaning or baking or whatever else I might like to do on a Sunday morning along with getting my body and mind ready to teach a yoga class that's smack-dab in the middle of the day just...well, it throws your whole day off. There's not much time in the morning to get things done, and there's not much time in the afternoon after class to get things done. That sort of schedule just doesn't work anymore for us here at Chez Boeckman-Walker. A person gets tired of being frantic all the time.

So I'm transitioning out of being an active yoga teacher. Will I come back to it? I hope to. I can't imagine never teaching again. I pray that a complacency doesn't take over that prevents me from going back. And I know it'll be tough to get back on the schedule at the studio since it has a lot of teachers. But for now, I know it's time to be present for my family. That's my yoga practice now.