How Teaching Yoga Is Repairing My Relationship With My Body

I am the most unlikely person to become a yoga teacher.

When it comes to “helping people move with confidence and greater ease,” my role as a real estate broker is a more natural and obvious fit for my strengths.

In that role, I can harness my strengths in cognitive and emotional intelligence: my capacity for analytical thinking, synthesizing information, understanding clients needs, and guiding clients on the decisions that best align with their needs and values.

My Resistance to Teaching Yoga

In my role as a yoga teacher, I am forced into the realm of the body, which, for me, is rocky terrain.

My own relationship with my body is complicated.

Although I love to move and have always practiced a variety of sports and movement modalities, I have never moved with ease and grace.

I am uncoordinated, often clumsy, and prone to rare and freak accidents. It’s probably a miracle that I’ve never broken a bone.

My body may look fit and athletic, but once I start moving nobody is mistaking me for an elite athlete or even a graceful mover.

Movement is often slow and labored, and tinged with pain. And it’s not from a lack of dedication to practice. My gains in any sport or physical endeavor are often hard won through years of dedication to practicing the fundamentals. When my movement looks easy, it’s only because I’ve put in hours of work refining and practicing technique.

For most of my life, my relationship with my body has been fraught with tension; it often feels more like an antagonist than ally.

Engaging in physical practices — whether yoga, flying trapeze, weightlifting, or CrossFit — is never just about the “workout” or the outer work; it’s a transformational inner journey, a process of alchemy where I seek to better understand my body and repair our fractured relationship.

This, of course, is one of the fundamental purposes yoga. As one of my teachers says, “it’s a work-in, not a work-out.” The poses are merely tools to explore the relationship we have with ourselves in them.

Even though I have known for years that “yoga” is about much more than the physical poses, I was still resistant to becoming a yoga teacher.

I was overcome with imposter syndrome on both the outer and inner levels: How could I teach students to get into poses when I often struggle with them?

And, perhaps more profoundly, how can I remain in integrity by teaching a practice that often brings me so much frustration and misery in my body?

To be a yoga teacher requires me to be in my body — the place I’ve long escaped in favor of the comforts and safety of my mind.

My Surprise Insight From Teaching Yoga

After several years of doing yoga teacher trainings to deepen my own practice, I finally started teaching yoga on a regular basis.

The more I teach, the more I discover something oddly ironic:

Teaching yoga puts me in my joy.

Whether I am teaching a class or a private, hot power flow or yin, I am able to be present and connected. While teaching, my physical pains dissipate, my awkward clumsiness smooths out. I am able to be in the moment with my students, to hold space for their experience, to attune to their needs.

In my personal journey I’ve been graced by teachers who have helped me find portals of entry into my body.

Now I get to do the same for my students. There’s something so profoundly fulfilling in helping someone else have a new experience in their body, to help them find the portal of entry into their physical home, to hold space for a student as they have a new insight or awareness.

To hold space for the inner exploration and healing that is possible in a yoga class is one of the greatest joys I’ve experienced in my wide-ranging professional career.

Interestingly, this helps me feel better about the struggles I’ve had with my own body.

Teaching yoga turns my often-frustrating relationship with my body into a source of inspiration for both myself and those I guide.

In fact, the more I’m able to help others, the less I am in an antagonistic relationship with myself. Coming back into my “home” becomes easier. There’s less resistance from my body as I try to move.

Funny how things work.

Finding Gratitude Through Joy

In a recent workshop I took with Nevine Michaan, the creator of Katonah Yoga, her words resonated deeply:

When you find your joy, gratitude will be in the rearview mirror.

When you are in your joy, you look back at your life and see how all the pivotal decisions led you to this place of your joy. Decisions that might otherwise have looked like mistakes, or circumstances that may have seemed to be obstacles, suddenly reveal themselves as something else.

My journey into teaching yoga is a testament to this.

Suddenly, years of struggling to work my way into my body, to move with more confidence and greater ease, have a purpose: they help me better attune to the challenges my students have in moving.

Years of battling various physical pains help me approach my students with compassion and the knowledge of what can help them.

All the struggle I’ve had — and continue to have — with my own body is alchemized into a strength.

While my physical movements might still lack the power or grace of an elite athlete, I can see each stumble and clumsy step as a stepping stone in my journey, shaping my ability to connect with the challenges my students face.

In the moments when I’m teaching a class or working with a student privately, I no longer feel like the most unlikely person to become a yoga teacher.

My journey’s challenges are not obstacles but assets, and I find myself living a version of my highest calling.