Its 5am. Im sitting at the kitchen table, my now regular writing spot.
After years of living by choice with very minimal furniture and no table and chairs, I have to admit, sitting up at a table to write is more comfortable. Rod laughs at me ‘You’ve been converted! You need to go to chair sitters anonymous!’
These mornings are very precious. I’ve got hours of silence before the others get up. We live in an old, creaky house with hardwood timber floors and blue walls. The house is full of character. It was half built by the previous owner who purchased the block in the 80’s. Whilst he was (rather haphazardly) building the main house he lived in a shack at the bottom of the property towards the dam. This shack still remains, leaning at a precarious looking angle, as if any moment it will collapse and become one with the forest floor.
Disassembling and recycling what we can is just one of the hundreds of projects to start, continue and finish around the property. ‘We will get to it’. Rod says, as we both fly around devoting endless hours to our own businesses and the daily running of the house, including the never ending questions of ‘what will we have for dinner’ and ‘how can we get more vegetables into Kane’ who’s just about to turn 13 and is celebrating the first day of the school holidays with (in his words) ‘a very long sleep in’.
Rod bought the property in his early twenties, some 26 years ago. The house was unfinished. The now luscious gardens were bare earth. He could hardly afford it but he scraped the money together for the deposit at a time when house prices allowed young people with not much money to do things like that. For years he simultaneously worked on finishing the house, planting the gardens and starting his own sign writing and stump grinding businesses. The house is nestled in a valley just north of Batemans Bay, set on 7 acres of gum forest with a dam at the bottom. When it rains there’s a little creek that runs around the edge of the property. In the afternoon the sun starts to climb down the mountain range to the West and every tree is turned to gold. I like to walk and even run on occasion along the fire trails carved into the impenetrable bush. I took Mum and Dad walking when they were here.
How far does this track go? Mum asked. Forever. I said.
In England there’s only so far you can walk before you hit a road, a house or a motorway. Even after all these years the space and freedom is still intoxicating. It gets into my bones and reminds me how small I really am. I’ll often lie down on the prickly dry leaves in a sunny patch, looking up at the now familiar yet always astounding eucalypt canopy. I always come back from these walks changed somehow, as if i’ve beens scrubbed clean.
The house is rather eccentric, like the man who built it, although I have to admit I’ve never met him, I can only assume from the fire place that is way off centre, the random doors that go nowhere and the Kookaburra stained glass (how did he know they are my favourite bird?!)
There’s no insulation, especially since I insisted on taking down all the curtains.
It’s freezing in winter and our deck is currently ’the shed’ that is yet to be built and is scattered with all kinds of tools, paint, hardware and multiplying bikes. Sometimes I’ll feel overwhelmed about the amount of work to do and spend a frenzied day writing lists and cleaning everything I can, but regardless, I’ve never been happier. Each morning I give thanks to twenty something year old Rod for securing this magical place for us all to live.
Since I moved in I’ve filled the house with plants, candles, incense, crystals, sheepskin rugs, paintings and more plants. I’ve moved the furniture around and got rid of the TV in the lounge room that no one ever watched. I’ve adorned the walls with paintings, including our own attempts at watercolours that actually look surprisingly good in their light wood frames. The overhead lights are bright white but I’m gradually (surreptitiously!) changing them all to soft, warm yellow. When the sun goes down I like very low light and we’re learning to compromise. ‘I like to see what I’m eating’ Rod says as we eat dinner by candlelight. It’s incredible what some plants, rugs and good lighting can do.
It’s almost a month since our wedding, which simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday. I’ve been thinking a lot about the passing of time. We give a certain weight to big life events like getting married, moving house, changing jobs, having children, going on overseas trips and of course these things are important rites of passage, but really all we have is now. Whether I’m walking down ‘the aisle’ or walking to my car, I’m in the same now.
Life is a series of moments. We are here. Then the moment is gone. Evaporated instantly into nothing. Where does the past go? This is something I’ve been contemplating in the early morning as the house sleeps.
~
In the studio we’ve been exploring the four agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
They are:
Be impeccable with your word
Dont take anything personally
Dont make assumptions
Always do your best
These are simple and effective teachings to check in with regularly, especially if we’re experiencing any kind of conflict or agitation in our relationships. For years I had them stuck above my kitchen sink on curling post it notes. I’ve used these four agreements extensively, in teacher trainings, workshops and retreats. Still, I forgot about them for a while, until my friend Lucy suggested bringing them in as class themes.
I’ve noticed that whenever I think ‘oh, I know that’ and stop practicing, I slip back into old habits. I got so familiar with the four agreements that my mind went into ‘oh yeah I’ve got that’ and then I stopped applying them. I notice I do this with a lot of things. I need to remember, it’s the ‘doing it’ that transforms me, not the result.
The Four Agreements are essential to apply in any kind of teaching role. Especially teaching yoga.
Teaching yoga requires vulnerability, and as we know from Brene Brown’s work, vulnerability equals courage.
Let’s say you fall in love with the practice of yoga. You decide to deepen your understanding through study. You take a yoga teacher training. You start to understand the philosophical concepts of yoga, first hearing, then holding, then memorising, then embodying and eventually sharing them. You care deeply about the practice. You care deeply about your students. There is naturally a lot of fear that comes up in this learning process.
My first couple of years of teaching were a slog. I worked extremely hard to be ‘a good yoga teacher’. I would get so nervous the night before my class I couldn’t eat or sleep. I would have nightmares about a myriad of embarrassing scenarios, like forgetting to put clothes on or forgetting how to speak.
Thankfully I had a strong, supportive mentor during this intense growth phase. Without Mathew Bergan I would have given up a long time ago. When I first arrived back in Australia after a year in Canada freezing my butt off, I googled yoga teacher training and clicked on the first one that came up. I liked the logo. That will do I thought.
This rather haphazard decision making process turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Had I done my teacher training with one of the more well known studios at the time I’m not sure I would have lasted. Mathew was, and still is, one of a kind. He believed in me and he poured a huge amount of time and energy into me and my teaching.
I was one of the weakest teachers in my YTT group. My voice was so quiet no one could hear me. I was constantly forgetting my left and rights (nothing changed there!). I was terrible with time and was always getting confused about when to finish the class. I was so shy my voice would shake which didn’t instil a huge amount of confidence in my students or Matt but I knew, and he knew, I had something. Practical aspects aside, I had a natural gift for words and could lead a meditation or talk about philosophy seemingly effortlessly. The cueing, voice, alignment, timing, basically everything else was a huge challenge for me.
I had no money but I had good organisational skills. I was good with systems. Matt was in the process of transitioning to an online booking system. He needed help. I needed him to mentor me. It was a match made in grungy Inner West Sydney heaven.
We soon became inseparable. We worked together for 4 years, spending most days sitting in the little office behind the studio, scheming and hatching creative and often ridiculous plans including Anthropic Skin, our short lived clothing brand featuring designs from the Inner West’s notorious tattoo artists and street artists.
We both split from long term partners during that time and spent a lot of time discussing our Tinder dates (me) and the gay equivalent (him). I learnt a lot about the gay scene in Sydney. I remember Mathew saying to me once, why are you going to meet this guy for coffee? What’s the point of that? What a waste of time. Why not get straight to the action.
Dating stories aside, Mathew Bergan is a take-no-shit, bold and creative Manifestor who doesn’t follow the crowd.
He had the ideas.
I had the energy and speed to implement them.
We had a lot of parties, including a catwalk show for Anthropic Skin that I’ll never forget, complete with live drum solo from my then boyfriend that was so loud the roof shook. I’m sure there are eardrums that never recovered.
Mat did things his way. He taught me a lot. He showed me that it was possible to do business on your terms. After managing the studio for 4 years I was convinced of two things
I can get shit done
I would never (NEVER) own a studio because I would never (NEVER) be up for that level of responsibility. I saw how hard it was and it was a hell no. (the universe is funny like that)
A couple of times a week Matt would come to my class and sit in the back with a scowl on his face, furiously writing notes. He never smiled. Sometimes he would even interrupt the class to correct me about something. It was old school teaching, very different from the way I lead teacher trainings. At the end of each class I’d sit down and brace myself. He was kind and patient but very firm on what he believed was the right way to teach. I needed this structure. I needed boundaries to make up for my almost complete lack of them. I learnt a lot, I learnt what to take on and what to keep doing my way.
More than anything I learnt to not take things personally.
I’ll never forget our last mentor session. He sat down and looked at me for a long time.
‘That was good’. He said. And that was it.
Fast forward quite a few years. I’m own a yoga studio. I employ teachers and a studio manager. People look to me to make decisions all the time, which still freaks me out if I’m honest. But somehow I’m here. I’m doing it.
~
It sounds obvious but the way I got better at teaching was by teaching. I threw myself into it with an almost deranged amount of energy.
I wasn’t teaching yoga for fun. It was never my side hustle. It was always my only job. When I did my teacher training I was waiting tables and pouring beers. I had no qualifications. I’d never been to university. I had no back up plan. This was it. I had to teach as much as possible to earn enough money to pay rent, eat and have a good time in Inner West Sydney. At the time that was about 25 classes a week. I said yes to everything. I taught 7 days a week. I didn’t have a day off for over a year.
It’s easy to get seduced by the idea that just because you love something, just because you’re here on this earth to do just that, it won’t be hard.
In my experience that is simply not true. Teaching yoga and getting over my fear of speaking in public, being seen, getting it wrong and being ridiculed, has been the most challenging thing I’ve done, and by far the most rewarding.
Running my own business is also the hardest and most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
Every time I face these challenges I feel my world expand just that tiny bit more.
It would have been easy to stop teaching.
It would have been easy to believe the stories about the yoga teaching market being saturated so what’s the point.
It would have been easy to close the studio when the shit hit the fan and the class numbers dwindled to almost nothing.
It would have been easy to give up but I knew, it might be easy, but I’d always regret it.
When I taught my first class and messed it up big time I could have decided teaching wasn’t for me.
If I’d ran away from that initial discomfort I would have stayed in the same place.
My world would have shrunk and continued to shrink. BUT. I dusted myself off and got on with it. I kept teaching. No matter how many embarrassing scenarios, no matter how many no shows, no matter how many people rolled their eyes or walked out of my classes or said ‘this isn’t yoga’, no matter what happened, I kept teaching.
I like to say I expanded my comfort zone. I didn’t get out of it. It’s still here. I still feel the edges of it all the time, especially when I feel like I’ve made a bad decision or let someone down.
Teaching yoga brings me into direct contact with the four agreements every day.
As a new teacher I was constantly making assumptions based on people’s facial expressions.
What I’ve worked out is, most people have ‘yoga-face’. They are concentrating on their breath, their right foot, whatever you’ve told them to concentrate on. They’re not going to be smiling at you through the whole class.
This can be disconcerting at first.
Usually the people who looked the most bored would be the ones to find me after class, breathless and enthusiastic, saying ‘that class changed my life!’ ‘I loved it!!’ ‘When do you teach next!’ (And of course the trap to avoid is taking even that personally)
The moment you start making assumptions about how your work is being received, it’s all over.
The moment you come from that place of ‘what do they want’ versus, ‘what feels right to me’ it’s all over.
The most important thing I’ve learnt (am learning) through all this is:
ITS NOT MY JOB TO PROVE MY WORTH
IT IS MY JOB TO KNOW MY WORTH
This was an absolutely beautiful read! “It’s easy to get seduced by the idea that just because you love something, just because you’re here on this earth to do just that, it won’t be hard.” Oof this resonated with me so much. I think the things that challenge us the most are the things that we should lean into. And that we should practice “failing forward.” Because if you’re not failing, you’re not growing. It’s also such a brave choice to take this path. Thank you for your words 🤍