First blog of the year - about time too

Sunday January 19th 2008

Yoga Teacher Training Course, Victoria, London

Saturday

I can't believe I'm only just getting round to updating our blog - a month after the last entry.

Our yoga teacher training course re-commenced today after more than a month off and what a surprise - only four people turned up. One person - Sarah - was getting married this weekend so she has a good excuse. And Christina has apparently moved off our course onto the new course starting in a few weeks time. A shame as I thought she was rather a fun member of our group. Still she was a bit behind everyone else so maybe its not such a bad plan. But no one has any idea about any of the other people missing. The September course is also running this weekend and it is apparently full today over at Oxford Circus

So today it is just Eve, Tracy, Rhea and myself. Elena decides to re-organise her plan and start with a class for couple of hours. This is actually very good, though extremely tiring. Lots of postures held for longer than normal to get our alignment sorted out. All of us are rather struggling to keep going. No doubt we have not been practicing enough over the past few weeks. And Rhea has a bad cold as well. Much to my surprise, Elena is quite complimentary on how I'm doing with my practice - my downward dog is now excellent apparently!

For most of the rest of the day, we complete the missing posture lab notes on standing positions and then do the first half of the seated postures. My working sheets are now completely covered with additional notes and I am going to have to spend quite some time updating them all.

I am staying at a new hotel yet again, this time in Victoria and not far from the course setting. And it is even worse than the really dreadful one that I stayed at last time. I have decided to re-think my choice of hotels for the remainder of the course. It would be nice to stay somewhere that actually had a bath for a change. Instead I am left to ponder on whether it is worthwhile to troop up to Leicester Square for a back and shoulder massage at the Chinese medicine centre. But tonight I am too tired and I have a bit of food and am back at the hotel for an evening's reading and listening to music on the new ipod.

Sunday

Things are even odder this morning as only two of us turn up - Eve and myself. Indeed at 10:00 there is just me and Nita there. We are supposed to be doing a Posture Lab on seated postures together with some work on adjusting and use of props. As a result of there just being the two of us, this turns into a really intense day's work with both Eve and me able to really get into the detail of what we are doing in a way that isn't possible when there is a full class. So in a strange way, it is actually better for us two.

Nita only teaches a couple of the course sessions but is very good. Eve and I take turns to try and teach various seated postures and I can clearly tell that I am getting better at explaining postures to other poeple. Nita has a lot of additional points on teaching technique so I felt the day was actually really good.

The afternoon is taught by Elena and it is clear that both Eve and I are flagging as the afternoon moves on. So we take advantage of any opportunity we can to take a breather and chat about a wider range of yoga things.

Elena also asks quite a bit about Well Being Breaks and the financial aspects of the business. I bought the new Yoga Journal today and we have our small advert in the Directory section. This might be the only time that I am mentioned in Yoga Journal! Elena seems to be moving towards the idea of doing retreats again at some point in the future.

A terribly slow journey home on the coach for some reason. An odd weekend - wonder what the next weekend will turn up