So you wanna be a Yoga Teacher? What it’s Really Like

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So thanks to this blog, I’ve had a lot of people reaching out to me about yoga, yoga teaching, and yoga teacher training 🙂

It’s so wonderful to hear from people… and to know that the love of yoga abounds.

Given the many people seeking answers to help them on their own journey, I’ve decided to write about what the journey has been like for me – in the practical sense. I often talk about my emotional, mental, and spiritual journey but not really about my career – so here it is. (READ: The Journey So Far)

Just a few things before I start though — these are my opinions and experiences and I can’t speak for all yoga teachers. I haven’t been teaching that long either so to be honest, I feel a little shy about sharing but hey – whatever helps 🙂 If you want a comprehensive view, maybe ask other teachers too. Maybe try the Yoga Teachers of Manila.

I’m also speaking as someone in the Philippine setting, Manila to be exact. Although I’m sure we yoga teachers share a lot of common experiences 🙂 The questions I will answer are just the few frequently asked ones so if you have more, do leave one in the comments.

Here goes…

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What I Got from my Life Coach

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“So, is life coaching like getting coached on a sport – except the sport is my life?”

This question may sound a little ditzy but whoever asks that is actually on to something.

To most of us, life coaching sounds like an awesome idea and, at the same time, a completely vague concept. What is it?

In its simplest form, life coaching is just a long conversation between two people where one person needs help figuring something out and the other person, your coach, commits to helping  by being a sounding board, a truth teller, an advocate and, an accountability partner.

A coach is basically your go-to person for developing your own clarity, direction and, optimism. Through asking great, powerful questions, providing you structure and empowering you to create solutions, life coaches walk with you towards defining your dreams, achieving personal goals and, breaking through to the next level in your self-awareness and performance.

Still confusing? Yeah, I know right? When there are a whole lot of positive words just strung together, what they all actually mean can fly over our head. To keep us on the ground, just like coaches do, I’ve spoken to three people who’ve worked with life coaches before. They shared what they got from their conversations with a life coach.

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Yoga teachers of Manila: Rach Bonifacio

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Back when I was on the student’s side of the yoga classroom, teachers always seemed so impenetrable in their calm happiness, and sometimes even, otherworldly. Now that I’m a yoga teacher myself, I can tell you all with full confidence and honesty: we can be just as crazy, unhinged, insecure, uncool, basic, and normal as everyone else on the planet.

And you can bet the teachers in Manila have a lot of the Filipino quirks you can think of too 😉

In an attempt to demystify yoga teachers and the seeming perfection of their practice as seen through social media, I’m starting a series on my blog not-so-creatively entitled “Yoga Teachers of Manila.”

With grace and honesty, yoga teachers share with us their struggles, their funny “un-yogi” moments, and what keeps them on their mat as a teacher and as a student.

For this post, we get to know more about studio owner, yoga teacher, mom, and friend:  Rach Bonifacio

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What I’ve learned about people, as a Life Coach (6 months in)

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Obviously, as you’ll see from the title of this post, I haven’t been a Life Coach for very long… which is precisely the reason why I just had to write this post.

I’ve only been a life coach for approximately six months and in that short time, I’ve learned so much about people, it’s insane. I have no ambitions of entertaining the idea that I’m expert, nor that I already know exactly what I’m doing either 😉 I’m just doing my best. I can say thought that I feel like very slowly but surely, my views on the world before me are changing.

So what have I learned as someone whose job it is to truly, actively listen to people? I’m so excited to share it with you.

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#CoachYourself: The Wheel of Life & Self-inquiry

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On this episode of the #CoachYourself series, I’d like to share a great tool for beginning any kind of self-inquiry: The Wheel of Life ♥

I first encountered this exercise when I was a coach-in-training with The TLC Solution. On the very first day of our training, we were asked to fill out our own Wheel of Life and immediately, coach each other with that as a jump-off point! Things were happening too fast for me to even doubt if I could coach or not but blessedly, the Wheel of Life did around 60% of the work for me.

Let me explain how it works – then you’ll get why it’s such a great starting point for self-inquiry.

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Sources of healing crystals in the Philippines (Part II)

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The last time I wrote something about crystals, sooo many people responded it to it well 🙂 I guess it means a lot of us are all finding a little something-something to support us in this journey, something grounding, something we can physically hold on to. (READ: 6 Sources Of Authentic Healing Crystals In The Philippines)

Since then, I’ve actually done my best to stop looking for crystals unless I absolutely need them – as there’s a difference between healing and hoarding 😉 So I’m happily surprised to see that since the last time I got a crystal for myself, there seems to be more people making art and beauty out of healing. I’m happy they exist and I’d like to share them with you.

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Filipino-made for yogis: Cuesee Creations, Simoy ng Haraya, Control Freak, a Yoga children’s book

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I’m very happy to see that after not having written a blog post like this in a while, entrepreneurs and yogis continue to thrive and create 🙂

I share with you some products perfect for yogis, made by Filipinos. For Filipinos and yogis all over the world. If you know of any others or have businesses of your own, I’d love to hear about it.

 

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#CoachYourself: Gaining daily clarity & purpose using a “goal funnel”

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Yesterday, after a private yoga class, a student of mine and I were talking and I ended up saying in Filipino, “There’s a huge difference between the quality of our decisions when we’re centered and calm and the quality of our decisions when we’re scattered and stressed.”

In my head, I laughed to myself because it’s exactly what I needed to hear for myself.

As I’m writing this, it’s been a little over a week since I got home from a two-month teaching gig in Bali. I expected to have a challenging time integrating myself back in Manila life and… let’s just say it’s a little harder than I expected. In the wake of settling back in, having a new long-term goal to reach, and going back to an expensive city technically jobless, I’ve been struggling to ground myself. It’s daily work and every day I’m feeling a little better than I did before so I’m grateful.

Yesterday’s breakthrough, talking about the quality of decisions, made me realize that I had lost my clarity. More than ever, I understand how easily clarity  can be lost, and how valuable it actually is. And what did I feel like when I returned to clarity? Relieved. I felt soooo relieved. It felt like a return to my true goals, a return to a sense of purpose, a return to hope 🙂 More?

  • Energy: Knowing what to do gave me a renewed boost of energy
  • Letting go: Clarity helped me understand what efforts at grounding and abundance were actually unproductive. It’s a push towards acting with long-term goals in mind, in the present
  • Creativity!: Clear goals means our boundless creativity has a direct object, something to pour forth into. What we want to create is clear. Figuring out how to do it is play, or it can be if we let it 🙂
  • Breathing space: Here’s where I felt clarity’s gifts the most. When you’re clear, it’s easy to understand that you don’t have to do everything, you don’t have to be everything, you don’t have to have everything now, you don’t have to do something even if it seems to make sense. In fact “what makes sense,” will change once you’re clear-seeing, goal-seeing 🙂

Now, enough about clarity. How do I get there? Well. With a looooooot of work. Haha!

I’m now starting this series on my blog, #CoachYourself. I hope to share tools by which we can be our own life coach, given enough time and dedication to daily inner work. I find it fitting that our first tool will be about clarity. I’m calling it, The Goal Funnel.

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Yoga teachers of Manila: Enzo Montaño

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Back when I was on the student’s side of the yoga classroom, teachers always seemed so impenetrable in their calm happiness, and sometimes even, otherworldly. Now that I’m a yoga teacher myself, I can tell you all with full confidence and honesty: we can be just as crazy, unhinged, insecure, uncool, basic, and normal as everyone else on the planet.

And you can bet the teachers in Manila have a lot of the Filipino quirks you can think of too 😉

In an attempt to demystify yoga teachers and the seeming perfection of their practice as seen through social media, I’m starting a series on my blog not-so-creatively entitled “Yoga Teachers of Manila.”

With grace and honesty, yoga teachers share with us their struggles, their funny “un-yogi” moments, and what keeps them on their mat as a teacher and as a student.

For this post, we get to know more about Teacher Enzo Montaño.

Continue reading →