It was the last day of the Yoga for Trauma and Mental health workshop. I am realizing that most of these weekend yoga workshops usually end with a short yoga session, a few more teaching tidbits and then some practice teaching with the group. I am terrified of teaching my peers. All of my “I am not good enough” insecurities come out. For the teaching practice we broke into groups and planned a class together. Each person had approximately seven minutes of teaching which was then combined into a full class. I find this style of teaching jarring but good practice regardless. My teaching session was the last one of our group. Relaxation and savasanah. When I agreed to this I had forgotten that our team was teaching a “chair yoga” session. Hrm? Savasanah in a chair? I used some of the techniques that Jennifer Piercy had taught us at our Yoga Nidra workshop. I think it was a success. One of the people even started nodding off. I thought they were just “pretending” to nod off because we were “pretending” to teach a class of addicts. No.. they actually fell asleep in a chair during my relaxation session. This is a good thing right?
We get feedback from the group afterwards which is meant to be constructive but positive. So far in these workshops my feedback is always the same. “It was good” or “That was really nice“. There isn’t really any feedback with comments like those. I suppose “Wow! You totally blew that class didn’t you???” isn’t really what I am looking for but the feedback is always so non descriptive. I don’t know what it means. Maybe if the right situation comes up I will try to dig deeper for feedback. I really do want to know how I am doing even if it isn’t all positive.
This was a very emotional workshop for me. I felt a lot closer to the women in the room than I usually do during these teacher trainings. We shared a lot. Most of the women are continuing on with their 500 Yoga Therapy Certification. Sadly I am not… My kids need the small amount of extra cash I have now for their “education” (camps, music/art lessons etc). I felt quite sad leaving the group at this stage though. I was enjoying the community. It is a little scary sometimes being a “lone yoga teacher trying to break her way into a new career”.
yoga4ayear.wordpress.com 
The fear of teaching your peers? That might be addressed by a shift in attitude – your belief you are not good enough may stem from a belief that a teacher _must_ be more knowledgeable in order to teach. I once had that, but one skilled teacher threw that out the window.
At the start of my DTE/DCE networking course, the instructor began by pointing out that, for any given section of the course, some student or other would know as much as or more than he about the topic. His goal was to bring the overall group to a higer level of understanding, not to prove he always knew more than us.
In any given week, a different 90% of the class came out more knowledgeable.