"Real World"? Not really...

"I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you've got to rise above..."
- John Mayer

Does life ever go back to normal?  I have my doubts.  Or maybe I just need to change my definition of "normal."  What IS normal, anyway?  (From over here, you look upside-down...)

And here's another question.  When you get everything that you wished for... what do you wish for next?  In the fairy tales, that's where the story ends.  Happily ever after, finished, no more, nothing here to see.  But what does Cinderella do when she wakes up the next morning?  She marries the Prince at the end of the story, right?  (I'm a little rusty on my fairy tale knowledge.)  So then she's a fricking Queen, with a whole kingdom to manage!  That's gotta be a whole other crazy adventure.  Politics to navigate, servants to manage, crazy people to deal with, and all kinds of other tasks to deal with!  Bet it made sweeping the fireplace seem easy, in retrospect.

You know what I mean.

Maybe.

It's still totally crazy that I am teaching yoga as my "job" right now, but it also feels really... well, normal.  I know, I'm contradicting myself.  But it feels natural.  I'm doing all the crazy things I used to do with my spare time - spending all day at the yoga studio, driving around LA, going to Bikram's classes, hanging out with friends from yoga - same thing.  But now I get to go up on the podium and teach sometimes!  And now this isn't just how I spend my "spare" time - it's how I spend ALL my time.  (In my spare time, I do crossword puzzles, go hiking, and watch Doctor Who with my sister, in case you were wondering.) I'm doing exactly what I like to do...  All.  The.  Time.

The actual teaching is getting smoother, I think.  Taught number 20 tonight.  Wow.  I taught at 3 different studios in the past week, including two classes at Headquarters. (Bikram was totally in the building for the second one - he watched a bit from the lobby.  That wasn't weird or anything...!!!)
I've had some really big, fun, high energy classes.  The craziest was probably the one a week ago when I had 41 students and TEN of them were brand new.  I felt like I worked as hard as everyone in the class put together, just saying the dialogue, keeping the energy moving, and doing crowd control over the 25% of the class that was distressed about the heat and trying to escape.  Hah!!  The 4th of July morning class was a really good one - had a bunch of friends in town visiting (Greg, Lindy, Ayesha, Ricardo: shout-out!!) and that made it exciting and fun to teach, because none of them had taken my class before.  It was a fun class - people were awake, working hard, good energy.

Teaching is so much like practicing - every class is totally different.  My mood changes, of course.  Some days I feel like BOOM, rock and roll, let's go, let's do some YOGA!  Other days I feel more low key, like okay, let's just do this nice and quick and clean, no fuss, no mess.  I had one class where I was just kind of spaced out and I actually fucked up my dialogue a couple times.  After that one, which I thought was a total trainwreck, one of the regular students commented that it was my "best one yet."  Go figure!

But the BIG wildcard is the mood of the CLASS.  Because now, I'm not just dealing with mySELF when I go into the room, I'm dealing with everyone.  When you practice yoga, you know that your body is going to be different every day.  But when you TEACH, you might have 40 different bodies in the room, and THEY are all different every day, too.  And the different combinations of people - how many are new, how many are young, how many are injured, how many are tired, how many people are in the room - those things all make a big difference, too.  I've noticed that you have to tune into the mood of the room, or the class feels weird.  There was one class that I taught where I was really excited to teach, but it felt like the students were just feeling like "uuggh, let's get this over with," and that was a weird class.

Anyway!  This has been kind of a rambling little update.  I'm trying to keep up with the blog, maybe once a week or so.  (I miss the routine of teacher training, a bit.  Can you TELL I lack structure in my life right now?!)  I'm going on a camping trip for the next couple of nights up in King's Canyon - hooray! - and then next week I'm going on sort of a "working vacation" to another Cali studio where I'll get to teach twice a day for the whole week - yay!  This is work?!  I like it...