The Hot Teacher Training: A Life Changing Experience
“Please let it be known that everything is subject to change, including your life”
You will find this sentence at the end of every HotTT email. It is used by every member of the Hot TT team and it sounds pretty dramatic if we are just talking about the schedule, right? How is it possible to relate a tiny change in the daily schedule to the level of change in somebody’s life? It is just a teacher training. I will sweat a lot that is for sure, I will learn a lot for my personal practice and ultimately I will learn how to teach the series and motivate the students. THAT IS ALL…..it must be the silly American culture (or so I thought) that is sometimes a little too close to what you see at the movies… One sentence made me think how over-the-top all this is in just a few seconds. And I still think that is the only logical way to compare those two changes…. if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m writing these words from Texas, which is far far away from Colombia (where I have been living the past four years), from Spain (my country) and where my new life has started.
Sometimes we don’t realize how precious it is to give ourselves space. It can be scary to give that to ourselves as well. That is what eight weeks of training with TheHotTT represented to me: space and confrontation with my true self. In the end it was surprisingly calming and amazing to get to know myself better, to get to know what I really want in life or to be perfectly honest what I don’t want in life.
I had an idea…
Looking back now, I see that things changed gradually as they needed to, at the perfect time. I remember introducing myself to all the trainees in the group “My name is Maite, I live in Colombia right now, I’ve been practicing yoga for almost a year now and I’m here because I want to open a studio back home in Barcelona”. And I thought that I was excited, I truly believed in that, until I realized that I was fulfilling the expectations that other people had for me. I was just going along with what a “normal life style” is meant to be and of course I was unconsciously ignoring my feelings.
i thought i had direction…
I remember introducing myself vividly. I remember answering the “Who am I?” question for the first exercise that we made as a group (they knew how deep this answer was going to change for all of us) vividly. Then the teacher training started with this spectacular meditation workshop, as Elias would say, “the first precious tool for the tool bag” that would ground ourselves during our days in Santa Barbara. And everything changed. The workshop was deliberately placed at the first weekend of the training to provide us the space that only meditation gives. It was not only an invitation to explore within ourselves but also a differentiation from what other teacher trainings are; elsewhere where meditation is not considered something reachable for the people that practice yoga in western cultures. I really think it was a gift.
Until i was given a tool
Meditation quickly became an everyday practice. Normally with my wonderful roommate in our bedroom and eventually at the beach during lunch time (with a third adopted roommate as well). I soon started experiencing more moments of clarity where I could listen to my inner self speaking, yelling at me and obviously starting an inner fight between my feelings and my thoughts. And at some point, those moments of clarity empowered my feelings, giving them sense, making me feel more comfortable and showing me a way, my way.
That slowly became life changing…
While digging into this way of life, I appreciate my best friends’ reactions during the training. Answering the most difficult questions a smart Irish friend could ask helped me to understand how determined and confident I was. Her insight is how I changed my supposed passion of becoming a business woman for the real passion that I didn’t know that was inside me. Being a yoga teacher is how I changed every second of my planned future for a life that is based in the present moment. A life that would allow me to combine my two passions, yoga and traveling around the world getting to know as much different wonderful cultures as I can. That is how I got to start sharing all these present, real, and adventurous moments with a blond soul that understands the world just as I do.
& then it stuck…
“Be careful what you wish for” they say in English. I always wanted to live my life to the fullest, well, it turns out that living it in the present moment is leading me that way. It seems that in the end, it was true my dear Hot TT team… a tiny change to add a daily meditation practice changed my life.