blogoversary and an extract

Today is my two year blogoversary, so yay for me! Way back when I made that first post I was just on the verge of giving up my corporate job to teach yoga full time. I had no idea what the future held and I certainly had no idea how many great bloggers I was going to connect with through this medium.

Life's changed even more since then what with our move to Cambridge last year - and I have great hopes for the future!

So to celebrate the last two years, I thought I'd tell you about one of the many steps on my journey from yoga student to teacher (not that we ever stop being students of course!).

(Mr Park say "oh hai")

One of the hardest lessons you have to learn as a yoga teacher is to not take things personally. The first time nobody turned up to class I wept and wept. It wasn’t until the next day I realised I’d got my term dates wrong and everybody assumed we were still on vacation. Sometimes people come to class, sometimes they don’t. It’s not your fault. You don’t know what’s going on in their lives and shocking as it may seem, yoga class doesn’t always take priority.

Sometimes you will get a student who comes once, and then you never see her again. You have to learn not to beat yourself up about that too. Sometimes they just won’t like you and that’s OK, because if it wasn’t for not liking a teacher, I wouldn’t be teaching yoga myself.

I used to go to a lunchtime yoga class twice a week at the gym near my office. It was perfect – it stretched my body and relaxed my mind halfway through a stressful day. No matter how busy we were at work, or how badly my boss didn’t want me to take a lunch break, I always made sure on Tuesdays and Thursdays I got to my midday yoga class. My sanity, and thus the sanity of the rest of my department, depended on it.

This particular Thursday the regular yoga teacher was away. I was always disappointed when my regular teacher was away. It happens to all of us. There is always a strange sense of loss when a cover teacher arrives. I’ve seen it in the eyes of students when I have covered another teacher’s class for them. I see it in my own student’s eyes when I tell them I won’t be there the next week and another teacher will take the class. Much as we know intellectually that we shouldn’t be attached to one teacher and one style of teaching, emotionally it is far harder to let go.

So let’s return to that distant Thursday lunchtime. I unrolled my mat with a feeling of frustration, not knowing what was in store.

I then took what, at that time, seemed to me to be the worst yoga class of my life. There was no flow, we seemed to be up and down and up and down more times than (insert suitable metaphor here!), and before I knew it, almost apoplectic with internal rage I found myself against the wall being told to “press myself against the mirror”. I’m sorry to say that I then did the unthinkable, perhaps one of the rudest things I have ever done. I walked out of the class before it had finished.

I never do this. I’m one of those people who stay in the cinema until the bitter end even when the film is so long and boring I think I may pass away. I always finish books, even those with which I lose interest on about page twenty and when it comes to yoga classes I am the mistress of etiquette. I never arrive late and I never, ever leave early. I always stay until after Savasana and the closing meditation. Except for this one time.

To this day I can’t tell you what drove me so mad about this teacher. To be honest, I can’t remember her name or what she looked like or much else about the class, apart from having to press myself against the mirror.

Later that afternoon I bemoaned to my office mate about the uselessness of my lunchtime teacher.

“I could do better,” I said.

She smiled. She knew nothing at all about yoga but she did know me.

“I know you could,” she said. “So why don’t you?”

~~~~

This blog is on the move to its own URL. I will be double posting until Monday 8th March and then the whole blog will move over to SuburbanYogini.com.

To follow me in your favourite reader
Go to Suburban Yogini
Click the orange button with 'Subscribe' next to it and follow the directions.

Or just paste http://suburbanyogini.com/feeds into your "Add" window.

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Open Dashboard
Scroll to just below ‘Blogs I'm Following' and click the 'ADD' button. Then just enter the url http://suburbanyogini.com in the pop up box and you should be good to go.

If you are kind enough to link to me on a blogroll or links list I would really appreciate it if you could change the link to Suburban Yogini.

Any problems drop me an email at suburbanyogini at gmail dot com

Fiona Robyn's long awaited Blogsplash!

 Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.
Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.
*
These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.
The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.
I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.
So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?
Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.
Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.
I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.
Continue reading tomorrow here...

another award

The lovely ReneW has awarded me the Beautiful Blogger badge. Go check out her blog, like Yancy yesterday, she has just given up her corporate job to follow her heart!

The rules for the award state that I should pass it on to 15 Beautiful Bloggers but I'm going to shake things up a little bit. Everyone who reads this blog is a pretty Beautiful Blogger in my opinion, so let's all get to know each other a little better.

Post a comment here with a link to one of your favourite blog posts and then visit the blogger who posted before you and leave a comment on their blog.

Have fun!

~~~~~

The rules also state that I have to tell you 7 random facts about myself so here goes (if you share 7 random facts about yourselves in your blog, leave me a link!):-

1. I am addicted to Australian soap operas.
2. I don't want to get married, but get silly excited when other people get engaged.
3. I have two cats, both named after Foo Fighter songs.
4. My favourite film is "You, Me and Dupree" - I have lost count of the number of times I've seen it.
5. I love pancakes - when I was little I ate so many I was sick :/
6. I wear odd socks.
7. For someone who attempts to practice non-attachment, I am very attached to my pink yoga mat.

things i love thursday (7)

This week I received the Sunshine Blog Award not once, but twice! One from Heather and one from Jamie. Thank you so much ladies - that made my week.

I now have to pass the award on to 10 people. I read a *lot* of blogs so it's hard singling it out to 10. The 10 I have chosen are not all blogs specifically about yoga but they do all encompass so many of the thoughts of yoga, whether they know it or not! (Also I'm trying not to double up on people who already got the Sunshine!)

So instead of a "things I love Thursday" I'm going to have a "blogs I love Thursday" for the 10 wonderful bloggers who bring sunshine into my week with their brilliant writing. Spread the love onwards if you so desire!

* Brenda P at Grounding Through the Sit Bones
* Marie at Begin: Writing, Yoga, More
* MG at Who's That Gamine? (you always make me smile girl!)
* Kiki at Yogademia (hope all is well in the States)
* Angela at Just Waffling
* Leslie at YogaDiva's Divine Life
* La Gitane at Yoga Gypsy
* Kathleen at Soul Sisters
* Josephine at Tale Peddler
* And the final one goes to Himself over at Iron Thumb. A blog about software development (*yawn*), but he brings sunshine into my life every single day. Boring blog, fabulous man :D

(I know I'm going to get into trouble for calling his blog boring.....)

thank you!!

Thank you to everyone who posted such lovely comments on my post yesterday. It means so much to me. It's great to "meet" a few more of my readers and be assured I will be checking out your blogs over the next few days. Audrey Hepburn eh? *grins*

A little slow on the uptake I've started a yoga related Twitter stream. You can follow it here if you like.

My Saturday has so far consisted of a six mile bike ride, hot soup, a long nap and chocolate biscuits. No yoga, Saturday is my day off! And you dear reader?

Enjoy your Saturdays, whatever you are doing :)

blogspash update!

As the regular reader will already know, Fiona Robyn is going to be blogging her next novel Thaw.

Bloggers across the web will be publishing the first page of the novel on the 1st of March. The entire novel will be available to read for free online, and this 'Blogsplash' is a way to let as many readers as possible know about it.

I also have an ulterior motive, as if you, yes you dear reader, sign up, I'm in for a chance of winning a signed book and a special gift.

If you sign up and ask one of your blogging friends to sign up, you'll be in with a chance too!

There's more information here and when you do email Fiona, make sure you mention my name.

Do join in. Fiona is an awesome writer, her blogs are totally worth reading regularly, she has the most gorgeous red hair and seriously, who can possibly resist a surprise gift!

a new look for a new decade and a very happy new year!

I've been coughing for about three days now and have had to cancel my New Year's Eve plans for a hot date with the sofa and TV instead. Sigh. Still I've been being productive from my sick bed.

As you can see, the Suburban Yogini has undergone an overhaul in preparation for the new year. I have felt this blog has been heading in a new direction for a while so I figured it was time to make it look that way. I've added a whole new "About Me" section which should appear in the previous post and also if you click on the pretty pink "About" button! (Thanks to shabbyblogs for that and the awesome header!)

I feel as though I have undergone an overhaul over the last few months as well. I'm not going to pretend 2009 has been an easy year, it hasn't. It's been one of the toughest years of my life. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and without this transitionary year I wouldn't be in the position I am in now - to really live my life to its fullest in 2010.

Happy new year, dear dear readers and thank you for reading. I leave you, not with poetic genius as such, but with the very simple words of Dave Grohl.

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again

100

Brighton Beach at sunset - by me

This is my 100th post in this blog. It amazes me how much my life has changed since I first started to post here back in early 2008. That’s less than two years ago but to me it feels as though a entirely different person wrote that first post.

In early 2008 I was still working in corporate law in the City whilst teaching yoga three nights a week. I was exhausted as you can probably imagine. Luckily I was already well into the process of changing my life for the better. A couple of months after that first post I left law for good after 8 years and set up my own business, teaching yoga.

Since then things have changed again. Life is nothing if not unpredictable and in constant flux. We live in Cambridge now I work for a local arts charity and make the most of my evenings off. And since the move I have started using this blog a lot more and have met some fantastic fellow bloggers. It started off as an outlet for my thoughts on teaching and practicing yoga. It has since also become my notebook for recipes, and album for photos of my spoiled kitties and a blank page for the ramblings of my mind.

So dear readers, how has your blog changed since you started writing it?

Website

My new website is up and running. Want to see? OK clicky here-y!!

I haven't decided where I'm taking my yoga teaching now I've moved to Cambridge. I don't think it matters that I don't know where I'm going with it. I'm certainly not worried about it. I have so much else going on in my life and so many things I want to do. Right now I just want to put the information up and see what becomes of it. If it just becomes a community yoga website, or a rescourse for yoga and scoliosis or yoga and chronic pain and I just continue as I am, subbing classes as and when, well I'm fine with that.

I was lucky enough to do everything I needed to do with my yoga teaching when I ran Thames Yoga, I even ran a retreat in Turkey. I fulfilled every ambition I had and that is an amazing thing.

Right now I'm enjoying working on my own practice, and having most of my evenings free!

Back to the website - take a look and let me know if you see any glaringly obvious errors. Also if you know of any websites that you'd like to go on the links page then let me know.

Thaw

Green Ink drew my attention to this and I thought I'd join in :)

Fiona Robyn is going to blog her next novel, Thaw, starting on the 1^st of March next year. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth’s diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.

To help spread the word she’s organising a Blogsplash, where blogs will publish the first page of Ruth’s diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).

She’s aiming to get 1000 blogs involved – if you’d be interested in joining in, email her at fiona@fionarobyn.com or find out more information here.

Join up too - it looks like a great book and a brilliant idea!