Yoga Girl

fears of mine. First, I am scared shitless of public speaking. You might not
be able to imagine that, since I teach yoga for a living (teaching is pretty
much speaking to the public), but it took me a long time to get
comfortable speaking in front of a group. I used to be so nervous I was
nauseated before every class. On a bad day I’d go over in my head all the
possible things that could go wrong: What if I forget the words? What if I
fall over? What if someone asks me a question I can’t answer? What if they all
laugh at me because I’m so terrible? I would always come back to the same
thought: Do your best. Who is judging me here, really? No one judges us
harder than we do ourselves. e expectations and judgments I was
feeling all came from me. In the end I would think: Keep going forward.
Don’t go back. en I would step into the class and simply do what I had to
do, because if I decided then and there not to teach the one class that
scared me the most, I wouldn’t have learned all the things I needed to
learn. I look back at my first year of teaching and can see the importance
of those difficult classes. Every time I pushed through the fear of failure
and taught the class, I took one step up the ladder that has taken me to
where I am today. We need to keep moving up, up, up. e funny thing
is, no one ever even knew I was nervous! at’s the thing about teaching
yoga; people aren’t really there for you. ey’re there for themselves. All
of us have our own path and our own issues; most of us spend so much
time worrying about ourselves that we rarely notice what’s going on with
other people. is is how I finally overcame my fear of teaching; I knew
that if I focused on my nerves, I would never truly see the people in front
of me. If I gave those people 100 percent of my attention, as a good
teacher always should, I wouldn’t be able to worry about how my voice
sounded or if my sequencing was good enough. I started to relax and my
true voice as a teacher came out. My teaching improved dramatically.
ere is no difference between Rachel Brathen the person and Rachel
Brathen the teacher—it’s all me. And this shows in my teaching.