Last Thursday I started my yoga teacher training.

I am working with a private teacher, not going through a studio. There are two other students. My teacher, Eleanor Harris, has trained yoga teachers for studios before. This is the first time she’s offered it at her home.

This will be my life outside work  for the next few months. We meet Tuesday and Thursday evenings, some Friday evenings, and Saturdays. She will be offering classes at her home studio, so we will have real students to work with as we learn to teach poses and whole classes.

When complete, I will be certified to teach yoga by Yoga Alliance (RYT-200). I will be able to teach beginner, mixed level, restorative, and vinyasa flow classes.

After 12 years of yoga, in two classes I have already learned concepts new to me — linking poses and the 5 pranas.

I will be taking 6 or 7 yoga classes over 3 or 4 days a week. I’m sure it will strengthen my sitting practice.

Yoga has ideas about meditation — in fact, the Buddha was a yogi before he became enlightened (only rather ascetic about it), and yoga had a deep influence on him and thus on Buddhism.

I’ll be exploring both yoga and Zen meditation and writing about my understanding and experience of them here.

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Bindu Wiles is a yogi and blogger. She is undertaking a challenge — taking yoga classes 5 days a week, writing 800 words per day, for 21 days, as an online community project. I am not going to join her, but I want to support her. I may do something similar at some point!

Here’s the link to her blog, if you’d like to catch her: http://binduwiles.com/buddhism/my-new-project-21-5-800/