Yoga teaches me.

I don’t teach yoga.  Yoga teaches me.
For the past few months, I have maintained mostly silence.  All the amazing and transformative experiences brought to me by constant practice, I have kept to myself.   I lost the impulse to share, to blog or post about my feelings or openings or closings or understandings.  It…just went.
I stopped caring about capturing yoga students.  I stopped caring about adding a fresh voice to the yoga blogosphere.  I stopped trying to be clever, new or insightful.  I guess that I went inside.  It felt good.  It feels good.  My inner voice is loudly private.  What bearing has my experience of yoga on yours?  Very little.
For this reason, out of the silence came this phrase:  I don’t teach yoga.  Yoga teaches me.
Say it to yourself.  Repeat it a few times.  Change the intonation.  You will see what I mean.
Yoga teaches me to be patient.
Yoga teaches me to listen.
Yoga teaches me the value of constancy and dedication.
Yoga teaches me that pain is a signal to stop.
Yoga teaches me to listen to my intuition, to stop when it says stop and to pay little heed to what others are doing.
Yoga teaches me that when people are ready, they will arrive.
Yoga teaches me that some people are never going to be ready for yoga, in this lifetime, or perhaps in the bit of a lifetime that you may know them.
Yoga teaches me to love those who don’t practice with equal intensity and without judgement.
Yoga teaches me that people’s bad behaviour is a sign of their inner suffering and they need compassion, not criticism.  But you don’t need to be their best friend, either.
Yoga teaches me that being alone and maintaining silence is often the only remedy.
Yoga teaches me to delay gratification.
Yoga teaches me to communicate clearly and non-violently, verbally and non-verbally.
Yoga teaches me to look within, assess clinically what I find, undo the knots and find out that I too have a lovely, gentle, kind, open, accepting soul.
Yoga teaches me that what I thought to be “me”, what I mistook for “who I am”, those things people call character, is all an illusion, an armour that I made while trying to protect myself.
Yoga teaches me to remember this armour for when I need it, but to shed it most of the time.
Yoga teaches me to relax.
Yoga teaches me to be, and in being, to do good, while remaining detached from the fruits of the actions.
I don’t teach yoga.  Yoga teaches me.