One Year of Yoga

            This past September 2017, I began on the journey of training to become a yoga teacher. My reasons were in part searching for answers to questions I had, and another part being a potential avenue to a career change. My background is in engineering, yet my free time centers on learning herbalism, working with Reiki, among many other areas of personal growth. Yoga teacher training seemed like a logical next step. I liked yoga as a student, so why not take the leap and get the certification to teach yoga?

            When I signed up for teacher training, I expected the actual yoga poses/postures to be straight forward. I could perform most of the poses as a student decently enough, so teaching shouldn’t be that far of a stretch. What I discovered as the most difficult part was communicating how to do a pose to an audience. The communicating of instructions, the forming of sentences that made sense, the actual art of teaching. Performing the pose was no issue at all, but telling someone how to do the pose, now that was and still is very much a challenge.

            With signing up for this two year teacher trainer course, my interest mainly fell for the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of yoga. I was here to learn and experience all that I could. The philosophy class became what I looked forward to every month. The debates and discussions around yoga, around lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and other topics fueled my wanting and yearning to learn about the depths of yoga. These depths of yoga, these emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects, in my opinion give insight to the truth behind people, their actions, and their true nature, and more so, the truth about oneself. These debates raised more questions for me, more uncertainty regarding my plan for myself. More self-doubt as to who I really was. What defined me as me, and what I really and truly wanted for myself out of this life.

            I am still trying to figure a lot of that out, but yoga gave rise to that creative destruction of my perceptions. Yoga created the opportunity for personal growth in the way I wanted it to, not through the physical pose and posture part, but through the mindful, deeper, more meaningful part in my opinion, being that of self-reflection. This act of self-reflection while difficult, gave me the chance and insight to dive deep into much of what drives and makes me, me.

As I look back on the past 10 months, I see the transformation I went through. I see the knowledge I gained. I see my change. I don’t think any of my life questions have been answered as a result of this yoga journey so far, I think I have even more questions now that require answers. Maybe though, that is the point of yoga for me personally. Not a method or a way to finding solutions, but path to more questioning, a path of learning, a path of continual growth. A path of seeking.

Ryan Kologinski

June 2018