I m breaking up with yoga

The buildup to this major life event was unceremonious: squashing my thumb in the balcony door.
And the slow and painful recovery that followed.
But even on another inspection by the doctor, it wasn’t broken nor infected.

My mother also had an accident. Five days before me. She fell and was covered in blood, half her face was damaged, her eye thick and closed.
Seventy-two hours later?
Eyes clear, wounds/ skin fully healed, and the only thing that reminded of her accident was one black bruise that had settled itself along her cheek and nose lines.

When the doctor was done with me, she asked me how my mother was doing.
I answered:
“She’s great! It’s one of the reasons I keep thinking something is wrong with me. She recovered from that horrible fall within days. Not dragging it on, like me.”

I heal slower than someone decades older than me and with a fifty percent gene overlap. Good thing I stopped drinking, in response to this accident, because my body is obviously going to need all the help it can get. I did finish what was still in the bottle. Half a glass. I didn’t wanted to throw it out. And I also didn’t want my last glass to be right before my thumb got stuck.
That would not have been festive at all.
I wanted my step to abstinence to be happy, peaceful and conscious.
And it was.

I m now midway in my holiday week, and yesterday was my “active resting day”, as they call that in fitness. With me, that meant socially resting.
I didn’t have anything planned, aside from the doctor’s appointment.
I went shopping for presents, took myself out for a meal and pondered a lot about my work as a yoga teacher.

The past few weeks I started creating an online yoga program, but it was based on the idea that creating those videos would take the place of a normal yoga practice. After the thumb accident, and my mother falling, I knew I had to do better.
More rest, less work, and a genuine home yoga practice were required, if I planned on getting as old as my mother, without turning into a whining, crackly old lady.
Working seven days a week, or skipping my home yoga practice were not an option anymore.

Seated at the restaurant, counting, scheduling, writing in my notebook, I came to the conclusion that was inevitable but that I could not accept before I had the hard proof on paper.
I had to stop my online yoga program.
The only way I could sustain my yoga business, and focus on writing (more about that later) was if I downsized teaching yoga to the absolute minimum. Which would mean:
– no online yoga program (which cost me fifteen hours a week)
– only create content for my yoga studio blog after I had spare time.

The moment I will get serious with my writing (yes, yes, more about that later) I can spare about five hours a week, for my yoga business.
And there will be times (like now) when that will go entirely to studying my new course topic, as the topic changes every eight weeks.
So I prepare my classes, and also create yoga schedules for my students if they want an outline of what we did in class.
That all comes first.

Which means that a lot of the time those five hours, will already be dedicated to creating my classes and my studio program.
I kept puzzling, planning, writing my notebook between courses, and realized:
Choose writing.
Cut back studio.
PERIOD.

This is the way it has to be.

My ideal would be not doing ANYTHING, ever again for the yoga studio, that wasn’t about creating classes or teaching.
I don’t want to invest in marketing yoga anymore, nor in creating an online program.

Not if I could also put all that effort into something else:
marketing my writing.

Since my books came out, I ve done ZERO.
Absolutely nothing.
At the time it made sense, since at that time in particular I saw myself as a yoga teacher first. It has been my source of income since 2003.
And I knew writers didn’t make any money (unless they accepted assignments) so it made no sense to even try and put my work out there.
But things have changed.
Something bigger is at stake.

Maybe it’s because I don’t feel comfortable fully showing myself as a yoga teacher. I am still, to this day, trying to stay within the lines of what is accepted of a yoga teacher.

I have chosen.
I am a writer.

Not because I think being a writer is easier, or make me more financially successful. But because it allows me to totally be myself, and to develop as a human being, an entrepreneur, and even a yogi, in the way that suits me. Without having to fit into a box.
It’s a relationship that accepts me, for me.

From this day forward, for better of for worse, in sickness and in health,
I choose to be a writer.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living