2,000 Hours In!

This summer, I crossed the 2,000-hour mark of teaching yoga and earned my ERYT-500. It felt like the perfect time to look back on how much has changed, not just in my teaching, but in what I want my teaching to be.

My first thousand hours of teaching yoga were all about exploration. I wanted to teach anything, anywhere. The bigger the class, the better I felt afterwards. The weirder, the wilder, the better. Yoga with live DJs, yoga with treadmills, chocolate yoga in Myanmar. I was open to it all. I was open to anything because I was still figuring out what kind of teacher I wanted to become.

As soon as I hit 1,000 hours, that all suddenly changed. I knew the hustle was going to burn me out, and I was itching to teach fewer, more specialized classes. I finally had a direction: trauma-informed, restorative yoga informed by my background in global health. I just couldn't yet see how all the pieces fit together.

Then, just days after earning my ERYT-200, I became pregnant. Suddenly, all those seemingly separate interests stopped competing with one another. They became the same path. The last 1,000 hours of teaching yoga have been devoted not only to my own two babies, but also to all the mamas I met along the way.

I became a student again, training in prenatal yoga, children's yoga, full-spectrum doula care, childbirth education, and eventually studying midwifery and maternal health in French literature through my PhD. And while my first thousand hours of teaching happened all over the world – in Boston, Myanmar, Vienna – my second thousand hours were much more focused. I taught primarily online during the pandemic and while in California, then transitioned to teaching locally in St. Louis when we moved in 2022.

When Ezio turned six months old, I began teaching three classes at Urban Breath: Prenatal, Baby & Me, and Flow and Restore. And I’ve maintained these classes ever since. After teaching at so many different places with so little continuity during my first thousand hours, I learned in my second thousand the value of being part of a community here in St. Louis.

I absolutely love that over the last nearly 4 years of teaching in St. Louis, I’ve seen several mamas not only through their first pregnancy, but also through their second. And how I’ve known mamas before pregnancy from Flow and Restore, then seen them through an entirely new phase of life. And how I’ve seen group chats morph into lifelong friendships. There’s really something about this sense of continuity that the big classes and Instagram followings I thought I wanted during my first 1,000 hours can’t rival.

Somewhere between the airports, the studios, the Zoom screens, the sleepless nights with newborns, and Sunday afternoons surrounded by babies and mamas, yoga stopped being something I taught.

It became the way I chose to build a life.

Here's to the next thousand. 🤍