Tags
chronic illness, Chronic Yogi, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Health, imperfect yogi, interview, oms, perfect yoga teacher myth, sutras
Don’t you just love Cora Wen’s Yogi Imperfect talk? It dovetails very nicely with this post…
Yoga teachers. We’re a funny breed. Many of us teach for love, not money. But when teaching for money (i.e. doing it full time), then the love usually still comes first.
However, just because we teach yoga does not mean that we’re perfect. We might (or might not) be bendy, we’ve probably done endless downward dogs, sounded off with more oms than you can count and possibly read dozens of sutras and other yoga books. But that doesn’t mean we’ll always have impeccable health.
In fact some of us are Chronic Yogis – yoga teachers who live with a chronic illness of some kind. We’re more common that you might imagine.
This interview series is inspired by my own recent diagnosis of an autoimmune condition called “Hashimoto’s thyroiditis”. Sometimes I feel like crap, but I still love teaching yoga.
I’m undergoing a process of learning to be cool with my health issues, all the while being clear that it mostly doesn’t affect my ability to teach yoga.
So I’m featuring Chronic Yogis from all over the world in an effort to kick those “perfect yoga teacher” pedestals down…
We might not be perfect or perfectly healthy, but we can still teach yoga and hopefully our imperfections will help our own students be more accepting of themselves, too.
As each interview is published, I’ll include a link here so they’re all indexed together.
Chronic Yogi interviews
- Rachel Hawes
- Christine Claire Reed
- (more to come soon!)
Are you a Chronic Yogi? Wanna be a part of this series?
I’ve sent out a bunch of emails to yoga teacher friends and fellow bloggers. But I’m sure there’s more of us out there than I know!
So if you’re a yoga teacher with a chronic health problem and you’d like to be involved, then I want to interview you, too!
Criteria
A chronic health problem is generally any disorder that persists over a long period and affects physical, emotional, intellectual, vocational, social, or spiritual functioning.
This can include all sorts of conditions such as depression, mental health imbalances, diabetes, epilepsy, ME/chronic fatigue, auto-immune disorders and many more.
If this is you, and you also work as a yoga teacher, I’d be honoured if you would consider participating in my interview series.
Just get in touch at: svasti108[at]gmail[dot]com
~Svasti
Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness 