I lost my first version of this because when I hit ‘Submit’ I was no longer logged in. So I will try to quickly summarize what I wrote before.

Because my teaching experience spans university teaching, teaching science to kids, and yoga teaching, it can be difficult to generalize, but I think the most important lesson that the influences I have listed have taught me is to be authentic. It is really hard to “fake it” when teaching; students will see right through you. I try to embody this in my teaching by knowing what I’m talking about and admitting what I don’t know, by seeing my students as human beings and caring about them, and by trying to express the truth as I have come to understand it, even when expressing that truth pushes me outside of my comfort zone. Yoga is an interesting subject because it engages the subtler levels of experience, it has as a fundamental tenet that the world as we know it is a construction of the mind and is not “the real world,” and because some of its subject matter is unabashedly “spiritual.” As someone whose training is in the “hard sciences,” and has someone whose students are steeped in a culture of rationality and practicality and who are sometimes averse to things “spiritual,” it is a real challenge to get myself to express certian things that challenge some of the prevailing underlying assumptions of knowledge and reality, even though I believe those things to be true.

All of the influences I have listed are positive. Perhaps this is a function of privelege, but I am not angry at my education. To the contrary I wish I had been more compassionate, more able to see my teachers as human beings during my education. This is not to say I don’t think things could have been improved. I would have liked my early education to be less superficial. I would have liked those prevailing underlying assumptions to be more challenged. I would have liked ethics and religion and spirituality to have been more a part of my education. But I have been lucky enough to have encountered compassionate, passionate, and authentic teachers, and to have found teachers that teach to the subtler levels of experience.

In the future I hope to be more brave. If I am going to get comfortable speaking in ways and about things that make me uncomfortable, I am going to have to be brave and put myself in situations to do so and just do it, even though I’m still not comfortable doing it. Teaching is probably my most important practice of self-expression and personal development, so it is not only for the sake of my students that I hope to do it.