Becoming a Yoga Teacher "Capital Y" (#43) - a podcast by Mark Whitwell

How do we make the shift from practitioner to teacher? Who should become a teacher? How do we make sure we don't become "One more monkey" in the yoga industrial complex? How to keep the heart in yoga?

Mark interviews Andrew about his experience of this process and emergence from the middle-class massage into a life of meaning, play, & subversive subtlety as a practitioner & teacher.

Andrew talks about his current project offering yoga in high schools for both students and teachers, drawing on his own experience as a disillusioned teenager chafing against the restrictions of school and family. 

They discuss getting free of the search for an intangible distant realm of happiness, or a distant god, and instead coming home to the local and our immediate environment in time and space.

Mark and Andrew talk about the natural movement to wish to share yoga after feeling the doors it has opened in one's own life, and how this gradually becomes the most important thing in one's life.

How do we find teaching opportunities? When shoudl we teach? What if no-one is interested? What if they just want stimulating gymnastics?

Mark and Andy also discuss the resonance between aspects of yoga and of the indigenous Māori culture of Aotearoa / New Zealand. 

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