Prologue

I'd like to start this blog by explaining why I started doing yoga in the first place and why I want to be a teacher.

As I was transitioning between my Junior and Senior years at LCAD, I started to feel the effects of doing digital art 24/7 for so long. I began to feel constant pain in my hands, wrists and arms. During my fall semester I immediately sprang into action to try and fix this problem - after all, if I was in this much pain before I even started my career, there was no way I could handle working full time doing it without some countermeasure. I investigated stretches, medicinal remedies, and changes in posture and ergonomics. Alas, nothing worked and my pain continued to inhibit my ability to work hard. I didn't know what to do next.

After fall semester, I went to visit home. A family friend, Marie Hoffman, was a teacher of Bikram Yoga and when she heard about my chronic joint pain she immediately recommended I try doing Bikram Yoga. After all, she insisted, it was designed as a beginner's class that could heal every kind of joint pain. While I would have normally scoffed at the idea due to my low opinion of yoga at the time, I was at the end of my rope and so I looked for a studio near my school. There was one only a few blocks away from where I lived, so I decided to give it a shot.

After reading about it online I went for Bikram's recommendation to new students: do it every day for 30 days and you will start to see amazing changes in your body. With that goal in mind I headed in to my first class, and within about a minute I thought there was no way I could make it through the entire 90 minute class even once. Just in the first breathing exercise, my shoulders and chest were exhausted and I had to take frequent breaks. When I looked around and saw all of the orange county soccer moms doing the class with ease, I began to suspect that maybe I really wasn't in very good shape, and so I kept trying.

After 30 painful days, I noticed that while the class still hurt, I didn't hurt nearly as much outside of the class. Almost like magic, I could feel my body healing itself of years-old injuries. Even my bad knee, which I have had since I was about 10, hurt less each day. I finished out my school year strong, confident that I had found the solution to my joint pain. The catch was that I had to keep going to class, or I started to hurt again. I was an addict, like it or not.

When I moved to WA to work at a big video game publisher, I immediately found a Bikram studio and began going 4-5 times a week. Despite my regular attendance, I began to gain significant weight and my joint pain returned at a simmer, due to high stress at work. Eventually I got my diet back under control and the weight began to go away, but the joint pain was still lingering, despite regular trips to the yoga studio. I was at equilibrium - damaging my body for 8 hours a day so I could fix it in 90 minutes.

I began to dream of having a job that didn't undo all of my hard work fixing my body, and one day it dawned on my that I might enjoy teaching yoga. After all, my favorite thing about visual art is studying the human form, and yoga is really just another outlet for that passion of mine (besides being outstanding physical therapy.)

I was still a long shot from actually considering being a teacher, because an even greater passion is my love of game design, and I can't imagine myself ever giving that up. By this time, however, I had transitioned out of my sweet video game job into a job that I can't describe concisely, other than that it was not something I ever want to do again. It led me to another kind of fantasizing - dreaming of a world where I could make creative games free from the constraints of a publisher - the indie game scene.

Around the time that all of these ideas were swirling around in my head, I got laid off from my not-so-video-game job. As I frantically looked around, trying to find a next place to work, I was revolted at all of the job postings I saw. Flashbacks of my old job haunted me, and I found myself longing for that indie freedom. But how would I support myself? I didn't have enough savings due to paying off school loans, and I didn't want to get another full-time job that would drain me too much to work on my passion projects. That's when I noticed that Bikram's Teacher Training was only a couple of months away, and yoga teaching was a part time job that I was already interested in.

While all of the doors had been closed in my face looking for jobs at video game studios, they were all wide open on my path to become a yoga teacher. My yoga studio was super excited to send me, they helped me find a temporary place to live until training started, and everyone was friendly and helpful with all of my questions and concerns. The layers of stress left over from my job began to peel away, and my yoga practice improved tenfold without work all day to undo it. I spent the summer figuring out all of my post-layoff nonsense, and now it is two weeks until Teacher Training and I've got nothing left to do but wait.

It's been a crazy couple of years since I started Bikram Yoga to fix my joint pain, but now can sit on my knees Japanese style and my arm pain is all but gone. Not to mention I have lost over 40 pounds, and a number of other health issues have magically resolved themselves in the hot room. I am very excited to pursue my passion of making games from a different angle, and I'm excited to learn even more about the human body as I push mine beyond its limits over the next couple of months at training.

Training starts on September 15, and I plan on posting at least once a week with some kind of update, story or lesson learned. I hope that this blog can be useful to those interested in going to training, and entertaining to those who are just interested in what I'm going through. Until next time~