Breaking point
I’m a yoga instructor with 17 years of experience. And I made decision to open a one-person studio in Toronto.
Yoga has always been a part of my life since I started practicing it in 2005. 19 years later, I still remember the first day I started practicing yoga, and I can't tell you how many changes (positive changes, of course) it has brought into my life.
I don't know if the desire to teach yoga stirred within me. My mother, who passed away four years ago, saw that I was passionate about yoga and wanted me, who had been sick since I was young, to maintain my health by teaching yoga as a career. She supported my first TTC, but even though I was half-heartedly taking the course, I hoped that this would become my career. I never hoped for it. At the time, I was enjoying life at the school I went to because I wanted to make movies, and I never thought about leaving this shiny world and doing something that felt a little old-fashioned.
In other words, I think I liked yoga that much. I was already experiencing how quickly the work I loved faded when I looked at it professionally, and it was difficult to look at my only resting place from a professional perspective. Between all the drinking, homework, and classes as a freshman at an art college, yoga was a way to protect my mind and body.
The period in which I began to take yoga seriously was painful. Let's talk next time about the time of reorganization that digs me out from deep inside. Anyway, after all that time, I have now reached my 6th year of living in Canada and decided to create my own studio here. Finding the ideal location to set up a studio, finding funds, marketing, gathering people, and teaching classes with all my heart are all out of my hands right now, but I feel at ease.
It takes effort to make the ideals in your head concrete. While preparing for the TTC at the place where I worked for the past year, the so-called Hyeonta came. Is it right for me to teach yoga in the environment where I am currently teaching? I had fundamental doubts about whether yoga, which I love, was really possible in this environment. Doubts plagued me so intensely that I suffered for several days. Even if you don't feel like it, it takes great courage to become independent from the protection you were given.
But I thought about it. What made me grow all this time was not a stable embrace. In fact, I had never had anything like that, and life was a series of realizations that stability was nothing more than an illusion. What was in my hand when I first left Korea? When I came to India, Thailand, and the unfamiliar land of Canada, what I had was yoga. I came to believe in yoga, which was engraved in my body and mind, so I was able to enjoy and explore the changes. Nothing was wrong. There is a lot to learn in the process of implementing new tasks. There is no such thing as failure unless you give up on learning new things.
*Over the past year, meeting someone who loves me for who I am is a big reason why I made this decision. Confidence that you are no longer alone. The courage that someone who likes what I like gives me as well.
