Deciding to pursue Yoga Teacher Training is a huge step, whether we’re doing it to expand our knowledge, deepen our own yoga practice or share what we love with the world.

No doubt we expect to learn a million things during yoga teacher training: the poses, the Sanskrit names, how to sequence a class and how to actually teach, but there are definitely some things we’ll learn throughout our training that go a whole lot deeper than some books and poses.

Nothing else seems to matter anymore.

Our free time will become basically non-existent. Friends will ask us to hang out, but, “I have yoga” will become our new favorite excuse. Every other weekend will be occupied by 16+ hours of anatomy, philosophy and asana. The weekends in-between are filled with home practice and all required assignments. Our friends probably won’t fully understand that they’ve been replaced by yoga.

We’ll be humbled.

Every single class, multiple times a day. We’ll realize we can’t master every bad*ss pose right away or maybe ever. Someone else in the training might be able to do something we can’t, that’s life. Leave our ego at the door.

Our whole life will begin to shift.

Changes, big and small, will start to happen. Maybe we’ll see a change in our relationships with ourselves or others. Maybe we decide on a whim to leave our job (I quit my full-time job three months into training). Or maybe we start feeling happier and lighter. Other people will notice, trust me. A change is gonna come.

We’ll cry—a lot.

Everything we knew about our emotions will be turned upside down. We’ll cry when our instructor is chanting, we’ll cry when we have a breakthrough, we’ll cry because we’re overwhelmed, we’ll definitely cry during our last practice as a group. Hug it out and have tissues handy.

We’ll leave with a family.

We’ll likely enter this journey as strangers, but by the time training is done it will feel like we’ve known this group our whole life. Our instructors will become our yoga parents, our fellow trainees will become the best friends we’ve ever had. By the end, we’ll have spent 200+ hours together. Laughing, crying, learning, growing and crying some more. This group will truly become our forever friends.

During yoga teacher training, be prepared for some of the greatest 200+ hours of life.

~

Author: Courtney Haney

Image: flickr/Barry Silver

Editors: Ashleigh Hitchcock; Emily Bartran