Teacher Training Insights: The Yoga Shift

By teacher training grad Barbara Cottavoz

I’m a former dancer and used to take part in French national competitions until my early 20s. When I started University, I chose to travel in an effort to discover new cultures and countries. So as I was moving from one country to the next every 6 months, I wasn’t able to keep up with dancing and follow my passion. I started teacher training at Lumi earlier this year , at 26, and finally felt those amazing feelings of passion, contentment and accomplishment again. After a lot of changes, I am re-discovering myself as I was with dancing: feeling free and light.

Your thoughts and what is in your mind reflect how you feel in your body, how you behave and who you are – it is the biggest insight I’ve learned from practicing yoga.

 The Lumi  Teacher Training programme helped me understand two things: how and why we change and how we can grow by knowing and finding our inner self. I took on the journey of discovering myself through yoga and experienced an opening and a deepening – in myself and my practice. I laughed, cried, shared, practiced and developed acceptance, freedom and connections – all while having fun. The comforting and safe environment within the group made me open to my deep self without any fear or worry: I just had to go with the flow.

I let yoga come fully into my life and embraced it. There’s been a genuine shift, as I now behave the same way in every situation and environment as I am myself. I joined teacher training with a primary goal of deepening my practice and it went much deeper than expected! Despite feeling like I was fairly advanced in my practice, I now feel completely new to yoga. I am now more aware of how yoga is a way of living and applies to everything in life. Currently, I do not know what I know, what I need to know or what I will know, but I know that it is deep, changing and evolving. I have developed the insurance and strength that – no matter what I do and where I go – it is right and part of the journey – my own journey.

The teacher training also opened my creativity. I would have never thought or allowed myself to write an article like this one. I believed I was bad at writing and anything I wrote wasn’t easy to read. And yet, here I am, writing an article and feeling so proud of the change and the space I created for possibilities.

I thought the end of the training would be the end of a learning curve, an accomplishment and the full stop to my yoga teacher training. But it’s quite the opposite. It is just the beginning! After the training, I feel ready to start my journey of sharing my passion for yoga and I am committed to learn, grow and practice even more.

See you soon on the mat!

Namaste.

Barbara