Your Heart Against the Grain
Once I made the decision to change my career and my life, I felt light and free. The few yoga classes I was teaching in the evenings were filling up and I truly felt good about what I was doing. Teaching was something I always wanted to do, but I never thought for a minute that it would have been yoga. Those few hours in the evening, when I was teaching, made the rest of the work day tolerable. It was time to move on to a new path in my life.
What stopped me cold in my tracks at this stage of my life’s shift, was the lack of support by absolutely everyone in my life. My co-workers thought I was nuts. “Why do you want to give up your career to teach yoga?” “No one is going to take yoga in Green Bay, it’s too weird, people here are way too conservative for that stuff.” “You are crazy!” “You’ll be back, wait and see.” A few wished me well, saying, “I wish I had the guts to go out on my own”. Friends were neutral in a ‘I’ve heard this before’ kind of way. Most never thought I was truly going to go through with it. My family gave me all the why nots, or simply held comment for when I would fail. My husband didn’t want me to make any career changes, especially into something like teaching yoga. What about the money? We don’t need it. What about insurance? You can carry it. What about retirement, paid vacations, financial security? What about them? I’d rather be happy then be a slave to those worries. He didn’t feel the same way about those things as I did. But eventually he agreed that I needed to be happy for him to be happy. We came up with the “one year to make it work plan”. Read the rest of this entry »