Honouring your threshold

In my earlier days of teaching I was at one stage teaching something like 20 times a week. This was a mix of studio and gym classes, corporates and private clients. It meant travelling around London to various locations and often it was this – crossing the city most days by tube, train, bus and on foot, often contending with rush hour at either end of the day – that took the most out of me.

We all have different thresholds. I read recently about someone who was working full-time and teaching around 20 classes a week and that seemed to work for them. For me, teaching 20 times a week (without a full-time job) turned out to be a recipe for burnout.

At the time, I felt a sense of shame and failure over this. I knew that many other self-employed teachers were doing the same thing, yet they all seemed to be coping. Or so I thought. In time, I learned that what I had experienced was a common ‘rites of passage’ for newer (and sometimes, not so new) full-time teachers. I’d wanted to teach for the love of yoga, but I had found myself feeling trapped in a cycle of overwork in order to pay the bills. My body was giving me signs that I needed to slow down, but I didn’t pay attention to them because I needed to work. So, naturally I kept on going, eventually to my inevitable detriment.