The Singing Yoga Instructor

          One weekend last November my boyfriend and I went to three concerts, three nights in a row, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. By the time it was Sunday we were ready for a break from listening to live music. The day was meant to be spent resting and chilling out, I decided that day to go to a yoga class by an instructor I had never taken a class with before. The yoga class was not a typical class, the instructors normally played soft pop songs or more Zen-like music, this instructor still played soft music, but it was more alternative, there were at least two Deftones songs. Then when we reached the end of the class and laid in Shavasana (where you lay on the ground without moving a muscle, typically done at the end of class). During Shavasana the music changed, and it no longer sounded like it was coming from a speaker. I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, so I opened one eye to look around and found the yoga instructor walking around the yoga students in the studio, strumming her acoustic guitar and singing a song she wrote. My three days of live music turned into four days of live music, it may not have been an entire set of music, but one live song counts.

          I left the class amused that the one yoga class I chose to take that Sunday just happened to have live music, yet it made me want to take her class again because I liked the music she was playing throughout the class and the nice personal touch at the end with her playing live. Everything about the class was different from the previous classes I took with other yoga teachers. This is not to say that I don’t like the other classes, because I do, but it’s nice to have one class that throws a curveball.

          I went back to her Sunday yoga classes a few more times until Ethan and I left for Montana during Christmas. We spent two weeks in Montana and my plan was to come back home and get back into yoga. However, after I came back to work, I had two weeks of work to get caught up on and it ended up getting insanely busy with last minute business. This turned into long days at work where I would get home exhausted and my weekends being spent getting rest. A couple weeks after getting back from Montana, my boyfriend asked me to move in with him, I of course said yes. At this point we were already pretty much living together; my apartment had the things I didn’t need on a daily basis and was a storage unit I visited once a week to make sure everything was okay. As excited as I was to move in, the moving and cleaning of the apartment before my lease was up in mid-April became another priority over going back to yoga. You would think 3 months would be ample time to move but with work being busy, the days where I left on time were few and far between, when those days happened, I would stop by my apartment after work to pack and move a car load of boxes to my boyfriend’s house and store 75% of them in the garage. I did this through January and February with a few weekends where I would go to the apartment to pack and load up the car, my goal was to clear all the small items out before a 2-week festival in March where the area I lived in would be taken over by the festival. Then by the end of the festival I would have the items we would need a U-Haul for and cleaning. By sacrificing going to yoga on the days I had time and energy to do so, I was able to reach my goal, even though it made me sad to miss going to yoga.

          Once we moved everything to the house, cleaned the apartment, and handed my keys over to the property manager, my main focus then became getting the boxes in the garage emptied and the items placed in the house. Again, this was happening with work being insanely busy, I think the only slow period was during the two-week festival. At the beginning of the year there were three of us in the department and by mid-February we went down to two employees in the department as one co-worker put in their two-week notice. Once the festival was over the two of us were taking on enough work for three people, hence why it continued to stay busy. Fast forward to June, work is finally slowing down, and we added a new team member to the department. Summer has always been the slow period at work, January usually is too, but this January apparently became the exception, I was glad to see that June did kick off a slow time at work. I now have the time and energy to focus on my hobbies and workout routines again. I’m now back to leaving work on time and heading straight to yoga before heading home and going to yoga on the weekends. I went back to The Singing Yoga Instructor’s class on Sunday and just as she did in November, when she told us it was time to the end the class in Shavasana, she pulled out her acoustic guitar and strummed while singing. I left the class in good spirits and thinking about what has happened between November and now that made me pause from taking yoga only to come back and find the classes the way I remembered them, especially The Singing Yoga Instructors class.