I had no intention of teaching, because I had a huge fear of speaking in public, of making myself vulnerable in that way. But I felt stuck and knew things needed to change, I just didn’t have a map, or the right tools. Teacher Training offered three powerful lessons to take away.

1. The relationship you’re having with yourself is the foundation of all the relationships in your life. “Svadhyaya” means self-study, and it’s one of the ethical foundations of the yoga practice. If you don’t understand why you do the things you do, if you don’t know what lights you up, scares or inspires you, then you are lost. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. Yoga gives you a set of tools so you can go about the business of knowing yourself in an honest and compassionate way. Until you get right with yourself, nothing else in your life will flourish the way it could.

2. The way things look on the outside will never fill a hole that exists on the inside. I’d spent years trying to make things look perfect and I’d taken that ideology with me onto my mat. If I fell out of a pose, I cursed myself and I’d never take Child’s Pose to rest. “Ahimsa” means non-harming, and it’s the first of the five yamas, or social contracts. Examining the way you’re speaking to yourself is eyeopening. A lack of self-compassion often means we perpetuate a cycle of blame and shame and make our unhappiness someone else’s fault. By accepting the humanness in yourself, you can do the same with others. Things shift from, “How can I get happy?”, to, “What am I bringing to the table? “ When you start to think like that, you also take your power back.

3. Seeing things clearly is the key to your freedom. “Avidya” is one of the “kleshas”, or obstacles in the path to our freedom, and it means we’re in a fog, created by identifying strongly with our likes and dislikes. By becoming aware of and letting go of our attachment to these, we’re tapping into the energy underneath our ideas about who we are, and just allowing ourselves to be. How you ride the ups and downs of life has a lot to do with how you’re going to feel. If you cling and grip and try to kid yourself about what’s happening, you’re going to suffer. If you attempt to manipulate or control people, you’re going to suffer. Yoga gives us the tools to face reality as it is, to accept, care and then act. And there’s a lot of power in that.