How did Ed decide to top climbing the corporate ladder and become a Yoga teacher?
Read Ed’s story here:
Before starting my A levels, I knew I wanted to become a PE teacher. But in the two years that followed, a wonderful child came along. When it came to choosing degree subjects, I went for IT as I felt that would provide a better and more stable income.
To be fair, it was an interesting course. But I didn’t really enjoy the employment, pretty much from the day I got my first IT job. I became very interested in martial arts and this helped me get through the mundanity of my work. I discovered a love of expressive movement. Self-expression hadn’t been encouraged in my childhood – I can even remember the head of my secondary school patrolling the assembled lines of kids at the beginning of a day, telling us that “you will conform”. He meant it too, and in those days, he could back it up with force.
Martial arts gave me my first experiences of teaching movement patterns to people, and I very much enjoyed that. But after some years – as is often the case when people work with physicality – I took quite a serious injury that stopped me dead in my tracks. I couldn’t practice or teach. In fact, I couldn’t do anything: I could barely walk. Things would never be the same again.
This is when Yoga came into my life. It was the only movement pattern that didn’t hurt, and in time, Yoga practice entirely rebuilt my strength. A second operation was looming – after the failure of the first I was ready to try anything – even Hot Yoga. The second operation was deferred, and it’s still deferred I’m pleased to say! Hot Yoga, in my experience, really could build on the progress already made through regular Yoga practice.
By now, my IT work had changed as I progressed my career. I did re-discover my love for information engineering, thanks to renewing my knowledge with Open University and to some great opportunities that came up at work. I was motivated, and worked very hard.
But then two things happened. My marriage came to an end, and – despite working really hard – redundancy was looming. Collectively these moments lead to the decision to break away and become a Yoga teacher full time, with an aspiration to create a Hot studio myself.
Sometimes it’s really important to follow a crazy idea. Sometimes, things really do fall into place. In fact, to suddenly have everything I wanted turned out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with.
Read more of our blogs about how Yogis often find that life events all of a sudden just start falling into place.
Click here if you’ve ever had an interest in becoming a yoga teacher to learn about our Teacher Training course held in our very own studio here in Bristol.
