A Journey in Two Parts

This week, two major changes took place in my life, and I am thrilled to announce that I will soon be embarking on an exciting new journey with two parts. The first change involved my acceptance into the yoga teacher training program at Sun and Moon Yoga Studio in northern Virginia. The second change was my decision to resign from my job in order to pursue a career as a full-time writer--and, eventually, a part-time yoga teacher.

I have been with my current employer, a federal agency of the US government, for over seven years and before that was a university professor and researcher for twenty-three years. If I'm adding correctly, that means I've been working and drawing a paycheck for thirty years, a figure that is very hard to wrap my mind around. How can anybody (especially me) stick with something for as long as thirty years? 

Embarking on my own as a freelance writer is scary, given my long history as an employee of one or another large organization, but it is also very freeing and very exciting. My last day at work is around the middle of September, so I am beginning to clean my office and organize my files, a process that is bringing up a lot of old memories, not to mention dust.

Many of my blog readers know that I am a writer, so it may not be all that surprising to hear I'm branching out into full-time writing. The other part of my news involving a yoga training program, may, thus, be more newsworthy. I have actually been practicing yoga for a very long time, nearly twenty years, and have harbored a secret fantasy to teach it for probably the last four years. 

For quite a few of those years, yoga teaching was only a fantasy, not something I seriously considered. It didn't seem possible for somebody like me--a former professor whose interests and demonstrated skills seemed to be more aligned with math than the physical or athletic--but I gradually came to realize that yoga had become the center of my spiritual life, and I wanted to share it with others. I'll be writing a bit more, next week, about how this dramatic change occurred. Watch for my post on the Virtual Abbey blog.

I am very excited about being accepted into Sun and Moon's teacher training program, and eagerly look forward to our first session in late September. I know I'm going to have a lot to say about this new part of my life, so have decided to launch a new blog, Yoga Emergence, that will chronicle my year as a teacher-in-training. Follow along as I pursue my new adventure, a journey into yoga!