Ahoy, St. Francis Bay! The Yogis are coming!

In about 4 days' time, I'm headed to St. Francis Bay on the Eastern Cape where I'll be spending the entire month of September at a yoga teacher training course (that's a month of unpaid leave, mind you!). It's accredited by the International Yoga Alliance, and at the end of the course I'll be certified under their RYT-200hr program (RYT = Registered Yoga Teacher).

It's no walk in the park - from Mondays to Saturdays, 7am - 6pm for 4 weeks we'll go through everything from our own ashtanga practice, to sequencing a class, to physiology & anatomy, to breaking down the poses, to yoga philosophy...

A part of me's excited to finally be doing this course (it's been almost a year of planning in the making), and although at this point I have no guts to start teaching, I'm hoping this course will help me gain a deeper understanding of my own practice. If nothing else, I can't wait to eat, sleep, breathe and talk yoga for a full month!

I'm just going through my little checklist of things to bring now and it's a weird list - very different from the usual packing lists for work or holidays... I've got stuff like:
- Golf Ball (laying down on this helps relieve chronic shoulder knots I've got)
- Traumeel cream (homeopathic anti-inflammatory)
- TransAct pads (kinda like Deep Heat "koyok" pads)
- Deep Freeze cream (instead of that "hot" feeling, it's a minty version)

Almost feels like I'm prepping for bootcamp... guess who's deathly afraid of injuries!

There are 12 of us on this course and I'll be sharing a house with 4 other yogis. We're staying on a house by one of the canals in St. Francis Bay, so I'm hoping it'll be one of the thatch-roof houses they're famous for.


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