The Delusional Yoga Teacher Celebrates 17 Years

Today it is seventeen years since I opened Main Street Yoga.

 I’m still as delusional now as I was back then.

When I was fifty and delusional I thought I could become a yoga teacher and have a little studio. 

And I did. 

And now I’m questioning whether it’s delusional to think that at my current age (68) I can start something new again.

I can. And I probably will.

That’s because I can learn anything. That’s because I know how to learn. 

I don’t get frustrated. I don’t give up. I know Hard is part of learning. The obstacle is the way.

Case in point:

This year I learned how to video my classes and put them online.

 I also learned how to edit those videos.

Now, on these late winter days, I feel charged sitting in front of my computer, ripping up a bunch of footage.  It makes me wish I had more lifespan. (And way more skills.)

 I wake up in the morning looking forward to learning more stuff about video, and streaming, and YouTube, and Photoshop, and coding. I wish the days had more hours. I wish I had more days.

I haven’t always been this way. For most of my life I kinda blew in the wind. It was only when I turned 50 I realized I was mortal. It was then I started taking responsibility for my own life, my own happiness.

For a long time before that, I had wanted to become a yoga teacher. So at fifty, I did. 

That day I became a fifty-year-old delusional yoga teacher and drove home from Kripalu with a smear of tilak paste on my forehead and a shit-eating grin on my face was the day I started to steer my own course. It was one of the most important days of my life. 

I was not going to blow around in the wind any more. And even though I sat in that empty yoga studio for over a year before I made the rent, I didn’t care. I was where and what I wanted to be. I was a yoga teacher.

And now I feel the same about writing. I am a writer. I have always been a writer. And I have always been afraid of saying that. 

But thankfully, I am still delusional. I still think I have plenty of time. 

I believe if I just keep writing and don’t ever stop, not for a minute, there’s a good chance l’ll write myself into something interesting. 

Even though these days my obsession is not writing, it’s video. 

James Altucher always talks about Idea Sex. Idea Sex is when you take two wildly different domains and have them have sex. Then you build a business (or a life) around the love child that is born of that mating.

My three domains at the moment are: video, teaching yoga, and writing.  

But they seem too similar, too compatible. They’re not weird enough. I need to throw in a few kinky domains to make sure the progeny turns out super crazy. Suggestions?  

It’s time to push some edges. It’s time to learn to see. 

Am I delusional? 

Maybe. I just know I don’t want to surrender to the wind, or blow where it takes me. I don’t have time for that. I want to steer a course. Some people dream of blowing in the wind. 

But I’ve spent most of my life doing that and what I’ve found is that the wind is usually blowing from the mouth of  another person. 

Or a bank account.

Or some limiting belief.

And what I’ve found is once you’ve felt the rush of steering your own course, there’s no going back.

I am happy in my delusion. Let me keep on thinking I have other careers ahead of me, more cool stuff to do.

So even though I’m proud of the yoga studio, and in awe of  the people who have practiced there all these years, I really don’t think people should do the same thing for 17 years.

 So I’m currently looking around.

I want to plan an Idea Orgy of Wildly Disparate Things. Bring all kinds of kinky ideas together, then film them having sex.

See what happens.

See what gets born.

Then go do that.