My journey with yoga started in 2005 when a Bikram studio opened one floor below my office. During that time, I was going to the gym and playing badminton for physical fitness. I loved taking the group classes and also did one-on-one weight training with a trainer once a week. I remember feeling like I wanted to die in my first yoga class. I thought I had strong thighs from all the squats I did at the gym but I was shaking in awkward pose! I started out practicing yoga 3x a week and loved it so much that I gave up my gym membership and focused on yoga. I joined the first Asana competition in the Philippines in 2008 for the fun of it. I was not expecting to win anything but decided the experience will be well worth it. Standing in front of 3 judges and executing 5 compulsory poses and 2 advanced poses was nerve-wracking, to say the least. But the sessions we did with the teachers to prepare us for the competition really inspired me to hone my poses and made me gain a deeper understanding of how the body and the mind can really change with the yoga practice.
After 3 years of practicing yoga 5-6x a week, I found myself starting to give feedback to my classmates about their poses and alignment. I also found myself talking more and more about yoga and how it has changed my life. During sales calls, I end up talking more about yoga than about my company's products and services! It was then I realized that I wanted to be a yoga teacher, put up a studio and retire from IT. With my business background, I had my ideas about what I wanted in a studio and I articulated these ideas with my yoga friends. Some of them expressed interest in my ideas and in partnering with me in case I decided to set up one. This was how the concept of yoga+ was born. I took the 200-hour Absolute Hot Yoga Teacher Training in October 2010. When I got back, yoga+ was incorporated and we broke ground at the BGC studio soon after. While the studio was being constructed, I started teaching at the roof deck of my condo. My friends and staff were my first students. I was teaching 3x a week in an open-space venue and we didn't even have heaters! My classes were donation-based and the fees collected were used to pay for the venue. Whatever was left was donated to the eyeglass project of the A Better Chance Foundation.
I started teaching more regularly after we opened yoga+ BGC in February 2011. In yoga+, I got introduced to other yoga styles like Ashtanga, Flow and eventually Yin. Dona Tumacder-Esteban taught a Yin feature class in the BGC studio in 2012 and that got me interested. I started taking her classes in Echo Yoga as well. My body loved the practice and it was a perfect complement to teaching and practicing Hot Yoga. I enrolled in the 100-hour Yin Yoga Training with Victor Chng in Singapore in December 2012. Since that time, I have noticed significant changes in my body. My hips and lower back have softened significantly and this has affected my dynamic practice as well. Now I teach both Hot Yoga and Yin in the BGC and Ortigas studios.
Teaching 4 classes a week and managing yoga+ while having a full-time job running an IT company was not easy. I eased off slowly from my duties in my IT company until my eventual retirement in October 2013.
Teaching yoga classes made me realize how much deeper this practice can take us and how much it affects our lives off the mat. I wanted to do something else that can combine my over 20 years of management experience in a corporate environment and 4 years experience teaching yoga. I discovered the program of the Asian Leadership Institute (ALI) through Poncho Cottier. I enrolled in their 9-module Personal Transformation through Mindfulness Program and also recently completed the training to facilitate the course. Currently, I am a facilitator-in-training for TeamUp, an ALI affiliate. As soon as I complete the 2 practice triads required, I will become a Certified Facilitator.
My training with ALI and reading various books like Non-Violent Communication, Search Inside Yourself, and The Gift of Imperfection prompted me and my colleague Neil Salang, who is a meditation advocate to come up with a new yoga+ offering called Change From Within. It is a mindfulness-based program for developing emotional intelligence and we will be launching the first public training in April 2015. Mindfulness has been practiced for thousand of years by yogis. This program will focus on how mindfulness can help improve relationships, manage emotions, increase self-awareness, improve careers and contribute to over-all feeling of happiness and contentment. This is essentially taking our yoga off the mat!
Who would have taught that my first yoga class will lead me to this path? Last February 19, we had a teacher development program for all teachers in yoga+ which was facilitated by Dona. During the program, we were asked to list down the things we love, the things we are good at, the things we get paid to do and things the world needs. I was not surprised with what came up for me - teaching! When we were asked to write our personal purpose, this was what I wrote - To help others achieve TRANSFORMATION through TRAINING based on my personal experience. Whether this training will be asana practice on the mat, mindfulness training in a classroom or triad setting, I have no doubt this is the place where I was meant to be.
