I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t sharing something I was passionate about…at 10 it was my library of favorite books. I made pockets in the front of each and cards to track the checking out and return, as the neighborhood kids came by my impromptu lending space on the front patio of our home.

As a high-school senior, I tutored Shakespeare and algebra and a few years later bonehead English, to a returning soldier. He went on to earn a PhD and spent his life in high levels of academia. My small part in his journey was thrilling.

It seemed throughout my life that my passions just had to be shared with others. They sort of bubbled over in an unstoppable way. My first official teaching job began as a temporary replacement for an ailing professor of Interior Design in the Art Department at San Jose State. That role evolved into program director and full-time, tenure track Associate Professor in what became a program of Interior Architecture.

I discovered a fantastic way to change the way I eat and stop gaining and losing quantities of weight every year. I wrote articles and began teaching a class in nutrition for friends. After completing a solo circumnavigation of the world, I opened a women’s sailing school in Puerto Vallarta. I even shared ideas standing in line at the bank, if the situation seemed right!

What makes some people just love to share what they have learned? It could be ego, but often that has nothing to do with it. It certainly is not for financial gain! Many cite the creative stimulation of finding new ways to draw out discovery on the part of the student or client. Others talk about the need to be continually learning in order to teach. All of these strike a chord with me.

This commentary by Anna Ariadne on the site THINQon linked with my feelings about teaching very well:

I find I love the improvisational elements of teaching.  I find it very creative.  I teach mostly small, discussion-based seminars, and I get a great pleasure out of weaving together different questions and ideas and watching as interesting patterns emerge in different students’ answers.  It is like creating, or facilitating the creation of, a tapestry out of different voices–different colored verbal threads–each day. Before I went to college I thought I wanted to be an actress, but I hated the tedium of rehearsals.  Teaching is like performing a play without any rehearsals.  You have a very rough script, but you don’t really know what the final performance will be like because you aren’t (and don’t want to be) in full control of what emerges.

It has been six years since I began teaching Organic Stretching®, then called the Wallace Method, the revolutionary on-the-table therapy developed by Heather Wallace in the late 1980s. After training with Heather, I found I wanted to teach my clients how to make their own healing movements rather than move their bodies for them.

Creating a methodology for this communication and watching the results has been my joyful work ever since. It is not a process of imposing will (mine or theirs) over body, but rather to find the means…words, demonstration, inspiration, permission, suggestion, question…to unlock the barriers we all build into the ways we move and experience our physical bodies. It is not about teaching their minds, but rather about leading them to become observers and students of the deep knowing within their own bodies. About becoming connected totally with their physical beings.

From time-to-time, I make a small video as students are preparing to return to their homes in Canada or the US. These videos, as well as the comments from other students sharing their personal breakthroughs, are the gifts I get from doing what I do. What reward could be greater than this?

Teacher Training Workshop…June 24 – 28…Are you teaching or coaching a full schedule and find your body tired and burned-out by the weekend? Would you like to help others while helping yourself, too? Achieve greater fitness and a sustainable income as a certified Organic Stretching® instructor. This program may be the opportunity you are looking for.

Organic Stretching® offers the ideal complement for a well-rounded practice or studio line-up with a gentle, alternative movement system for people with limited flexibility or painful joints. Help your clients build a personal program that is uniquely theirs, suited to their bodies where they are today, so they can manage their own pain, increase their flexibility, improve their ability to avoid injury, and reconnect to their own bodies’ power and wisdom for healing. Details and registration follow in the link below.

Your first step toward certification.