November 2019
He invited me to the second yoga studio he also taught at where I became a member. My life was bringing me physically closer to him as my house sold and I moved in with my family that lives on the same side of the lake as he. His classes always spoke straight to my heart and brought out the healing tears in floods. We were both crying and healing in savasana, and he told me this only happened for him when I was in class. It felt like we were healing together with God’s beautiful words for us moving through him.
COVID hit after these months of classes together on both sides of the lake, and the yoga studios closed. I started helping the one closer to my house bring their operations online, and I became a yoga teacher right along side him there before I even finished my teacher training. We were becoming closer friends and peers. In the summer we started opening up the outdoor yoga deck for limited size classes. The topics of masks came up in what I call The Great Mask Debate. I wasn’t at first planning on getting involved since it was outdoors until the yoga instructor decided to take a stand for masks and put his job on the line. Suddenly I had to figure out where I stood on the subject for the meeting the next morning, and I came to my own reasons for taking the side of masks because of my core value of creating the safest space I possibly could for the most people in our community. It also made me face the truth that I was living in a high risk household and my fears of my mother dying. In the meeting my talk about core values calmed the situation, and we opened with masks. He told me afterwards how grateful he was for me, how he loved that his classes always resonated with me, and that I was just as much his teacher too. My heart melted with the compliment and the confirmation. A few days later the owner of the studio told me he was protecting me.
As we continued working at the studio together the subject of core values in regards to teaching yoga kept coming up again and again where our values matched each other but not the studio. We would talk after class on the yoga deck in what he called “deck therapy” where we would share what we were going through and support each other. From the moment I became a teacher myself, the way that I experienced our friendship changed. My feelings would get hurt in ways I hadn’t experienced when our only contact was through the heart in the yoga classes. Thank God for my own Ascension Coaches who were coaching me with either private or group sessions during this time.
One night just before class he told me he decided to leave the studio when he finished teaching the teacher training there in two months time. I cried all through class feeling like I had just loved him right out of my life. As I laid on my back looking at the trees in savasana the thought came to me that I should tell him what I truly desire. After class he asked me how I was. I answered with a “I’m fine” avoiding eye contact as he went inside to put away the altar items. I thought to myself “Damnit Jenny, don’t be that girl,” and I vowed to myself that I would say what I needed to say when he came out. As he came out he started with saying that he felt bad for telling me. I opened up and told him how I was glad he told me before class so I could work through my feelings about it during class. Then I got brave and honest and said “What I really want is to grow with you in my practice as I grow.” He made an audible aww type of sound and told me how he had been really looking forward to watching me blossom as a teacher. I asked him what he was going to do next, secretly hoping there could be a place for me, and he started talking about a book he was writing. As we were getting up to leave he floated the idea asking if I would maybe “manage him” and help him keep on track with his writing. I said with a little chuckle that I would totally “manage him” and couldn’t help but hear the innuendo in my own voice. I felt a bit embarrassed but felt the desire to actually write books together so much more. So I told him of the books I had been holding in my mind to write, and as we parted he left it with we could “manage each other.” I left the studio that night filled with a new level of hopeful delight.
The talk of managing each other turned to me managing a yoga studio he would open. The next day I thought to myself, no I want to do this together. The next time I saw him he told me that he had a long forgotten dream of building a retreat center, and that we could do that together. Over the next days I thought to myself, yeah but the everyday programming is important so it should have a community center too. The next time I saw him he told me it would need to start as a community center. It felt like this man was reading my mind.
A couple weeks or so of this and he told me he was putting in his notice and asked me to review the email before he sent it. He shared with me his selfish desire for me to leave with him. I told him I wanted to stay as long as I could and get more experience teaching. He put in his notice, and the next day the owner announced indoor classes without masks and without enough distancing for me. So we ended up leaving the studio together after all.
And just like that we embarked on becoming business partners.
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