I’m often asked what brought me to Yoga in the first place, and how I made my start as a Yoga teacher.
I was recently interviewed for the fantastic Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast by Lily Allen-Duenas. Lily is a yoga teacher, holistic healer, Reiki Master, vegan nutritionist, and meditation instructor. She has taught yoga classes and workshops in surf hostels in Sri Lanka, hotels in Bali and wellness centres in the Philippines. And she has sat at the feet of masters, monks, and gurus all along the way. Through her podcast, and all of her endeavours, she strives to serve her community in a way that is accessible, authentic, and inclusive. (She’s great. Subscribe to her podcast and follow her on Instagram.) During our chat, I opened up to Lily about the strange and serendipitous route that brought me into teaching Yoga.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. Enjoy!
Lily Allen-Duenas: Just to kick it off, would you like to share with us how yoga first came into your life?
Amy McDonald: Sure. Yoga came into my life when I was eight by means of my best friend at the time having a bit of an alternative mother. My best friend was doing yoga and my mum thought it would be a good idea for me to tag along because I was an anxious and stressed-out little kid. My doctor and my parents thought maybe yoga might be more helpful than medication to manage my anxiety. So I started out doing kid’s yoga. Yeah, way back in the eighties.
Lily Allen-Duenas: Wow. That’s fantastic. I haven’t talked to someone yet who was introduced that early to yoga. Wow.
Amy McDonald: Yeah, I was lucky. I caught a break. I think if it wasn’t for my friend, it wouldn’t have happened.
Lily Allen-Duenas: So did you just continue on and off throughout the years? Up until you’re an adult?
Amy McDonald: Yeah, I was a ‘one night a week’ sort of yoga person through my teens and early twenties. Wednesday nights was yoga night. And then after I finished university, when I was working in Melbourne, I’d go to classes on my lunch breaks. I wasn’t particularly discerning other than I liked a certain teacher. I didn’t really know much about the difference between styles or anything like that. I went to things that fit in my schedule.
After a few years of that I got more discerning with the classes I was taking and I decided to ultimately sign up for a 200-hour yoga teacher training in 2009.
Lily Allen-Duenas: Amazing. Was that in Australia or somewhere else?
Amy McDonald: No, that was in Thailand, in Chiang Mai. And it was a residential training, so it ran for just over a month. It was held as a very peculiar health retreat. Very peculiar. They had all sorts of new age modalities as well as our Yoga teacher training. People lived there, too. Kind of like a wacky, new age timeshare. Part of our YTT was going to some of the extra classes being offered. It was an eye-opener, to be sure! I went to something claiming to be Qi Gong that involved modifying my DNA with special, giant egg whisks. There was all sorts of wacky stuff.
It was a month of very long days. Between 12 to 14 hours a day of studying, learning and practising. It was a little bit like Survivor in that not everyone made it through to the end. Someone had a bit of a breakdown and she got kicked out and someone else had an ethical dilemma with the teacher and he got kicked out, too.
So the group shrunk over time, but I made it through. I almost didn’t, but I made it through, and I got my qualification in the middle of 2009.
Lily Allen-Duenas: You are a survivor and I am so glad Amy, that you brought up that example of modifying DNA with egg whisks. That’s rather unique.
Amy McDonald: Yeah, it was a weird place.
Lily Allen-Duenas: I spent a month in Chiang Mai myself doing a 180-hour Thai massage training so I’m very familiar with Chiang Mai. It’s beautiful there.
Amy McDonald: It sure is. I have been hosting my Abundant Yoga Teacher Retreat there annually ever since. I love it.
During the training we got the weekends off as free time. We got Saturday night and all day Sunday as free time. So I would book into a little arty hotel for the Saturday night and escape the weirdness for a few hours. Eat what I wanted when I wanted to, sleep as much as I wanted, and just generally not do anything to do with yoga! I’d recharge, essentially, and then head back to the wackadoodle retreat centre.
To be clear, though, my training was very good. It was pure fortune: I ended up learning from truly some of the leading teachers at that time.
Lily Allen-Duenas: I’m glad there was that. And it certainly kicked off your path as a yoga teacher. And what made you want to shift, or actually, maybe it wasn’t a shift, maybe more of an additional modality of being a spiritual business coach as well as a yoga teacher. When did that shift happen?
Amy McDonald: I came back from that training and I opened a small studio, just a home studio, and taught from there for a while. I was also working as a freelance writer and editor. Then about a year later I moved to the country to the little house that I have now and I studied to become a life coach.
I had a couple of different qualifications under my belt, and I started combining the yoga teaching and the life coaching in retreats I ran in Bali. I ran the first few with a friend and then began teaching them solo.
Like most yoga teachers, I wanted to develop my teaching skills so I signed up to do a 300-hour yoga teacher training and some more coaching qualifications. The YTT was in Jakarta and the coaching training was in Paris, Florence, Miami and Majorca. Each time I’d attend a training I’d connect with my friends who would quiz me about growing their businesses. I would just give them informal business advice based on my writing qualification, project management skills, life coaching stuff.
Over time my friends started advising me to make this my actual business. To stop just helping them and start calling myself a ‘Yoga business coach’ and seeking out paying clients.
So I started developing a business around those lines in about 2014. Within the year things were starting to feel promising so at the beginning of 2016 I decided to just go all in. I quit my very safe, very reliable, very well-paid corporate job and became a yogipreneur!
These days the majority of my work time, if you like, is in the business coaching space. But I also still teach some classes here and there to make sure I don’t get too rusty. It’s important to me that I’m practicing what I preach.
Lily Allen-Duenas: No. Yeah. I think that time on the mat is always going to be valuable.
So what is some of the advice that you would usually give a new yoga teacher on how to kick start their journey as a yoga teacher? That’s one of the questions I get most frequently. I’ve had a couple of listeners actually write in about it saying, ‘Can we talk more about what you do for new yoga teachers?’
So I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Amy McDonald: Sure. As far as the craft of being a yoga teacher, I really believe that there is an apprenticeship phase that is super important and mustn’t be skipped. It doesn’t have to last for too long. Sometimes it’s maybe only even six months, but sometimes it’s two years where you just want to teach your heart out. Where you just say yes to everything—paid stuff, I mean. Don’t say yes to lots of unpaid stuff!
Say yes to all the gigs you can get. Say yes to teaching at gyms. Say yes to subbing at studios for maybe not a whole bunch of money to the degree that you can afford to. Say yes to teaching groups of your friends in the park. Teach as much as you can, because you will get exponentially better, quickly, the more you teach. Once you get that experience under your belt, you can start to be more discerning. But don’t miss the ‘teach everything’ apprenticeship!
I know when I first started, I taught classes in what was my lounge room, but it became my ‘yoga studio’. I taught classes at a women’s gym, just to the trainers who would clear all the machines out of the way during the lunch break. And I would play these God-awful Buddha Bar CDs at their request. It was like teaching yoga to the whale music and pan pipes and wolves howling. It was horrific. But I did that twice a week. I taught yoga at a Hen’s brunches where they are all drunk on mimosas. (No wonder you can’t do Sirsasana, you can’t even stand up!) I would teach whatever I could get my hands on.
I taught at a terrible weekend retreat. I did everything—taught the yoga, made the food, drove the participants around—and I nearly killed myself as a result. Horrific, I’d never do that again. But I’m so glad I did it then. It was a weekend full of powerful lessons.
For brand new teachers, just teach as much as you can.
Also, don’t worry about sucking. I always say I got a ‘cat’ and ‘cow’ backwards for a good, I don’t know, 18 months, like I got them the wrong way around. I was terrible when I was brand new. It’s normal. It’s OK. You’re learning a new skill and it will take time to become proficient, let alone masterful. You will get your lefts and rights mixed up. Don’t stress. Laugh. Improve. Remember, it’s just yoga. It’s just a yoga class.
This is the first instalment from my convo with Lily. Be on the lookout for more from us over the coming weeks.
Want to hang out in person?
Join me on my National Tour this August and September. All of the details are here: https://www.amymcdonald.com.au/immersions
These 1-Day Abundant Yoga Teacher Immersions are a full day of Yoga biz trainings, warm and welcoming support, guidance, inspiration and encouragement. And you can save yourself a place for only $97!
I’ll be visiting Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. Come say hello!
Here’s the link again: https://www.amymcdonald.com.au/immersions