In December 2020, at the end of a year that felt a hundred years long, I read an email to my husband. I told him that one my favorite yoga teachers, and one of my favorite people, was offering a yoga teacher training course. She had partnered with two other teachers and they’d created an online program for the first level of teacher certification, 200 hours.

I mentioned it to my husband, in the context of a conversation I’d had with him many times, that I wished I had time to increase my yoga knowledge and skills. My practice was never consistent but always something I loved when I did it. I was serious in the way that you might say “Wouldn’t it be great if,” a bit of wishful thinking without a lot of weight behind it.

His response was “Do it. Just do it.” I said “What are you saying? I have a million things to do. I work all day, we are still battling this pandemic. How can I do this?” He responded, “It’s COVID. What else are you doing? Just do it.”

So I began to consider. It was a big commitment, nearly five full months of two evenings a week on Zoom from 6-9 and Sundays from noon until 6. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know the half of it, that I’d have homework for each module with reading and practice teaching and much more.

But, I did it. Our class connected virtually just as well as if we were in a studio. We learned and discussed, we shared and we practiced. We helped one another and classes became not just my obligation, but opportunities to expand my thinking and enhance my knowledge.

I won’t lie. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was over. I taught my final practice in someone’s driveway because of the pandemic and our other tests were all online. We finally came together in person for our graduation—outdoors of course.

In the intervening three years, I have continued to be sporadic with my personal practice but, more or less, regular with my teaching. I love to teach chair yoga to the older adults who live in the residential settings where I work, love to watch how dedicated they are, how hard they work, how much they concentrate on both the messages and the movements. I took an additional certification in Chair Yoga Dance so that I could find a way to add even more fun to our elder-centered practices and it has been a joy.

Now I stand at the brink of another precipice. Two of the teachers I had in 2021 are offering the next level of training, 300 hours, and, once again, I said “Maybe I should do this,” to which my husband, predictably, responded “Just do it.” Easy for him to say, harder for me to truly accept.

In recent weeks, as I wrestled with this decision, I’ve had this conversation with other people in my life. There are those who echo my husband’s viewpoint, the “why not” school of thought. And, then, there are those who are in the “why” school, “why do you need to do that” and questions to that effect. And then there are the “just try it and quit” if it doesn’t work out contingent.

Interesting to say the least. What I do know about myself is that quitting is never in my behavior set so that train of thought is immediately derailed. But, what I found, is that the “why should you” really set my teeth a bit on edge. Those were folks, many of whom I love, who see things as a series of little boxes. We jump into the work box and we do what is prescribed but we don’t try to push down the walls. We jump into the “outside work” box and we do our weekly card game or night out with the girls but we don’t push to do something new or different.

At the end of my debating, at the end of my anxious wondering about time and skills and abilities, I came to one strong realization. If we don’t stretch, we don’t grow. If we don’t try new things, we never know how far we can reach. If we don’t make the effort, take the risk, push outside our comfort zones, we never know how much we can achieve. I choose to stretch myself, in all ways. I choose to reach for more. I choose to extend myself and, in that way, to continue to fill my full heart.