5.11.07

People's skills

I was very touched today with what I witnessed. For the sake of these great human beings I have decided not to mention their names, but they are two the greatest Astanga yoga teachers, with pure hearts, good bones and good intentions. Its funny how you create these teachers to be such idols, their dedication and experience in yoga is what you miss, however they seem super humans. When they teach they give their whole being to their students and get great joy out of it as well. However being so connected in such a way can mean that sometimes we are even more removed from the fast growing reality of our world and advance technology. One of the teachers had just introduced herself to using PayPal for her students to pay for the workshops but was having great difficulty with the account, due to something I will also mention in a moment. But my heart fell into pieces when I saw her distress and her anxiety of this cock-up. She broke down in tears, because she didn't have the skills to stay on top of things. She had never heard of Excel to save her students details in. She had been creating more and more files in her email system to keep a track of the students who have paid or attended their previous workshops. And this unorganised chaos meant that some things took hours to locate, to collate, to email…It was obviously part of the job she definitely did not enjoy. The fact that she starts her day by practicing her own yoga at 3am, and then having students over for 5hours is pretty much a full day work for her by 12noon. It is very natural that she felt exhausted and depleted by the end of the day. I wish I could help her more but the mountain of work that her unorganised files would create meant that she really needs to get someone to dedicate time sorting out her things. And that was the exact suggestion we made to her, to get a student in with good IT skills (which is very easy these days as using a computer is like brushing our teeth) and in turn of yoga classes get them to work and organise things. Hopefully she will take this great advice and ask for help because it will only get harder to operate in such chaos, particularly when they are so popular and it will only get busier as the time goes by.Lets come back to the rather pure hearts and thoughts they had, which can sometimes be played to their advantage as ignorance but in true senses just shows wanting to earn a living without realising that the community in large ought to also benefit from that, which is called "paying tax". It seems to me the cause of the problem with PayPal was that this couple was now getting large amounts of money being paid into their account, and because they are not set up as a business PayPal requested more information from them, i.e. invoices for the transactions, company name etc, and as that information isn't available they froze the account. I mean the whole set up in India is rather dodgy too. They tell their students not to mention that they are earning any money but simple are a group of people practising yoga together. There was even a joke made by the teacher to a student "if anyone comes to check I will take your place on the mat and you can stand in front of the class pretending to teach". Surely this isn't healthy and someone is bound to get irritated with the amount of money going in and out of this business and start up enquiries. Never the less what I realised today is that there is no need to have such higher expectations of such ordinary people and have them placed somewhere where we believe is too far to reach. Yoga doesn't make people better or worse, respecting a teacher's skills is just as important as respecting a geek's IT skills. After all we are all the same but in different shapes, forms and abilities.