I landed my first yoga teaching job at a newborn studio in a sweet Colorado town. A freshly-minted YA papers-carrying teacher, I was barely as old as the studio itself. I carried a heavy vision that when I began teaching for real, I would instantly sport the goddess-y aura of the teachers I had idolized in New York. I could see myself seamlessly weaving throughout a crowded room of sweaty down dog-shaped bodies that converged around my ethereal essence on a regular basis.

No one else saw that.

Instead, sometimes I showed up and few others did. Sometimes I showed up and people left. Sometimes I showed up, period.

I was lucky to have a teacher back in NYC, Lesley Desaulniers, who graciously advised me over the phone. She asked how things were going with teaching and I said, “Ok, but sometimes it’s just one person.”

“Oh, don’t say it like that,” Lesley implored. “Every person is an opportunity.”

In my first year teaching, I took this wisdom to mean I had to “work it” to gain students wherever I could, be it one person or ten or twenty –-in other words, I ignored it.

I worshipped numbers instead.

I taught at a gym that required I write the number of class attendees down in a big notebook after each class alongside all the other teachers’ classes and numbers. I was new in town, and worse– the product of a non-local (and thus unknown, no matter how sexy my teacher’s name had been in New York) yoga teacher training, and my numbers shrank like submissive dogs in deference to the bigger, more dominant numbers of treasured, experienced and locally famous teachers. My numbers were as embarrassed of themselves as I was of them. Let’s not forget the omniscient mindbody, silently judging me with its ubiquitous yoga class sign-in system that revealed to me and all those in possession of a password all the numbers for all the classes of all of the teachers that week (and I confess, yes I confess, to checking to see if my numbers were commensurate with others’. Sometimes I still do.)

There were successes — I had an early morning class that boomed despite its hour in the carefree land of Boulder and my “sometimes there’s just one person class” developed a happy regular quorum.

I know. In recounting these successes I’ve revealed the nagging problem:

Success was simply a matter of numbers.

I’ve moved three times in the space of four years. I moved away from Colorado but brought with me the shame of losing one of my regular classes on account of low numbers.

By dint of a miracle, the Washington D.C. yoga community adopted me like a lost puppy (teaching tail between my legs and all); with the support I found there, I flourished both as a student and as a teacher. It didn’t hurt that maybe I was a bit more mature than my earliest teaching days, and perhaps a bit more connected to teaching because I’d begun to find myself as a student — of ashtanga. I received a teaching job organically and without any audition — people believed in me.

Teaching again I was surprised to find myself in this strange position – Popular. The class began tiny, but swelled to the max, sometimes with people turned away at the door. It was close to my original vision! (Ok, I must admit that it helped that the studio could not fit more than two-dozen bodies). Still, after struggling during my first year teaching as an unknown newbie, I tore this experience open like the gift that it was.

Less than a year later, I moved again. Back to square one, those palmy DC days behind me. I started teaching a new weekend class, at a new time slot, at a new location for a great local studio. My first class came, and there was….

One person.

Only I didn’t see “just one person.” I saw an opportunity to do something I love to do. I radiated the joy of my own practice and the teaching I was gobbling up from a beautiful ashtanga community.

This person came back. She came back again, and brought her mother. When I started teaching somewhere else, she came there too. So did her mother.

I think she came back because I’ve reached a point where I don’t worry so much about those who are not coming to my classes. Frankly, even when I think I am worrying about those people, I’m really just concerned with myself. That’s kind of the antithesis of service, which is what teaching yoga is.

Instead, I teach from the inspiring well of practice housed in my own body. I want to teach you what others have taught me. I don’t try to be someone I am not or to teach anything that I don’t feel in me: you don’t deserve that. I am trying to give something I cherish to you.

One inimitable DC yoga teacher in the Iyengar tradition, Kristen Krash, says it best:

I don’t have the biggest classes. But they are big enough. Be yourself. Stand your ground and teach from it. Emphasize the positive benefits of your practice. Understand not everyone is going to get it. Or get it right away. But do your thing, shine your light, practice to keep it bright, and the interested students will come.

Years passed before I could hear the message delivered years ago by my great vinyasa teacher back in New York; I still stop and quiet down so I can listen to Lesley say it sometimes:

“Every person is an opportunity.”

I hear it when I think of all the teachers who saw me as an opportunity and not a number—the times when I was in a room of “just” a few people with a famous and incredible teacher (the last half hour of the mysore session with David Robson, an early morning class with Lesley Desaulniers, and some precious fall mysore mornings with Peg Mulqueen), and the times when I was one person, individually recognized, among many with Kelly Morris or David Garrigues; the times when I was a reluctant student, the times when I could have been left behind in the dust but you, great teacher, would not leave me behind.

And I hear it when there is “just” one person in the room. I hear it when the room is packed, and it is harder to come by that one-on-one connection. I hear it when the room is pleasantly populated but there is one person who appears to rabidly dislike my teaching – or me. I hear it outside the yoga room when I meet someone for the first time. I hear it as I say it to myself– a reminder that I am a potential “every person” and “opportunity” too.

There are no numbers anymore, appropriately. After all, I don’t teach numbers—

I teach people.