Between books and mats

Hi, I'm Francis.

I'm a literary translator and a yoga teacher. Yes, I'm self-employed and registered for two different activities. In other words, a glutton for punishment.

Most of my time goes into translating books from English into Spanish. The rest I spend teaching a handful of yoga classes each week. I don't make a living from yoga. But, honestly, yoga is what keeps me going. I'm not exaggerating. I half-jokingly say that if I hadn't found this practice years ago, I might well have ended up with some other, far less healthy habit instead.

Anyway — I trained as a teacher in 2013 at Tatami Spirit – Escuela de Terapias Naturales, a Yoga Alliance–certified school, and went on to further training at Quiromás – Formación Profesional en Quiromasaje y Terapias Naturales.

Training, of course, doesn't end with a certificate. Over the years I've come to understand that a big part of learning starts right after: teaching, observing, getting things wrong, trying other ways of doing things and, above all, listening to the people who practise with me. In that sense, my own students have been — and still are — some of my best teachers.

In recent years I've become especially interested in the history of yoga: where the postures we do today actually come from, and how they've changed over the centuries. I care about respecting tradition, without forgetting that yoga is a living discipline in constant flux, one that has absorbed ideas, techniques and ways of understanding the body from very different times and places.

In fact, if there's one thing I've learned after more than ten years teaching, it's that yoga changes along with you. The yoga I teach today doesn't look much like the yoga I taught when I started. I care less and less about complex postures and more about the ability to listen to the body. Less about flexibility as a display and more about the mobility that lets you bend down to pick up a shopping bag without your whole back reminding you it exists. Less performance, more quiet.

I'm not interested in extremely complex postures, or in turning the practice into a display of skill. What I care about is that you leave class walking a little better. Breathing a little better. Sleeping a little better. And that, for a while, the background noise turns down a notch. Because that, to me, is the real difference with other physical activities. For a bit over an hour, the phone stops existing. So does work, email, errands, the news, the rush, and all that noise we carry around almost without noticing. All that's left is you, your body and your breath.

And something curious happens. I couldn't quite explain it, but I've been watching it for more than a decade now, in my students and in myself. I don't think yoga works miracles, but by the end of class, a lot of people leave with the feeling of having hit a reset button. The problems are still there, of course. But they don't take up quite the same space anymore. And these days, that's no small thing.