01/20/2016
Getting comfortable teaching yoga
To me the love of teaching yoga was, and sometimes is, balanced with an equal dose of anxiety. Fear of failure in public is a legitimate thing to worry about. A silent room full of grim students rolling their mats up with eyes downcast at the end of a class is a truly awful feeling that will stick with you, even in the good times. I think so many sensitive and thoughful teachers who might become really great are immediately thwarted by a fear of drying up with nothing to say...a light, hot sweat surfacing on the skin as the trembling in one’s voice betrays what the students already know - you suck.
If feeling deeply uncomfortable teaching yoga is the fear, then how do we get comfortable? How do we get comfortable with any task? Let’s look at something you already do comfortably. How about walking... (actually, I tend to walk most comfortably when no-one is watching, even though I have a lot of experience with it.) How about... picking something up.
Take a moment and reach out for something and hold it for a few seconds, then put it down. How did you do that? What was the thought process preceeding the action? There was none. You are so good at picking things up that you’ll automatically change your approach - shifting the object, using both hands, bracing a muscle if it is heavier than you thought - to accomplish the action.
You weren’t always so good at this. There was a time when you reached out, missed the object, and fell foward in your crib. Then you let your ice cream fall out of the cone because you were still working out gravity and its effect on surface tension. Then you tried harder things - catching a moving object, holding your hand open to pet a moving cat as it passed by. Then you learned to touch other people in a sensual way. You got good at these things by doing them often spontaneously, not by “practicing” them. You didn’t sit at a desk and try to pick up your pencil smoothly for 10 reps. Yet picking up a pencil is so integrated into your habit patterns now you might have a hard time writing a step-by-step script describing each sequential action involved. If you did, it would look something like this:
1)Reach out your dominant hand toward the pencil resting on the desk in front of you
2)Lower your open fingers, thumb on one side of the pencil, index middle and ring finger on the other side
3)Move your hand toward the table until the table surface stops your fingers
4)With fingers slightly bent and thumb hyperextended (look!), grip the pencil with exactly enough force to allow you to lift it off the desk
So, doing the thing is easier than explaining how to do the thing. Good postural yoga teachers get good at explaining how to do things the students are not yet good at. See why it is hard?
Most yoga postures are somewhat complex - arms and legs doing different or opposite things, internal muscular actions to align the pose yet another level of complexity. The degree of difficulty in successfuly cueing all this to a group of people who are all different in ability, attention level, strength and flexibility is astounding. The potential for it sucking is high. No wonder you’re not comfortable.
The way to comfort is simple. The complexity of the task must be reduced so that the student new to the postural shape can approximate it and feel successful. Then that new task - that new postural shape - needs repeating by the student, with the guidance of the teacher, until the new thing becomes habitual. When that level of competency is reached, then more specific alignment cues, or breath pattern cues, can be added to enrich and deepen the posture.
This means going methodically, relatively slowly, repeating postures, making sure the student knows the name of the thing they did so they can do it next time you ask them. It also means practicing a simple postural routine regularly yourself, so you are well aquainted with the poses.
Trying to do this with a group of students is much harder than teaching to one student. With one student, your verbal cues can be tailored to what you see them doing. Your advice for prop use, pose form and the poses you choose based on their ability are all more specific and more helpful.
I developed my teacher training through the years by watching how people learn, then developing and modifying the way I teach the training based on what works best. If you are interested in working with private clients or group classes I have trainings for each. Contact me at
DanielClement7@gmail.com
OpenSourceYoga.ca
