Teaching yoga

A few observations

Provided.

Provided you love yoga, you enjoy practice, and you love teaching yoga.

Provided you have an opportunity.

Provided that you are having a long innings at the wonderful art of teaching.

Then. Here are some notes, randomly put together.

Prepare. Rehearse. Practice, before each and every class. Each and every class, whether you have taught that class once, or 50 or 100 times. Always prepare well.

The way to prepare is to become a performer, an actor. Rehearse your teaching everywhere – in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in a bus or an aircraft. Mentally go over your instructions, your walk, your talk, your method, the results that you want to achieve.

Watch and imitate great teachers in action, not just yoga teachers – anyone, including great leaders, actors, and icons.

Be early for class, earlier than the student if possible. Teaching is an act of service, and to be there before symbolizes this.

Keep good humour, even if sometimes our own personal circumstances may be totally contrary to humour. That is not the student’s fault, nor does she deserve anything else except a yoga session of the highest quality and enjoyment. It is also important, when teaching such a serious subject as a life science, to keep a lightness of being, and make the subject interesting, and engaging, not serious. There is a saying – laughter is the best medicine. To be a strict, or cold, or mechanical, or clinical is the last thing a yoga teacher wants to be. Rather, the truly enlightened teacher understands that the whole of life is but a game, an illusion, a play of shadow and light and a yoga class is where the students experience it for themselves. A yoga teacher donates joy and relief, and students walk away taller, more buoyant, free.

Focus on breathing and relaxation, but do not make it either mechanical, or repetitive, or boring, or predictable. This holds true for everything else in the class.

It is supremely difficult to train the mind by direct methods. This is maybe a western, or more accurately, an intellectual approach, and doomed to fail. The ancient seers had another way. They realized that a technique-led approach will frustrate the mind and make it more aggressive, outward looking, and uncontrollable. So, they said, instead of technique, focus on experience. Each day, the student is in a different state, the experience varies, and therefore the class, and the enjoyment of it. Put the student through a system which is complete on exercise, breathing, relaxation and meditation. Slowly the mind comes around by itself. Talk about observation, awareness, feelings, the common attributes of a monkey mind. The student’s mind will get attracted.

In the Sivananda class, the teacher’s voice is the only anchor which a student has. It is the single most important ingredient in the class. We must train ourselves to speak slowly, speak clearly and to speak well. We must modulate our voice and change it from time to time. Very importantly, our voice must be reassuring, comforting, and persuasive, gentle, firm, relaxing and life-giving (energetic). Avoid being loud, shrill, fast, monotonous, lifeless. Use words that carry deep meaning, words which are simple, words which bring about happiness, joy, and fulfillment. Avoid negative words and negative actions.

Your uniform carries a direct message about you; it also carries a subconscious message to the student. A clean, bright, well maintained uniform, a glowing countenance and a smiling face (added here from Zen training), makes it easier for the student to learn from you. 

There is a difference in teaching in the morning, and in the day, afternoon and evening. Each class, in fact, is totally different in content (the student and her mind) to the previous class. We must understand the subtle difference and modify our teaching accordingly.

Some techniques.

After kapalabhati and anuloma viloma, give a long relaxation, maybe 3-4 minutes. It takes time for prana to circulate and get absorbed after pranayama.

Surya namaskar is a little creaky for even the most flexible people in the first two rounds, so we must take it easy in the beginning. Slow rounds, followed by a medium, even pace focusing on the breath will give a good warm up. It is only in surya namaskar that we give the heart a continuous workout over 10-12 minutes, so we must see this practice as one of warming up, not stretching fully. That we can do in the asana practice to follow.

In the Sivananda class, it is difficult to assess what asana or which part of the practice is more important than the other. However, there are places where you can concentrate more.

The shoulderstand gives complete relief from tension – physical, mental and emotional, so important in very stressful times. You can give this asana more time. The same applies to the sitting forward bend with the additional advantage of helping very tight legs and stiff backs.

The backwards bends are critical to counter the menace of modern life – sitting, standing, bending. If you give an extra backward bend, or hold the same postures longer or repeat them a few times, it helps a lot.

But then, these are not rules, not even semi-permanent ways of teaching. A good teacher will have to keep on her toes, giving the students a class which they need, not what she wants to teach.

A yoga class is definitely a place where quality matters, not quantity. Teach less. And what you teach, just teach really well. It is enough.

An overall view – be tough, but gentle!

Finally. The entire quality of the class can be transformed with a full ten minutes savasana at the end of the class, not a minute less. So finish the class early, and give savasana the full due.

Sometimes you may be running out of time or you may not have a full 90 minutes; do pranayama, a couple of rounds of surya namaskar, double leg raises, give at least one inverted asana, one forward bend, one backward bend, one spinal twist, one balancing pose and one lateral stretch.

One observation about teaching yoga – when the student is relaxed, her breathing improves. When the student is relaxed and she is breathing well, her flexibility, her strength and her stamina, her health, her mood and her overall life perspective changes for the better, improves dramatically, magically. The opposite is also true. So if we have to teach a student ‘good’ yoga, then we must first teach relaxation, and then breathing and then asana and pranayama, in that order.

To teach relaxation, we must ourselves understand relaxation, and tension.

When correcting.

Don’t be in a hurry to correct. But don’t wait too long either.

Watch and observe students by slowing down. Watch every movement, every expression, every behavior. Slowly you will become aware of the student, who she really is, what she is thinking, what she is feeling, what she can do, what she cannot do. Make observation your way of life. Watch, listen, take time to understand. Then slowly each student will become clear in your consciousness.

Start by passing on your energy to the students, through your voice, your attitude, and by your pure intention.

Correction happens by itself, magically, if you allow the students to relax and breathe. This is the greatest learning for a teacher, because the student will have his own realization, provided we can make the environment so safe, pure and charged. In a space of giving up, the student realizes his ability, his limitation, his possibility. So this is the first major step in helping students. To let them be, and not to instruct, teach, instruct, teach, instruct, teach.

Then, we must understand whom to correct, when to correct, what to correct, how much to correct and how to correct.

Again, don’t be in a hurry to correct. Be eager, be hungry to show the way. But develop a knack of what you can correct and how much of it, in that brief moment of time during the class. One correction can make a huge difference in a student’s practice, sometimes forever. So, observe patiently, and make your contribution at the right time in the right way.

When spending time with a student, focus and correct fully, before moving on to someone else.

You can help a student through clear instructions, or demonstration, or by touching. Sometimes all the three methods are required.

It is easy to ignore a student’s mistakes, or the need for correction, if you have been teaching that student for some time, and you haven’t seen any improvement. This is the teacher’s limitation, not the student’s potential. Never let go of a chance to correct again. Instead, change your own approach so that the student can clearly understand what is required.

Watch teachers more senior to you. Be in their class, assist them, listen to them carefully. Some things will become clear. You will learn things which can be taught and which students will like. You will also learn things which do not work, so you can avoid making those mistakes.

Watch teachers who are fresh, and new to teaching, or maybe less experienced. You will learn things which you cannot learn by theory – both the freshness, and the minor, but obvious mistakes of newer teachers.

Happy teaching!

Arun Pandala, Gurgaon

October 2010