This entry was posted on Mar 8, 2023 by Charlotte Bell.
Do you ever get bored with listening to your yoga instructing “script?” I do. I’ve been instructing yoga since 1986, and generally it hits me that I appear to say the identical issues time and again—and time and again.
That is partly okay. I’ve spent appreciable vitality crafting my instructing language. As a author, I prefer to be concise, utilizing as few phrases as potential to get my level throughout. I additionally prefer to be exact, utilizing simply the fitting mixture of phrases to convey what I’m attempting to speak. As a instructor, I’m conscious of the facility of language to encourage or to convey judgment or to mission my perspective onto my college students. It’s a fragile steadiness that I proceed to hone.
I additionally generally discover that I are likely to get caught in a rut in the best way I sequence asanas. For instance, I’ve discovered that sequencing standing poses in a sure order makes structural sense. Every pose prepares the physique for the subsequent one. However is that the one approach to sequence standing poses? In fact not. I lately utterly upended my standing sequence in a pair lessons. The outcomes have been energizing and revitalizing.
Stick to What Works, or Change it Up?
I typically surprise if my college students tire of listening to the identical language. (Most of them have been attending my lessons for 10 to twenty years or extra.) I think about they generally do. However I additionally know that listening to one thing repeatedly can finally result in listening to it in another way sooner or later. College students have instructed me as a lot: “I’ve heard you say such-and-such many instances, however I simply lastly received it right this moment.”
However as a longtime Deadhead again within the day, I at all times really feel compelled to vary it up generally. (The Grateful Lifeless by no means performed the identical present twice, and didn’t play their songs the identical manner every time.) I prefer to problem myself by tuning into my college students’ wants and letting the sequence circulation in shocking methods. I generally take pleasure in not figuring out what the subsequent pose shall be till a cut up second earlier than we apply it. Then again, a number of folks like a set routine, a apply they’ll rely on. So which manner is finest?
As at all times, there’s not one yoga instructing approach that may fulfill everybody. A mix of giving college students one thing acquainted to hold onto, whereas additionally introducing new methods of training appears to strike the fitting steadiness for me.
How one can Enliven Your Yoga Instructing
Listed here are two solutions for altering up your yoga instructing:
- Observe: Protecting your property apply very important might be a very powerful factor I can encourage you to do. Your own home apply is the place you may experiment with altering your sequencing. That is how you will discover out what works and what doesn’t, on your personal physique. Then you may take what you’ve realized into your yoga instructing. Remember, after all, that should you’re a flexible or athletic practitioner, that your college students could not have the ability to do the “fancier” poses. Use your property apply to give you methods to switch poses, utilizing Yoga Blocks, Yoga Straps, Yoga Blankets or Yoga Bolsters. That manner, you may supply your college students options that give them the identical advantages because the pose you’re training.
- Play with language: As a author, I’ve skilled myself to search for other ways to say issues. I like to make use of phrases which can be exact and descriptive. I edit a number of yoga writing in my career, and I persistently learn directions that use all-purpose generic phrases. “Carry” is without doubt one of the commonest ones. As a quite simple instance, as an alternative of “convey your ft to hips-width aside” I‘ will say “step your ft to hips-width aside.” I do know this appears very choosy and trivial, and generic phrases should not fallacious. College students usually get what you’re attempting to say. However taking part in with utilizing totally different phrases and altering your phrasing can generally result in new understanding, each for your self and on your college students.
- Continue to learn: Take lessons from different academics. Hearken to how they convey and study new methods of approaching apply. If you happen to stay in an space the place you don’t have entry to academics, look on-line. YogaUOnline, specifically, affords high-quality on-line workshops and programs.
Yoga Instructing is an Inward Journey
In the end, efficient instructing entails a steadiness between going with what you realize and studying new methods of speaking. You don’t have to surrender the methods that you realize profit your college students. However to ensure that your yoga instructing apply to proceed to develop, it’s essential to problem your self. This doesn’t imply it’s important to proceed to apply and educate ever extra “superior” poses. It factors, as an alternative, to experimenting with the instruments you’ve already cultivated. It means trying inward to find the extra refined results of sequencing. It’s a chance to play with language, and to contemplate the consequences of the phrases you utilize.
As Suzuki Roshi famously wrote in Zen Thoughts, Freshmen Thoughts, “Within the freshmen thoughts there are various potentialities. Within the professional’s thoughts there are few.” Preserve your thoughts open to new methods of training and instructing.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third e-book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Crimson Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards in 2010.
