This entry was posted on Feb 18, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
Many years in the past the movie, Annie Corridor, embellished a well-known quote concerning the artwork of instructing. Within the movie the quote went like this: “Those that can’t do, train. Those that can’t train, train fitness center.” (The movie’s embellishment is the second sentence.) The quote’s intention was to diss academics, particularly fitness center academics I assume. For yoga academics, it appears to be the other. The bendiest amongst us typically select to show. We will carry out all the flowery poses, in spite of everything. However is that all the time an excellent factor?
My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile physique. So once I began training yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained trainer, I took to it immediately. All of the poses we practiced relied on flexibility, and in brief order, I discovered myself in a position to carry out every part the trainer provided—to extremes.
When June introduced that she would offer a trainer coaching, I instantly thought, that is for me. I liked how the apply made me really feel. I may do the poses “higher” than anybody within the room, I believed. This might be the right calling for me.
Just a few months later, earlier than the coaching began, I moved to Salt Lake Metropolis. June’s coaching was out of the query. The academics I discovered in Salt Lake Metropolis—there have been solely a handful at a time—taught Iyengar yoga. It was an entire new world.
All Standing Poses, All of the Time
In each single class we did standing poses. I hated them. My loose-knit physique was very unstable, and the loosey-goosey apply I’d been doing most likely didn’t assist. My physique trembled beneath the barrage of alignment directions, and from my overabundance of flexibility and lack of energy.
I can’t start to recount the variety of occasions I heard, “Carry your kneecaps!,” an instruction I used to be incapable of fulfilling. I’d been unconsciously hyperextending my knees for years and my quads had been fully asleep. My quads slid down towards my knees 24/7. Participating them appeared unattainable. In each workshop, academics referred to as out my hyperextended knees for example of what to not do.
I’m actually unsure why I continued. The apply was such a problem to my ego. However I actually favored my academics, Cita and David Riley, a bodily therapist and physician. Their data was so huge, and I used to be studying a ton from them.
They introduced many senior Iyengar yoga academics to city: Ramanand Patel, Mary Dunn, Felicity Inexperienced, Judith Hanson Lasater, Pujari Keays. These workshops hardly ever attracted greater than 30 folks—a quantity that was thought-about to be big on the time. On reflection, it was a tremendous time to be training.
Again to Sq. One
Mary Dunn taught me methods to get up my quads. She took me to the wall. She confirmed me that I wanted to apply with the ball of my foot of my entrance leg a couple of inches up the wall and my heel on the ground, at a couple of 45-degree angle. After I pressed the ball of my foot into the wall, my quads would really transfer upward a fraction of an inch. She urged I apply standing poses this manner for at the least six months to construct energy and intelligence in my quads. It took a yr of training this manner earlier than my quads would interact with my foot flat on the ground.
Throughout that yr, my standing poses slowly grew to become extra steady. Different issues began to fall into place in my standing apply. I discovered that once I stopped collapsing into my knee joints, my arches started to carry too. I used to be born with flat toes, and I used to be amazed to see tiny arches forming. My calves additionally engaged, pushing my shins ahead, which stabilized my knees.
As my legs started supporting me, my breath eased. I may increase within the standing poses as an alternative of combating simply to carry myself up. I now not discovered myself grumbling silently as Cita and David talked us by means of limitless standing sequences. When Pujari Keays got here to city together with his particular model of depth, I really started to like standing poses and started to notice a newfound stability in the remainder of my life too.
The Energy of Woodshedding for Yoga Lecturers
After I first began instructing, I sequenced lessons the way in which Cita and David had as a result of it was what I knew. I taught a number of standing poses. And I discovered with out fail that the directions I gave to assist college students discover stability had been extra thorough and useful than any I gave for the poses that had been simple for me. Regardless of my troubled previous with standing poses, I got here to instructing with a much better understanding of them than the poses I’d discovered easy.
Many years of observing my college students’ struggles with the poses I discovered simple have taught me what to search for and methods to train these poses too. However my deepest, most thorough instruction is in standing poses. Having began at sq. one, I perceive my college students’ struggles and methods to assist them by means of these struggles.
How Challenges Assist Yoga Lecturers
So perhaps the “Those that can’t do, train” quote isn’t a diss in spite of everything. Perhaps it’s those that needed to study the rudiments that make the very best academics. If yoga was about performing fancy poses and posting our prowess on Instagram and Fb, maybe the quote would have some advantage. Nevertheless it’s not.
The overwhelming majority of yoga practitioners won’t ever carry out excessive backbends or slide their ankles behind their heads. Most individuals are simply not constructed that method. Lecturers who’re “born on third base and suppose they hit a triple,” because the saying goes, have quite a lot of work to do to grasp the place most of their college students are coming from.
Asana apply is about discovering steadiness and ease within the pose you might be training at this second. A trainer who understands in her intestine, from her personal expertise, that the journey is the apply will probably be capable of train nearly all of college students with empathy and understanding.
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 revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third ebook 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 gained two Emmy awards.
