This entry was posted on Mar 8, 2023 by Charlotte Bell.
Do you ever get uninterested in listening to your yoga educating “script?” I do. I’ve been educating yoga since 1986, and typically it hits me that I appear to say the identical issues again and again—and again and again.
That is partly okay. I’ve spent appreciable power crafting my educating 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 best mixture of phrases to convey what I’m attempting to speak. As a trainer, I’m conscious of the facility of language to encourage or to convey judgment or to undertaking my perspective onto my college students. It’s a fragile stability that I proceed to hone.
I additionally typically discover that I are likely to get caught in a rut in the way in which 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 following one. However is that the one technique to sequence standing poses? After all not. I not too long ago fully upended my standing sequence in a pair courses. The outcomes had been energizing and revitalizing.
Stick to What Works, or Change it Up?
I usually surprise if my college students tire of listening to the identical language. (Most of them have been attending my courses for 10 to twenty years or extra.) I think about they often do. However I additionally know that listening to one thing repeatedly can finally result in listening to it in a different way at some point. College students have advised me as a lot: “I’ve heard you say such-and-such many occasions, however I simply lastly bought it at this time.”
However as a longtime Deadhead again within the day, I at all times really feel compelled to vary it up typically. (The Grateful Useless by no means performed the identical present twice, and didn’t play their songs the identical approach every time.) I prefer to problem myself by tuning into my college students’ wants and letting the sequence circulate in stunning methods. I typically get pleasure from not understanding what the following pose can be till a cut up second earlier than we follow it. Then again, a lot of individuals like a set routine, a follow they’ll depend on. So which approach is finest?
As at all times, there’s not one yoga educating method that may fulfill everybody. A mix of giving college students one thing acquainted to hold onto, whereas additionally introducing new methods of practising appears to strike the best stability for me.
Enliven Your Yoga Educating
Listed here are two solutions for altering up your yoga educating:
- Follow: Maintaining your private home follow very important might be a very powerful factor I can encourage you to do. Your private home follow is the place you may experiment with altering your sequencing. That is how you will discover out what works and what doesn’t, in your personal physique. Then you may take what you’ve discovered into your yoga educating. Remember, in fact, that for those who’re a flexible or athletic practitioner, that your college students might not be capable to do the “fancier” poses. Use your private home follow to provide you with methods to switch poses, utilizing Yoga Blocks, Yoga Straps, Yoga Blankets or Yoga Bolsters. That approach, you may provide your college students options that give them the identical advantages because the pose you’re practising.
- Play with language: As a author, I’ve skilled myself to search for alternative ways to say issues. I like to make use of phrases which can be exact and descriptive. I edit a lot of yoga writing in my career, and I persistently learn directions that use all-purpose generic phrases. “Deliver” is without doubt one of the most typical ones. As a quite simple instance, as a substitute of “carry your toes to hips-width aside” I‘ will say “step your toes to hips-width aside.” I do know this appears very choosy and trivial, and generic phrases are usually 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 typically result in new understanding, each for your self and in your college students.
- Continue to learn: Take courses from different academics. Take heed to how they impart and study new methods of approaching follow. In the event you stay in an space the place you don’t have entry to academics, look on-line. YogaUOnline, particularly, provides high-quality on-line workshops and programs.
Yoga Educating is an Inward Journey
In the end, efficient educating entails a stability between going with what and studying new methods of speaking. You don’t have to surrender the strategies that profit your college students. However to ensure that your yoga educating follow to proceed to develop, you need to problem your self. This doesn’t imply you need to proceed to follow and train ever extra “superior” poses. It factors, as a substitute, to experimenting with the instruments you’ve already cultivated. It means trying inward to find the extra delicate results of sequencing. It’s a possibility to play with language, and to think about the results of the phrases you employ.
As Suzuki Roshi famously wrote in Zen Thoughts, Rookies Thoughts, “Within the newcomers thoughts there are various prospects. Within the professional’s thoughts there are few.” Preserve your thoughts open to new methods of practising and educating.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced educating in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Follow and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed 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 Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards in 2010.