The Top Three ESSENTIALS Every Yoga Teacher Should Know
While I think there's about a bazillion things every yoga teacher should know- here are three biggies that I think are missing from the Yoga or Yoga Anatomy discussion
1- Everybody is so forkin different!
Not just the shape and size of our bodies.
Not just our backgrounds, constitutions or bank account balances but even on a real skeletal level we are all wildly unique.
Even how are bones FIT together is different.
How beautifully lumpy bumpy not just our thighs are but our spinous processes are is going to make a huge difference in how a posture shows up (or doesn’t show up) in our bodies and in our students bodies and to demand any one posture from all of these unique bodies is unfair (and often injurious).
While as teachers we have to have a framework, something to say rather than just “downdog- good luck”.
This framework is just that- a starting point for us to riff off of because you see there's no such thing as a down dog.
Whhaaa?
It’s an arbitrary shape that holds no magic.
YOU are the magic!
There's just YOU doing a down dog.
YOU experiencing your body in space in that moment.
Any alignment cues are only ways to point you in a direction of an experience of YOU but the experience is yours.
I even bristle a little at the word alignment.
It’s defined as “to arrange in a straight line”.
We ain’t straight. We are round and curvy and spiral-y and defy the rules of arranging ourselves into universal cues and protractor drawn lines on our mat.
The better question is- What are we aligning to?
Whether that's our body parts to one another, or our self to the floor, ourselves to these practices or ourselves to one another the posture is malleable and is meant to fit our uniqueness not the other way around.
2- Everything is connected
Sometimes I feel like that crazy person in movies that has all of these sheets of paper taped up to a wall with red string running between them furiously coming to the inevitable conclusion that indeed everything is connected.
We get very tempted to dissect things and place them in separate containers.
Goodness knows I love the Container Store!
There's nothing I like more than organizing things and putting them in their own very special box.
I even used to love memorizing facts and figures about the body in this way.
Organizing separate categories in my notebook or in my mind like- this is muscle, this is bone, this is fascia.
We can even go a step deeper and try to say THIS muscle originates here and inserts there and we use THIS muscle to do THIS posture.
THIS is all lies.
We are wildly connected and these lines that we draw between THIS and THAT are arbitrary borders. It’s almost as if you are looking at the United States. Some of these borders kind of make sense. This is the mountain range. This is a river. Some are a little bit more amorphous like this was a land dispute. But given enough distance like say viewing from way up in the space station we remember that these lines, these borders, don't even exist.
The mind will insist on duality on separating to make sense of things but keeping our view large and more real we are connected there is no division. Whether that's your thoracic diaphragm and your psoas or you and me. To deny that connection won't lead to anything positive or truthful. We must remember our interconnected, interdependent, interwoven nature when looking at each other or our various bits and bobs.
3- Presence will always beat smarts
No matter how much you think you know.
No matter how much you study and learn.
The biggest impact you can have on your students is to be really present and the only way we can be really present is if we practice.
Our own practice of yoga informs our teaching more than anything else.
The biggest impact we can have when with our students is to completely be with them.
I see you
I hear you
I feel you
I am with you are our most powerful mantras.
And we only can do this if we know ourselves.
If we take time each day to see and hear and feel and be with ourselves.
This has more power than any fact or figure in any book, any line in a spiritual text or therapeutic sequence you can throw out- presence beats smarts every time.