Description
This book is for anyone on the yoga teaching path who is committed to teaching classes that are safe, sustainable, and transformational. With over 100,000 yoga teachers in North America alone and new yoga teacher-training programs opening nearly every day, the ranks of the yoga teaching profession are growing proportionately more quickly than the increase in students taking yoga classes. While one might be tempted to see this as a boon to students looking for the right teacher, there is legitimate concern over the core competencies of teachers who themselves might be beginning yoga students or otherwise limited in yoga experience or knowledge. Long gone are the days when most teachers studied and apprenticed for many years or even decades under the guidance of a highly experienced mentor, and the mentoring days may be limited for those veteran mentor teachers who are not keeping pace with the many advancements and refinements in the techniques and methods of teaching yoga, especially amid concerted efforts to elevate yoga teaching to a bona fide and widely respected profession marked by high standards of training and competence.
When writing my first book for yoga teachers, Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques, my focus was on offering a broad text covering all of the main elements of teaching yoga, including yoga history and philosophy, subtle energy and the highlights of functional anatomy, general techniques and methods for teaching asana classes, how to teach various pranayama and meditation techniques, and the basics of sequencing and working with specialized needs among students. Meanwhile, as I peered more closely at how teachers were designing their classes and listened to teachers discussing their greatest challenges, I was inspired to write Yoga Sequencing: Designing Transformative Yoga Classes. That second book for teachers addresses a simple question at the heart of teaching sensible yoga classes: why this, then that? It presents the philosophy, principles, and techniques for designing yoga classes, looks closely at how to sequence one’s instructional cues, offers sixty-seven model sequences for a wide variety of student needs and intensions, and practical resources for sensibly designing one’s own unique yoga classes.
Just as that second book was going to press, the bombshell of William J. Broad’s provocative article on “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” appeared in the New York Times. Like many others in the yoga community, my reaction to Broad’s statements was as swift as it was visceral; it felt like he was hitting the yoga community below the belt, and I, like many others, passionately responded in writing. I also reached out to Broad directly to try to better understand his concerns and his sources. He sent me a massive database on yoga-related injuries compiled through the National Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). Although I find some of that data contains ecological fallacies or other issues of integrity, Broad’s basic message—that doing yoga can wreck your body—is well supported by it.1 Looking more closely at that data, at Broad’s subsequent book, The Science of Yoga, and many similar articles published in the popular press over the past twenty years, but also listening to the stories of innumerable teachers confused by even very basic student conditions, the need for the present book became abundantly clear.2
This book is all about the nuances of teaching asanas and making them as accessible and sustainable as can be for the real human beings doing them in our classes. In teaching asanas, we rely primarily on three means of conveying guidance to our students: visual demonstration, verbal cues, and tactile cues. To the extent that you as the teacher are clear in understanding what you are attempting to communicate to the student, any of these three methods can effectively lead a student to adjust and refine what he or she is doing in a way that makes that student’s practice more safe, sustainable, and transformational. This is the primary mantra of this book: safe, sustainable, transformational. Here we look at the balanced and appropriate use of these means of guidance, giving close attention to how they are uniquely interrelated in guiding any particular asana.