Cultivating a Teacher's Practice

One of the best things about the first teacher training I took was its emphasis on a personal, or home practice. It was something that I had already developed, mostly due to the financial constraints of being a young dancer in New York City. I had the funds for a gym membership, and— at most— one yoga class a week. Keep in mind that this was twenty-one (gulp) years ago, so there was no Instagram or YouTube. But I did have a Kundalini VHS tape and a Rodney Yee DVD that I did until a scratch forever froze him in Warrior 2.

Five years later I was in a teacher training that prioritized showing up to your practice no matter what, even when you did not want to. That’s solid and sound advice for building a practice of anything or changing a habit. Being successful in any endeavor means that you must develop some willingness to surrender to the ups and down that come with reality. Practice isn’t perfect. And a tenant of the brand was to 'teach your practice', so the expectation was that what you taught in class was what you did on your mat that day.

Ultimately, this meant that most of my “practice” was choreographing what I was going to teach. For many years I taught a style that was known for its creative sequencing, and as a dancer this was both appealing and satisfying. I don’t want to or mean to diminish that experience or that style, but the reality was, that on top of an already grueling and demanding schedule I was trying to squeeze in more grueling and demanding practices. It was unsustainable, and as you can imagine, I was injured -- a lot.

This lead me to seek out other disciplines and methods of yoga, including Katonah Yoga®, which is the most prominent in my teaching today. If I were to sum up the theory in a few words I would say it is a practice of context. Nothing is arbitrary, everything is useful and the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. The latter takes the onus off having to overplan and prepare your classes and also gives you the freedom to utilize your practice for your personal needs.

You don’t need to do everything, or mark everything you teach. Spend time on what is useful to you, which includes exploring our blind spots. Afterall, if we teach that yoga is a transformative practice that one can use, then we should set aside time to actually test it out and use it.

So what should we practice? Here are some useful things to keep in mind when thinking about and setting up a home practice that compliments a teacher’s busy life:

• Set aside 5 minutes to start. If you have more time great, but try not to make your practice so precious and daunting that you won’t do it. Most

• Consider your energy reserves. If you have grueling physical demands in life (who doesn’t), maybe allow yourself to use this time for a restoratives or pranayama. 

• Consider other circumstances of your life, like the time of day or the season. For instance if you are practicing at night, it’s probably not a time for big back bends. If you are practicing in the morning, do things that help you get up and go. If it’s winter, prioritize grounding work and rest.

• Home practice is different than group practice so maybe save the warriors and the like for when you are playing with others and keep your alone time centered on the more interior work. This is your time to tune your instrument. When you are teaching you are leading an orchestra. 

• The work you do on your mat will seep into your classes, so try not to worry about having to sequence or plan everything. For example, the insights you have in a hip-opening sequence will carry over to the standing work you teach

Want to dive deeper into this work?…

The first week in my Form.Function. Flow. 15-hour course is devoted to exploring Katonah Yoga® theory and developing a home practice. Click here for information on the next course. 

Also, check out my teacher, Abbie Galvin’s Home Practice Book

MD's Holiday Book Ideas

My absolute favorite Christmas gift to give and get is a book. And…I often get asked what my favorite yoga books are. So this year I thought I would get on the holiday list bandwagon and share some of them with you.

But you might notice one thing about the list—there are no "yoga" books on it.

This is intentional. We all win when we step out of our box, even just a little bit, for knowledge. It makes us draw lines and connect dots that are not always so obvious. I picked each of these books because the topics they cover including: embodiment, race, anger, anatomy, and toxic positivity, are important ones for any student or teacher of Modern Postural Yoga. Plus, they are all really good reads-I promise!

Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life

By Twyla Tharp

Everyone who is agining (that means everyone) should read this. It’s short and packed with wisdom on how to continue living in a body that gets older without losing your joie de vivre. It is is a self-help book that doesn’t feel like one. Tharp is a master of showing not telling, which makes you more likely to heed to her advice and keep moving! This is a delightful and fun read:)

Love and Rage

By Lama Rod Owens

This is a wonderful book on so many levels. Lama Rod Owens tells us his story in an incredibly generous way in order for us to learn from it. He invites us into his experience and covers a myriad of topics including: race, sexuality, teacher/student relationships, politics, embodiment, meditation, love and anger, and through it all gives us solid practices for learning how to recognize that anger in ourselves and others is often warranted, useful and indelibly human. 

Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich’s prose is blunt and brilliant, and this is a topic that sure could use more of that. Bright-sided shows the subversive side of the positive thinking movement and its propensity towards looking away from anything that is dark, dirty, or fully human. She writes of her own experience with cancer in a culture that is trending towards laying the blame on the sick for not being powerful enough to heal themselves. This trend is only getting worse since this book’s publication in 2009, and this holds up as both an insightful memoir and cautionary tale.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

By Bill Bryson

I think more yoga and movement teachers would benefit from reading books like. Our shelves are often full of of anatomy books which focus mostly on the mechanics of our bodies and fall short of marveling in its design. Bryson, one the best non-fiction writers out there, takes us on a fascinating journey into the mysteries and myths of the human body, without ever letting us forget that we live in one.

The Body in Motion: Its Evolution and Design

By Theodore Dimon (Author) &  G David Brown (Illustrator)

Which brings be to my favorite anatomy book…

I read this a while back when I was preparing to teach the anatomy section of a 200 and I could not put it down. It is now the book I assign because it is so engaging and so useful. It tells the fascinating story of our bodies in the context of evolution. What we learn is that as much as we make of the world, it has made us.

Staying Healthy With The Seasons

By Elson M. Haas, MD

This a wonderful book on how to harmonize with your surroundings as an important practice of health and wellbeing. I come back to this book often, especially when I am exhausted by life and need techniques to sync up with nature. It also offers us an understanding of how we all are operating within a system of great nature and all it’s cycles and patterns. A disclaimer that I don’t adhere to 100% of the books suggestions (hard pass on fasting for now).  But I do think there is a lot of interesting and very useful information here. 

This post contains affiliate links. When available I avoided Amazon.

Much Love and Happy Holidays:)

MD

Tips for Teaching Yoga Online : Basic Tech

Online yoga is here to stay, even when we re-open studios on a larger scale, people are going to still want to practice from home, both for the convenience and the accessibility to teachings they really connect with. So it makes sense to embrace, accept and try to make the best of it. That is why I decided to share some tips on how I make it work and what I have learned along the way.

Use Zoom…

Or another platform that allows people to see each other and for you to see them. Instagram Live and FB live are great. I actually used them back in the days before COVID when the market was less saturated. And if you have an audience of hundreds, I can see why this makes sense. It is also great for fundraising classes because you can pin your Venmo in the comments. But it is just a one-way street, so to speak, as you have no interaction with the students in the class. Therefore you have limited ways of knowing if what you are saying makes any sense. If you want to refine your cueing and what you say based on how well it works on real bodies, then Zoom is the way to go because you can actually see some of your students.

Also, it builds community. Many people like knowing there are other people practicing with them In your class. I have been told by many that it is a huge motivating factor.

Up Your Camera Game…

A camera on a tablet or a phone tend to be better than computer ones, but I find those devices to be less physically stable. I have been using a webcam on my laptop computer, and I love it. It ups the quality and gives you a wide-lens so you can keep the computer closer to you and your students can see you for the entire practice. This is the one I use, and it is also relatively affordable.

A note on lighting: Try not to set up in front of a window to avoid being backlit. If it’s in your budget, invest in a light to set up behind your computer. This is the one I use.

Use Two Devices So You Can “See” Your Class:

I know this might be economically impractical, but if you have a tablet you can log on into your class meeting with the same Zoom account set it to gallery mode so you can see everyone while you practice. I have found that this makes it feel more like your students are in the room with you. I can also give shout outs and positive feedback and guidance throughout. But there are steps you need to take to make sure it runs smoothly.

1. Log in to your meeting with your second device, and when prompted to join with audio, choice dial in, and then close the window with the dial in options. Do not choose “Call using internet Audio.”

2. On your primary device, pin or spotlight your video.

3. On your secondary device, switch to gallery view.

Now you are set to take your class with you on the mat.

Don’t use AirPods

This may be personal, because AirPods fall out of my ears. I had the older model and the right one fell out all the time. So I got the Pros, and now the left one falls out all the time. Tough expensive luck, I guess. But even if you can ride your bike with abandon and they always stay in, the sound does go in and out when you are moving, especially when your arms are by your ears and you’re in a fold.

Plus, you can’t use them to record on your Iphone.

Not sure if yours are working? Listen to yourself for an entire class, and check it out.

What to use instead? Nothing if you project well, or a body mic if you need one. Full disclosure, I have been projecting, but might switch to a body mic because I am offering my live classes on demand and want to up the quality

Record Your Classes and Offer a Replay

Time zones are pesky and people who live in other ones want to practice with you! I suggest making your yoga classes available for 24-48 hours post live stream. You can record to cloud on Zoom and send to your students. Or you could livestream directly to YouTube or Vimeo and give your students the link prior to the class. The later requires more of an investment and some tech acumen, but it might be worth it as we are in this for the long haul.

Also, side note: people who take the class live should also be afforded the luxury of pausing and rewinding to really soak in what you are teaching, so please make the replay available to everyone. If you just make it available to those who cannot make it live, you are potentially making the replay option more enticing.

Most Importantly: Treat the Experience Like Nothing is Missing

Literally everything I have listed is optional. The most important thing you need is yourself, an internet connection and an openness to treat the class like nothing is missing. There is a lot to reminisce about teaching live, but there is no reason to dwell on any of that while actually teaching online. Even if you don’t explicitly express what you feel is lacking, it might seep through your offerings. I was recently in a meeting where a teacher shared how they could not wait to get their hands on people because they were not the type to guide with words and cues. To be honest, I think that is missing an opportunity. This is a great time to learn new techniques, or news way of doing things because that is how we grow. Not to mention, we aren’t touching people for a very long time, and that, as I have written about before, might be okay for now.

Revisiting the Hands On Conversation in a Hands Off Time

One thing that I am grateful for is that even when we return to teaching in real life, we will take a break from hands on adjustments/assists for the foreseeable future. This might surprise those who have known me for awhile because I have taught hands on assist/adjustment trainings and workshops for years and teach a practice that is known for its adjustments. Don’t get be wrong, I love them and think they can be useful, especially when studying and learning about body mechanics. But the pre-COVID debate around the issue mixed with the hopefully obvious reasons why they have no place in yoga studios even when we go back warrants a huge and maybe permanent pause from them altogether. 

First, to state what I hope is obvious, there seems to be no safe way to offer assists/adjustments in group settings even when we start to re-build and open studios. (One-on-one sessions are a different situation.)  It won’t be safe to touch more than one body without washing your hands in between. It would be dangerous and irresponsible for any teacher to do so, likely even when we have a vaccine. 

But dangerous and irresponsible behavior from teachers is not new to the conversation that surrounds assists/adjustments. The issue even made its way to the New York Times this past fall. In this piece, many student’s experiences with inappropriate touch and abuse are highlighted. It’s a tough and worthy read and a presents a problem worth studying, even in this time of home-only practice. One thing that is often presented as a way to solve the problem, including in the NYT piece, is the use of consent cards. 

Consent cards are used as a communication tool between teacher and student. They have been used and designed in a variety of ways: some with words, some with symbols. They present the practitioner with the binary choice: Yes, you can touch me, or, no you cannot. Some studios supported using these in constant conversation throughout the class, meaning a student could opt out or in at different times throughout class.

I want to state that the intent in using the cards is very good, but there is a problem with them that I don’t see discussed very often: they only protect people who say no. They do not protect people who say yes, and in some cases might actually cause further harm. 

Because, really what are we saying yes to? If we say yes, does it absolve the responsibility of the studio/teacher if they imposed harm?  After all, we consented to it. Also, those of us who have been victims of assault in yoga would likely have said yes to being touched had we been given the option. Not only do we have to unpack the psychological distress of the act, we have to grapple with the fact that we “asked for it.”

I share this from first hand experience. I was assaulted by a teacher who I was friendly with and used to work with. I will spare the details, but it was one-hundred percent intentional and disgusting. After it happened, I mostly tried to justify this person’s actions in my head instead of calling it out or telling the studio. After all, I knew them, and trusted them-surely it was me who misinterpreted his actions. I don’t think this reaction is uncommon, and if I had been given a card, it would have said yes. But it wasn’t until I had coffee with a friend two weeks later that I realized what had happened. I brought up how good his class was (yes-it’s all so sick), and my friend said, “yeah, but he grabbed my boobs in downward dog.” 

Years later I finally confronted the studio owners. In their first response to me they said I was not the only one who had come to them with claims and concerns.  But unfortunately, after lots of back and forth, gaslighting, and victim-blaming, one of the owners said: “I just honestly do not believe that he is intending to violate any woman’s body or sovereignty with his assists.” I wonder how many women would it have taken them to reconsider.

I mention this not to re-hash old stories or pick fights, but to point out that yes/no questions might not be the solutions to big systemic problems. Also, I don’t think consent cards are a bad thing because protecting people who say no is a great and important step. But they are (were?) just a band-aid to a much bigger problem. Band-aids are important for healing, but if you just use them to hide what’s underneath, they will lose their efficacy. In many ways, our current COVID time, has caused it to to be ripped off. I think that is a good thing. Because the real problem is abusive power dynamics and patriarchal normalcy bathed in “love and light” platitudes. And that sometimes manifests in someone’s “healing” (and wandering) hands. 

Props to Asking for Help

One of the conversations that has repeatedly come up over the years with other teachers and students is how to convince people that yoga props are worth using. They often share how it has both been explicitly and implicitly stated that using a prop makes them less of a practitioner. Somehow, it makes you seem weaker if you sit on a blanket in a forward fold then the person forgoing one. 

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. It is a symptom of a practice that has been co-opted, amount other things, by Individualism (a topic for another time, perhaps.) But it might be interesting to inquire why it is so hard for us to admit that we could use some help from time to time. Or, in other words, what is so difficult about admitting that you might need, or benefit, from information and assistance that you cannot provide by yourself?

It’s somewhat like getting lost and stopping to ask for directions. I have definitely been guilty of driving aimlessly when astray, convinced that I will figure it out eventually on my own. Had I just stopped and asked, time would have been saved, and maybe some lessons— and directions— learned.

It’s an imperfect metaphor, but there is a common mindset taught in yoga that that your body doesn't have anything to learn— It already knows everything that it will ever know. This mindset is aimless at best, and dangerous, at worst.  A very senior teacher that I worked under for many years once said to students, “The body is so smart, that it is impossible for it be hurt while in motion.”  And I am sure many of you have heard similar things. “The body just knows…” seems to live in the yoga vernacular. 

It’s obviously not true, and acknowledging that honors the bodies’ intelligence rather than diminishing it. The technology of the body rivals and surpasses any manmade gadget. It is so incredibly advanced that we still cannot quite figure it out. Therefore, it is worthy of our attention, appreciation and exploration. To say that it “just knows.” strips it of perhaps the main marker of intelligence: the ability to learn. We don’t inherently have the answers, but they are worth searching for. 

This is where props come in. They are invaluable tools for exploring our physicality in ways that do not come so easily to us. Props can elevate us (blocks, chairs, blankets), give us boundaries (straps, blocks, chairs), and give us something to get over (blocks, chairs, poles). All can give grant us accessibility to our own personal unknown territory, and allow us to learn more about the ourselves and the vessel we inhabit: our body.  Because we are so amazingly adept at excelling in specific areas, others often get neglected. The areas we excel in are our strengths. In order not to wear them out, we should pay attention and explore our blind spots, or weaknesses. This attention we pay to these "weaknesses" is nothing short then a sign of our strength.

mdy reading guide for "The Goddess Pose"

Reading Guide for “The Goddess Pose” by Michelle Goldberg

Questions for Contemplation and Discussion

1. Indra Devi’s story is a Forrest Gump-”ian” tale of a woman who found herself in the middle of some of the biggest historical and cultural events of the 20th century. What were some of your favorite highlights from her story? What surprised you the most, given the knowledge (if any) that you had of Indra Devi going into reading this book?

2. Goldberg writes that in her early years,“no one would have guessed that Eugenia, alternately insecure and headstrong, would one day be admired as a spiritual leader.” What experiences in her life fed both her insecurities and stubborn nature? Do you think that while they are paradoxical attributes, both ultimately paved the way for her development as a leader and a teacher?

3. Devi adapts early on in her days in Russia by “…learning a lesson that would serve her for the rest of her long life: how to survive her world’s collapse by reinventing herself.” (29) Discuss the different “incarnations” of the protagonist: Eugenia, Jane and Indra. 

4. Discuss Theosophy’s origins and influences. How did this philosophy pave the way for the broader Western embrace of Eastern philosophy? Discuss it’s effect on Devi’s life and teachings. 

5. Goldberg writes that Devi’s mother Sasha was the “..great elusive love of her life…” Discuss this relationship and how it shaped Devi’s path.

6. There where many parts of the book where Eugenia/Devi found herself in tumultuous political climates where there were other people seeking refuge in Eastern spiritual and religious traditions. Discuss.
   

7. Devi was not at a loss for lovers in her life.  However, “…through yoga she was convinced it was possible to love without ever experiencing the anguish of loss or the constriction of dependency.” (226) Discuss the impact of her relationships on her life and philosophy of non-attachment. 

8. Her practice of non-attachment ultimately led to her less than kind treatment of her 2nd husband, Knauer, at the time of his last illness. Discuss this in relation to Goldberg’s analysis that not “many Americans or Europeans…are truly interested in the systematic dissolution of the ego that is a goal of Hindu and Buddhist disciplines. Instead, in a strange sort of inversion, New Age moments have often used Eastern spiritual techniques to strengthen individualism.” (233)
   

9. Goldberg tells us that Devi’s story in part, “reveals how the discipline (of yoga) has been shaped by a long dialogue among India, Europe, and America.” (8) There is a lot of talk about cultural appropriation in the yoga community these days. Some of the events of the book tell us that in many ways there was an Eastern desire to share yoga with the West, and also and assimilation of Western practices in the teachings of yoga in East. Discuss the why and how of this, and Devi’s role in the “dialogue.”
   

10. Devi’s later years were spent searching for another teacher, and she found both Sai Baba and Premananda. However, while she still upheld some of their teachings, both fell from grace. Discuss her relationships with her gurus and the arc of her spiritual quest. There is not much known about how she dealt with the knowledge of sexual abuse other than turning her eye. Do you think this stemmed from her practice of non-attachment, or were there other reasons?

11. Our current cultures perception of the history of yoga is often misunderstood. Explore Devi’s story as a historical text on the modernization of yoga. Discuss Goldberg’s statement that,”…Indeed, to adapt to yoga to modern needs is even to be part of a tradition of sorts. Today’s Western yoginis may not really be heiresses to Patanjali, but they are very much part of a lineage that goes back to Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Indra Devi.” (276)