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

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.