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.

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.