Why Bendy People Might Not Make the Best Yoga Teachers

The film decades ago, Annie HallEmbellis a famous quote on the art of teaching. In the film, the quote took place like this: “Those who cannot do, teach. Those who cannot teach, teach the gymnasium.” (The embellishment of the film is the second sentence.) The intention of the quote was to dissor the teachers, in particular gym teachers, I suppose. For yoga teachers, it seems to be the opposite. The coldest of us often choose to teach. We can perform all the fancy poses, after all. But is it always a good thing?

My father was a gymnast and I inherited his hypermobile body. So when I started practicing yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-Fory teacher, I took it right away. All the poses we have practiced depended on flexibility, and in a short time, I found myself capable of doing everything that the teacher offered – at extremes.

When June announced that it would offer teacher training, I immediately thought it was for me. I loved what the practice made me feel. I could do the “better” poses than anyone in the room, I thought. It would be the perfect call for me.

A few months later, before the start of training, I moved to Salt Lake City. The June training was out of the question. The teachers I found in Salt Lake City – there was only one handle at a time – learned the Yoga Iyengar. It was a whole new world.

All standing poses all the time

In each class, we made standing poses. I hated them. My united body was very unstable, and the loose practice of the Goosey that I was probably did not help. My body trembled under the dam of the instructions of alignment and my overabundance of flexibility and lack of strength.

I cannot start telling the number of times I have heard: “Raise your ball joints!”, An instruction that I was unable to achieve. I had been unconsciously understood my knees for years and my quads were completely asleep. My quads slipped to my knees 24/7. Engaging them seemed impossible. In each workshop, teachers called my hyperextends knees as an example of what should not be done.

I do not honestly know why I continued. The practice was such a challenge for my ego. But I really liked my teachers, Cita and David Riley, physiotherapist and doctor. Their knowledge was so vast and I learned a ton of them.

They brought many senior yoga teachers to town: Ramanand Patel, Mary Dunn, Felicity Green, Judith Hanson Lasater, Pujari Keays. These workshops rarely attracted more than 30 people – a number which was considered enormous at the time. In retrospect, it was an incredible moment to practice.

Back to Square One

Mary Dunn taught me to wake up my quads. She took me to the wall. She showed me that I had to train with the ball of my foot of my front leg a few centimeters from the wall and my heel on the floor, about a 45 degree angle. When I pressed the ball in my foot in the wall, my quads moved to the top of a thumb fraction. She suggested that I practice standing in this way for at least six months to strengthen strength and intelligence in my quads. It took a year to practice this way before my quads engage with my foot flat on the ground.

During this year, my standing poses have slowly become more stable. Other things have started to set up in my permanent practice. I found that when I stopped in my knee joints, my arches also started to rise. I was born with flat feet and I was amazed to see tiny arches form. My calves were also committed, pushing my shins forward, which stabilized my knees.

While my legs started to support me, my breath released. I could extend in the standing poses instead of fighting just to hold on. I no longer found myself groan silently while Cita and David spoke to us through endless standing sequences. When Pujari Keays came to town with his special intensity brand, I started to like standing poses and I started to note a new stability in the rest of my life.

The power of the wood rope for yoga teachers

When I started teaching, I sequenced the lessons as a city and David did because it was what I knew. I taught a lot of standing poses. And I found faultless that the instructions I gave to help students find stability were more in -depth and useful than all the people I gave for the poses that had been easy for me. Despite my troubled past with standing poses, I came to teach with a much better understanding of them than the poses that I had found effortlessly.

Decades of observation of my students’ difficulties with the poses that I found easy have taught me what to look for and how to teach these poses too. But my deepest and deepest instruction is to stand up. After starting out at the start, I understand the difficulties of my students and how to help them get through these difficulties.

How the challenges help yoga teachers

So maybe the quotation “Those who cannot do, teaching” is not a dissatisfied after all. It is perhaps those who had to learn the basics that make the best teachers. If yoga consisted in carrying out fancy poses and publishing our prowess on Instagram and Facebook, the quote might have a little merit. But this is not the case.

The vast majority of yoga practitioners will never make extreme backbends or will slide their ankles behind their heads. Most people are just not built this way. Teachers “born on the third goal and think they have reached a triple”, as the saying says, have a lot of work to do to understand where most of their students come from.

ASANA practice is to find stability and ease in the installation you practice at the moment. A teacher who includes in her intestine, on her own experience that travel is practice will probably be able to teach a majority of students with empathy and understanding.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell discovered yoga in 1982 and started teaching in 1986. Charlotte is the author of Mindful Yoga, Mindful Life: A Guide for Everyding Practice and Yoga for Meditators, both published by Rodmell Press. His third book is entitled Hip-Healthy Asana: The Yoga Pratitioner’s Guide to Protect of the Hips and Avoid Si Joint Pain (Shambhala Publications). She writes a monthly chronicle for Catalyst Magazine and is online Yoga U publisher. Charlotte is a founding member of the board of directors of Greentree Yoga, a non -profit organization that brings yoga to poorly served populations. Musician for life, Charlotte plays an oboe and an English horn in the Salt Lake Symphony and the Sextuant Folk Red rock Rondo, whose DVD won two Emmy Awards.