This entry was posted on Feb 18, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
A long time in the past the movie, Annie Corridor, embellished a well-known quote in regards to the artwork of instructing. Within the movie the quote went like this: “Those that can’t do, train. Those that can’t train, train health club.” (The movie’s embellishment is the second sentence.) The quote’s intention was to diss lecturers, particularly health club lecturers I assume. For yoga lecturers, it appears to be the alternative. The bendiest amongst us typically select to show. We are able to carry out all the flowery poses, in any case. However is that at all times an excellent factor?
My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile physique. So after I began working towards yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained instructor, I took to it instantly. All of the poses we practiced relied on flexibility, and in brief order, I discovered myself capable of carry out the whole lot the instructor provided—to extremes.
When June introduced that she would offer a instructor coaching, I instantly thought, that is for me. I liked how the apply made me really feel. I might do the poses “higher” than anybody within the room, I assumed. This might be the proper calling for me.
A couple of months later, earlier than the coaching began, I moved to Salt Lake Metropolis. June’s coaching was out of the query. The lecturers I discovered in Salt Lake Metropolis—there have been solely a handful at a time—taught Iyengar yoga. It was a complete new world.
All Standing Poses, All of the Time
In each single class we did standing poses. I hated them. My loose-knit physique was very unstable, and the loosey-goosey apply I’d been doing most likely didn’t assist. My physique trembled underneath the barrage of alignment directions, and from my overabundance of flexibility and lack of energy.
I can’t start to recount the variety of occasions I heard, “Elevate your kneecaps!,” an instruction I used to be incapable of fulfilling. I’d been unconsciously hyperextending my knees for years and my quads had been fully asleep. My quads slid down towards my knees 24/7. Partaking them appeared unattainable. In each workshop, lecturers known as out my hyperextended knees for instance of what to not do.
I’m truthfully undecided why I continued. The apply was such a problem to my ego. However I actually favored my lecturers, Cita and David Riley, a bodily therapist and physician. Their data was so huge, and I used to be studying a ton from them.
They introduced many senior Iyengar yoga lecturers to city: Ramanand Patel, Mary Dunn, Felicity Inexperienced, Judith Hanson Lasater, Pujari Keays. These workshops not often attracted greater than 30 folks—a quantity that was thought-about to be big on the time. On reflection, it was a tremendous time to be working towards.
Again to Sq. One
Mary Dunn taught me how you can get up my quads. She took me to the wall. She confirmed me that I wanted to apply with the ball of my foot of my entrance leg a number of inches up the wall and my heel on the ground, at a few 45-degree angle. After I pressed the ball of my foot into the wall, my quads would truly transfer upward a fraction of an inch. She prompt I apply standing poses this manner for a minimum of six months to construct energy and intelligence in my quads. It took a yr of working towards this manner earlier than my quads would interact with my foot flat on the ground.
Throughout that yr, my standing poses slowly grew to become extra secure. Different issues began to fall into place in my standing apply. I discovered that after I stopped collapsing into my knee joints, my arches started to carry too. I used to be born with flat toes, and I used to be amazed to see tiny arches forming. My calves additionally engaged, pushing my shins ahead, which stabilized my knees.
As my legs started supporting me, my breath eased. I might increase within the standing poses as an alternative of preventing simply to carry myself up. I not discovered myself grumbling silently as Cita and David talked us by way of limitless standing sequences. When Pujari Keays got here to city together with his particular model of depth, I truly started to like standing poses and started to notice a newfound stability in the remainder of my life too.
The Energy of Woodshedding for Yoga Academics
After I first began instructing, I sequenced lessons the best way Cita and David had as a result of it was what I knew. I taught a lot of standing poses. And I discovered with out fail that the directions I gave to assist college students discover stability had been extra thorough and useful than any I gave for the poses that had been simple for me. Regardless of my troubled previous with standing poses, I got here to instructing with a much better understanding of them than the poses I’d discovered easy.
A long time of observing my college students’ struggles with the poses I discovered simple have taught me what to search for and how you can train these poses too. However my deepest, most thorough instruction is in standing poses. Having began at sq. one, I perceive my college students’ struggles and how you can assist them by way of these struggles.
How Challenges Assist Yoga Academics
So perhaps the “Those that can’t do, train” quote isn’t a diss in any case. Perhaps it’s those that needed to study the rudiments that make the most effective lecturers. If yoga was about performing fancy poses and posting our prowess on Instagram and Fb, maybe the quote would have some advantage. But it surely’s not.
The overwhelming majority of yoga practitioners won’t ever carry out excessive backbends or slide their ankles behind their heads. Most individuals are simply not constructed that method. Academics who’re “born on third base and assume they hit a triple,” because the saying goes, have plenty of work to do to know the place most of their college students are coming from.
Asana apply is about discovering steadiness and ease within the pose you might be working towards at this second. A instructor who understands in her intestine, from her personal expertise, that the journey is the apply will possible have the ability to train nearly all of college students with empathy and understanding.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third e-book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Crimson Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards.