This entry was posted on Feb 18, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
Many years in the past the movie, Annie Corridor, embellished a well-known quote concerning the artwork of educating. 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 other. The bendiest amongst us usually select to show. We are able to carry out all the flowery poses, in spite of everything. However is that all the time a great factor?
My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile physique. So after I began practising yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained instructor, I took to it instantly. All of the poses we practiced relied on flexibility, and briefly order, I discovered myself capable of carry out all the things the instructor supplied—to extremes.
When June introduced that she would offer a instructor coaching, I instantly thought, that is for me. I cherished how the apply made me really feel. I might do the poses “higher” than anybody within the room, I assumed. This may be the proper calling for me.
A number 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 power.
I can’t start to recount the variety of instances I heard, “Raise your kneecaps!,” an instruction I used to be incapable of fulfilling. I’d been unconsciously hyperextending my knees for years and my quads have been fully asleep. My quads slid down towards my knees 24/7. Partaking them appeared inconceivable. In each workshop, lecturers referred to as out my hyperextended knees for instance of what to not do.
I’m actually unsure why I continued. The apply was such a problem to my ego. However I actually preferred my lecturers, Cita and David Riley, a bodily therapist and physician. Their information 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 of to be enormous on the time. Looking back, it was an incredible time to be practising.
Again to Sq. One
Mary Dunn taught me learn how to 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 just a few inches up the wall and my heel on the ground, at a few 45-degree angle. Once I pressed the ball of my foot into the wall, my quads would really transfer upward a fraction of an inch. She steered I apply standing poses this manner for at the very least six months to construct power and intelligence in my quads. It took a yr of practising this manner earlier than my quads would have interaction with my foot flat on the ground.
Throughout that yr, my standing poses slowly turned extra steady. 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 ft, 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 develop within the standing poses as a substitute of combating simply to carry myself up. I now not discovered myself grumbling silently as Cita and David talked us by means of infinite standing sequences. When Pujari Keays got here to city together with his particular model of depth, I really 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 Lecturers
Once I first began educating, I sequenced courses 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 have 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 educating with a much better understanding of them than the poses I’d discovered easy.
Many years of observing my college students’ struggles with the poses I discovered simple have taught me what to search for and learn how to 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 learn how to assist them by means of these struggles.
How Challenges Assist Yoga Lecturers
So possibly the “Those that can’t do, train” quote isn’t a diss in spite of everything. Possibly 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 benefit. However it’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 manner. Lecturers who’re “born on third base and suppose they hit a triple,” because the saying goes, have loads of work to do to grasp the place most of their college students are coming from.
Asana apply is about discovering steadiness and ease within the pose you’re practising at this second. A instructor who understands in her intestine, from her personal expertise, that the journey is the apply will possible be capable of train the vast majority of college students with empathy and understanding.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started educating in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe 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 folks sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.
