This afternoon I went for the Teacher’s Forum with Patrick. It was a session for all yoga teachers and for those who wish to perhaps teach yoga. It was an interesting class and Patrick shared some of his experiences about teaching.

I never really taught about teaching. But I think seriously, I think I would love sharing yoga with others. During yoga classes, helping those who are weaker truly makes me happy. I loved giving them the encouragement and the assurance that they can do it. It feels right. And I felt really delighted and happy when they did it, whatever the pose may be.

Then Patrick did an interesting exercise with all of us. He made us all sit in a big circle. Then he wanted to play a game : How to instruct a student to do into a pose within 4 steps. Sounds easy?

But it was not. Each of us were to instruct the person on our right to do a certain pose that Patrick decide. The observation was that those of us in the group who were already teachers always give too much instruction, and unable to simplify the instructions to give to the students to go into the basic shape of the pose. Some were finding difficulty in expressing using words to instruct. As we go along, Patrick will help each one of us to find the words as well as tips to simplify or refine the instructions and had us redo the instructing until we get it. In fact, one of the teachers had to repeat like at least 6 times before he got it just right. Not easy huh?

The problem is that most teachers tend to over-compensate with a lot of information to the beginner student ( like “tuck in your tail bone”, “square your hips”, “outer spiral your thigh”…) which in many case causes confusion or the beginner may not even know what it means. Refinement of a pose should be added after the beginner has been practicing for like 3-4 weeks and they are already comfortable with the general shape of the pose.

Common yoga poses he thrown at us include triangle ( Trikonasana ), half moon ( Ardha Chandrasana ), warrior 1( Virahardasana 1 ), warrior 2 ( Virahardasana 2 ), seated twist, eagle pose and lucky me, I got Chaturanga! Luckily I managed to get the pose in 1st try with 4 steps : “lie on belly, put hands beside chest, tuck your toes and lift up”. Patrick helped me refine the pose with the last instruction by adding : “now lift your hips and your shoulders to elbow height”. Tada!

And Patrick also noted that some words are not ideal to use when instructing as in the case of the word “take”. Many times, teachers would use the word “take” eg. “take your legs apart”. Most students may not understand that as in normal usage, “take” denotes an external factor like “take away the ice cream”, “take the bag”, and not coming from within. It is better to use “step your legs to the side”.

It is really interesting to note that teaching is really about connecting with others, communicating to others about what you mean and hence deepening your own teaching and practice. When you do that you connect deeper within yourself as you search for answers to help others, to understand the difficulty that others face when they practice. Teaching also means inspiring the students, helping them grow and sharing with them your own experience.

I have taught many people in previous jobs, programmers and students. It was fun and in process, I made alot of good friends as a result. The difficult part about teaching is knowing when to help and when to let go. You have to know when to step in and when to give your students confidence and encourage them to go forward. I guess teaching yoga is no different.

At closing, Patrick challenged us to go back and write out our own answers to these two questions :
1. What is yoga?
2. Why do you practice yoga?

Hmmm…

Most people work at a desk and hence, most of the time, they hunched they shoulders forward when they type or work at their PC. It is no wonder that many people developed a hunch back. I used to be one of them before I start going for yoga classes. It was a pretty ugly hunch and it makes me look even shorter than my already short height.

However, luckily for me, I discovered yoga and have since corrected the years of “torture” that I have inflicted on my shoulders. I count my blessings everyday!

But of course, it took me some time to “rework” my shoulders and it still need more work… So Tias workshop on the shoulder girdle certainly interest me alot.

Tias showed us where exactly is our kidneys located in our body and even though I was a biology student before, I never thought about why the kidneys are located as such. The kidneys are very important organs in our body and we can see that mother nature has “hidden” them deep within our chest. He also made us feel the kidneys of each other as we breathe in child’s pose as well as sitting up.

You can really feel the difference in breathing… between the left and right side. It is subtle but you can feel one side of the body rising more or faster or less smooth than one side. This shows which side is the weaker side.

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More coming… was inspired by a friend’s drawing of yoga poses… looks like my drawings are not so bad… Will up load them soon to share!

I was worried when I reached San Fransico on 6 February, I would be too tired to go for Sianna Sherman‘s workshop in the same day afternoon.

But after sleeping for hours on the plane, I felt quite awake when I got off the plane. I was confused with the time for a while and had a heavy lunch at Subway ( yes, my first meal in the US is Subway… ) thinking that I still had 3 hours more to digest the meal when in actual fact, I had only 1 hour.

Lucky for me, the walk to the studio had me work off my fullness as I searched for the little studio Yoga Tree SF, Hayes Studio. The walk was nice amid a little scary at first with a couple of homeless people hanging around in front of the hotel that I am staying.

I love the cold chilly wind blowing…. I got a chance to wear my long boots and long coat finally ( which I bought in Taipei for less than $20 each just because they were cheap even though we have only hot summer weather in Singapore ) I was early.. in fact the first to arrive for the workshop.

I realized that how troublesome it was to have chilly weather… the layers of clothes you had to discard to change into your yoga gear. We really had it easy in Singapore!

When Sianna walked into the studio, she looks nothing of her age (I just saw in the latest issue of Yoga Journal that she is already 39 ). She looks as if she is just in her twenties and she is very sweet and gentle. How amazing yoga is!

The theme of this class was about backbends and Sianna combined her previous day experience at a ballet performance with backbends. The ballet performance was about a russian folklore about firebird and she had all of us pretending that we are firebirds, full of grace, power and beauty. Sianna is really a lovely storyteller who weaves interesting and beautiful tales into our practice…

Some of the yogis in the workshops are very good and really inspiring to watch when Sianna had them demonstrate. Sianna also uses some props like chairs, blocks and blankets to help us in all our “bendy” escapades. The ones with the chairs are most interesting as I do not get to do them in Singapore ( studio I go to do not have chairs to use ). Especially memorable was the scorpion forearm balance with the help of the chair. We also did some fun handstands, including a single hand handstands ( against the wall of course! ).

I was secretly hoping for some dropbacks but unfortunately there was none… the time was really too short!

But it was a good refresher for me and I am grateful for the chance to be able to attend!

OM~

PS. Happy Chinese New Year to everyone!

It was interesting to note that she fused all the different schools of medicine from western anatomy, holistic healing, ayurveda and traditional chinese medicine. She had probably done extensive studies on all these, picked up the essentials that made sense, tested and experienced from her own work with her clients. All these translate into her knowledge which she shared with us.

She talked about each of us having different body types which result in differences in our joints and muscles makeup. She uses the TCM ( traditional chinese medicine ) way of differentiating between body types in regards to yoga practice. Two general types were classified – mainly the Spleen and the Liver. ( she derived these from chinese five elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth. Spleen is earth body type and Liver is wood body type. If you are spleen body type and if you have chemical imbalance in your body, you can get yellowish whereas live body type, you get kinda green )

Spleen people are those who are born with less collagen in their connective tissue. What this means is that spleen people are more flexible or rather they are born more flexible since there is less fiber in the connective tissues. ( and wow, we actually go into the detailed anatomy of the makeup in the muscles! Bio 101…. lucky that I took Biology before! )

Liver people are those who have thicker connective tissue. They have more collagen in their connective tissue which is denser and hence they are less flexible. These people in general, need more warmups than spleeny people and hence liver people actually enjoys hot classes. ( but if you practice yoga long enough or you started young with exercises, then you could still be very flexible )

Yup…. I am of a spleeny constituent. Which explains why I never really liked hot yoga (I get irritated and pretty much breathless…). According to Ellen, most spleeny people do not like hot classes as they get breathless, easily flushed (blood move out from the organs easily), more easily nauseous and claustrophobic. I went “AHA” when she mentioned all these… I always wondered why many people enjoy hot classes while I dread thinking of going for hot class.

More to share tomorrow… ( it was really very interesting but I need sleep now…. caught a cold today… )

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