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…