Freakish Flexible is Not a Requirement for Teaching Yoga

One of the myths about yoga teachers is that we are side-show flexible. While I have encountered practitioners and instructors who bend in ways that look just so very wrong, flexibility comes with time, and one can only work with the body he/she has. That is to say that though human beings are based on a standard blue-print variations abound. Length of bones and the angles at which they connect count, and so do our genetic predispositions towards building muscle mass, fat storage and elasticity of skin and ligaments.

For example, I possess a natural openness of my hips in external rotation. I did nothing to facilitate this over the years, but yoga has enhanced it. Conversely, I have a miserable issue at the ankle that makes rotation a challenge. Yoga can't alter anything about my skeletal frame and how balls insert into sockets. What I was born with is all there will ever be. That's why pose variations exist because yoga acknowledges differences and demands, really, that we listen to them.

As a teacher, I have a few moves that will silence any student's inner critic, but I am no Tara Stiles or Michael Stone. I will amaze no one with painful to watch demonstrations of pretzel-ness. And it's not necessary that I do so. Anyone who exceeds my own ability isn't likely to be in one of my classes anyway. How do I know this? Because I avoid teachers whose abilities don't match my needs and am under no illusions that this hasn't happened to me too.

I had a student confide that she found another yoga instructor not to her liking because she couldn't help but compare her style to mine. This teacher was younger, slimmer and more bendy than I am, but that isn't what the average student is looking for in a teacher or class. Students want personality and confidence. They seek warmth and someone who knows something about how the body works in poses and what poses do for the body.

Mostly though, students want to be recognized and not just a body on a mat. Flexibility is nice, but it's not what brings most students into your class.

The Yoga Teacher

A few weeks ago I read a novel by Alexandra Gray titled The Yoga Teacher. I was drawn to the book because the main character chucks her well-paying day job to run off to an ashram in California to take in one of those intensive teacher training programs. She dreams of teaching though at the end of her training the cold reality of eating and paying bills gives her a long breath pause or two.

She rather quickly builds a private clientele and a reputation as a wonderful teacher that lands her cushy gigs teaching obscenely wealthy older ladies, a rock star's wife and a internationally known actress - not the typical scenario of most aspiring yoga teachers - but her basic dilemma about ethics over giving people what they want is a common theme, I think, among teachers.

One thing struck me.

After completing her training, the instructor advises all the students to "... start teaching. Don't wait until you are perfect. Just grab some people and get to it."

Which is where I am. I am not perfect. I don't have a smooth delivery. I forget things. My sequences don't sing auras. They lurch here and there and I can see instantly when they aren't working though I don't always know what damage control to apply in the moment.

And I am not me in the role yet. Sometimes I am Jill or Catherine, and I fall back on my teacher persona from back in the middle school English teacher days of yore. I haven't gelled as much as I am just congealing haphazardly.

Building a teaching practice is not the stuff of fiction. There are no former models, aristocratic ladies who lunch or famous actresses in my teaching future. I have a few students. Four in total who are registered and a couple of curious who've dropped in but haven't returned.

Yesterday's Flow class had one student. She was making up a class she'd missed earlier in the week. My registered duo were no shows. It was disappointing, but once I started class, I let that go fairly easily and fell into the instruction.

Jill says that it takes time and as I am not a patient person, this is probably one of the multitude of tests the universe has sent me over the course of my life. Lessons that have mostly been for naught as patience doesn't stick to me like carbs do.

To help me out - and herself too because it's hard to build a studio on your own back alone - Jill has given me one of the noon drop in's. My goal is to form a bridge between the drop in and my Saturday class. To this end, I am scheming up a sequence I can down-size to drop in size and stretch out for the Flow class. People want to feel as though they have "exercised" which is only part of what yoga is, but it is the part that matters the most to the most people.

If you are in teacher training or a newly minted yoga teacher, I recommend Gray's The Yoga Teacher. You will nod, smile and thoroughly relate.