This entry was posted on Might 27, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
A long time 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, educate. Those that can’t educate, educate gymnasium.” (The movie’s embellishment is the second sentence.) The quote’s intention was to diss lecturers, particularly gymnasium lecturers I suppose. 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 all the time factor?
My dad was a gymnast, and I inherited his hypermobile physique. So once I began practising yoga with June Bains, an Indra Devi-trained instructor, I took to it immediately. All of the poses we practiced trusted flexibility, and briefly order, I discovered myself in a position to carry out every thing the instructor supplied—to extremes.
When June introduced that she would offer a instructor coaching, I instantly thought, that is for me. I beloved how the observe made me really feel. I may do the poses “higher” than anybody within the room, I assumed. This may 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 observe I’d been doing most likely didn’t assist. My physique trembled beneath 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, “Carry 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 actually undecided why I continued. The observe 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 individuals—a quantity that was thought-about to be big on the time. On reflection, it was an incredible time to be practising.
Again to Sq. One
Mary Dunn taught me the right way to get up my quads. She took me to the wall. She confirmed me that I wanted to observe 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 couple of 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 observe standing poses this manner for a minimum of six months to construct energy and intelligence in my quads. It took a yr of practising this manner earlier than my quads would interact 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 observe. I discovered that once I stopped collapsing into my knee joints, my arches started to elevate 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 may 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 way of countless 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 lessons the way in which 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 educating 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 the right way to educate 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 the right way to assist them by way of these struggles.
How Challenges Assist Yoga Lecturers
So perhaps the “Those that can’t do, educate” quote isn’t a diss in any case. Perhaps it’s those that needed to study the rudiments that make the very best 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. Lecturers who’re “born on third base and suppose they hit a triple,” because the saying goes, have loads of work to do to know the place most of their college students are coming from.
Asana observe is about discovering steadiness and ease within the pose you might be practising at this second. A instructor who understands in her intestine, from her personal expertise, that the journey is the observe will seemingly be capable of educate 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 people sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.