In the beginning of my yoga journey, I wanted to know everything about the body so that I could help people feel better and reduce their pain and suffering. I wanted to know what poses would hurt someone or help someone. I was curious about specific techniques, modifications, adjustments, approaches surrounding every possible scenario, from back pain to depression. I sought out that information with such vigor, studying with so many amazing, skilled and knowledgeable teachers. I loved the whole process of learning and it still continues today. Although now, I do not seek as many answers, I seek more questions.
How much of my initial seeking of information has truly helped me as a teacher? Is it necessary to absorb piles of information? These days it is very easy to find piles of information about any body part or any approach to yoga. It is very easy to find many answers, presented in the form of “facts”, about how to do something “right”.
I have found that it is not the facts, or even the information necessarily, that have made me a better teacher. Rather, it is the experience around the body part or the approach that has informed my relationship to the body. It was absolutely necessary for me to have sought out information, but not because I received the answers, rather because I continued to explore the questions, the inquiry about an experience or a body part. I have arrived at a place where the information doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did in terms of “facts”, but it does inform the never-ending string of questions.
This inquiry-based approach to yoga that I apply in my practice and my teaching, is very much influenced by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Amy Matthews and Lisa Clark. This approach invites the student to begin to educate, listen and spend time learning about their own body. One still has to investigate and gather information, but what is most important to me is an attitude that encourages one to take it all in as questions rather than definitive answers.
What I find most important is that a student in my class feels and notices what is happening as it is happening, thus allowing the student to awaken to their own natural intelligence, trusting their own choices and participating more fully in relationship to their self.
When a student begins to develop this approach, without layering ideas, thoughts, and expectations about what it is supposed to look like from the outside, then that students’ natural intelligence is brought forth and old patterns begin to shift.
So what I am responsible for in a class is creating the environment for this possibility to arise. It is my responsibility to allow for many possibilities to exist side by side, and to ask the students to attend and inquire about their own experience again and again. I constantly ask each student to consider what is a posture asking them to learn in any given moment. And, that I believe is my biggest responsibility as a yoga teacher, to be fully present throughout the process of a student as they come to trust themselves more and more.
My intention as a teacher is to facilitate the possibility for the individual to actively participate in making themselves more comfortable. I guide the student towards trusting themselves to make the choices that are appropriate to them in any given moment as opposed to me telling them what is appropriate or right, or what will reduce their suffering.
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