The teacher had never liked my Down Dog. It had been a subject of much contention over the week I had spent in her 100hr Advanced Teacher Intensive. Too long. Heels too high. Not stable enough. Shoulders slouching. Jaw clenched. That day in her class, I made my way into a pose I had taken hundreds of times and waited for her to walk by me. I steeled myself against the coming critique and breathed deeply.
But the correction didn’t come. She didn’t pass by. She stopped. I waited. Then to my surprise, as all of the decisions I had made about this woman imploded around my ears, instead of a cue, the teacher kneeled down beside me and lowered her voice to a whisper, “Now that is a Down Dog I wouldn’t fuck with.”
When you take a yoga teacher training, veterans will often warn you that it may take months, even years, to sift through what you’ve taken in. An intensive 30 days or even a week require time and patience to slowly unpack. Even at this stage, almost seven months since my 100hr teacher’s intensive, I am only just beginning to see what I learned about yoga and myself in 8 short days.
Short days. Let’s be honest, they were long and hellish on levels I cannot even begin to describe. Grueling. Testing. Trying. Every single one without exception ended with me bursting into the family compound in tears, involving hours on the part of my dear friends to slowly piece me back together.
But not for a moment have I felt that those days were lacking in worth.
The hardest part of the training for me was that I was surrounded by tried and tested instructors who had earned their battle stripes in studios and workshops around the world. Many of the students who didn’t carry this merit badge had taken hundreds of hours of training more than I had. Those that did not fall into these two categories benefited from a pre-existing student relationship with the teacher. Immediately, this put me at the bottom of the pecking order I’ve come to realize is an insidious part of the yoga community. I felt like I was starting behind the eight ball.
The teacher I chose to take my 200hr training with a year ago on the west coast of Canada is a man whom I have come to love and respect for both his ability to teach and his broad knowledge of anatomy, yoga history and philosophy. His world view is classic Tantra at its finest: a compassionate non-dualistic perspective of the world that I very much honor and continue to deepen in my own life and practice. Plus, he has a sense of humor and plays a mean guitar.
Because he does not claim a singular tradition, but instead chooses to draw from many, his credibility was called into question in many situations during my week long intensive. I found myself stuck in the precarious position of defending a teacher I admire while trying to prove my own beliefs.
Differing philosophies aside, I appreciated the opportunity to dig deep into the reasons for what I claim to be true, and the chance to begin to defend them to my peers. It became good practice for being able to teach my own methods as a teacher to students who by the nature of their position will (and should) question me. In the end I am grateful for the debates, the challenges and the critiques of the foundation of my world view and teaching style.
It is not my desire to resolve the conflicts of that week in this essay. Many have evaporated in the months since the training as I have tried my ideas out in the arena of the classroom. As I become more confident in the seat of a teacher, I am able to chalk up disagreements about philosophies and teaching styles with my peers as part of the multi-coloured tapestry of the origins of our art. To the rest I can apply one simple phrase that my mother imparted to me the first week of kindergarten, “Meg, not everyone is going to like you.”
My desire here is to share what I learned. Allow me to preface by saying there are many things that I gained in the training, but the most important of these, the most helpful to me now seven months out, is the ability to communicate more clearly in the classroom.
Just as not a single one of my faith or practice beliefs were left off the discussion table, each over used phrase, flowery transition, and “ing” word were singled out before the class and called into question.
The most effective exercises with dialogue in the classroom involved the teachers using only 3 short cues to transition their student through various poses. I started to ask new questions of myself: did the cue help or hinder? Was the language necessary to convey what I wanted the student to do? Is it really important in parsvakonasana to ask a student to feel the light of the world shine forth from your heart to all the happy enlightened beings of the divine creation?
I learned that in an effort to make a class more artistically pleasing, teachers often confuse and muddle students, detracting from whatever experience might organically be developing on the mat. I have witnessed examples of this in studios time and time again since those 8 days, and find myself thinking how much that teacher could benefit from a week long intensive.
As I began to apply these distillation methods to my teaching post-training, I began to realize other truths as well.
For example, who am I to tell a student what they should or should not be feeling on a subtle level in a pose? If a student is entering into a space in agnistambhasana where they have suddenly realized they have a piriformis muscle and are communing with it on an intimate level, telling them to picture sunshine and lollipops while they go deep into their centre is going to make them feel as though they are missing the mark.
I have become more prone to give cues about anatomy than about philosophy, and to allow my students to have their own individual experience from that jumping off point. I think yoga instructors often run the risk of becoming like religious preachers to a captive audience.
My job is to teach them yoga.
My job is to not get in their way.
So every time I reach for a word that ends in “ing”, and choose a more direct cue instead I think of Denise. Whenever I take a moment to choose three words instead of 20 that might help a student struggling with a posture, I thank Denise. And each time I observe a student in a strong, individual expression of a pose that is in every way safe and effective, yet not exactly how I would do it, all I can think of are a few simple words that changed my practice forever, “I wouldn’t fuck with that Down Dog.”
Wahe, guru. Wahe.
