Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Practice a beginner mindset and try to be comfortable not knowing
- 2. Let go of comparison and honor your own path
- 3. Find yourself within the structure
- 4. Sit with the discomfort and notice what shows up
- 5. Practice is the point
Introduction
The leaves have turned a faint orange-yellow hue and are still damp from the summer's rain. Yet the storms that caused it are no longer dampening the weekends of beach-goers now back to their city dwellings. There's a slight chill in the air, and I’m rushing out the door with the same nervous energy of a child running to catch the bus on the first day of school.
My bag is stuffed with educational books, a notebook, pens, and I even have a bagged lunch. I put my bag away in a locker and head into class to start my first day.
Only my classroom is heated to 108 degrees.
10 years after completing my first yoga teacher training, I’m back for another, this time learning Hot Power Fusion, a blend of 26/2 and Vinyasa. After years of standing at the front of the room, there’s been something illuminating about switching perspectives.
The experience has put some of the advice I regularly give my own students to the test. And I’ve been reminded that knowing what we’re supposed to do and carrying out those lessons ourselves are two very different concepts.
Here are five elements of my own teaching that I attempted to follow myself as a student and what I learned along the way.
1. Practice a beginner mindset and try to be comfortable not knowing
No matter how long you’ve practiced yoga, there will always be something new to learn. A different style, a unique approach, or another way of looking at something you thought you already understood.
Learning a new yoga teaching format has put me in that position again. I’ve been asked questions I couldn’t answer and have been called on to present before I felt completely prepared. My first instinct was to feel like I should already know.
When it came time to practice teach in our training, I started noticing all the little ways that feeling showed up. When I needed to buy time to think about what pose or transition was next, I filled the empty space with unoriginal cues like “keep breathing,” flowery language such as “surrender into the moment,” or a blanket “Good, good, good” without always acknowledging what, exactly, was good.
A note from one of my training leads about those filler words took me straight back to seventh grade, when I had to give a speech and was docked for using too many “taboo words,” our teacher’s name for all the ums, likes, and other words we reached for when we didn’t know what to say next.
If I lost my count and kept everyone in a pose too long, I apologized. If I got something wrong, I said sorry for that too.
Somewhere between the filler words, the over-apologizing, and hoping I wouldn’t be called on before I had an answer, I had regressed to middle school. I was suddenly shy, awkward, and acutely aware of myself. I might as well have had braces and been waiting for the bell to ring for recess.
But experience doesn’t mean having all the answers.
Instead of expending energy trying to make it seem like we know it all, admitting that we don’t leaves us open to absorb new information and continue to build upon our skills and knowledge.
There’s vulnerability in that. It can feel like having things left to learn means you’re somehow less experienced as a yogi or less knowledgeable as a teacher. Dropping the ego means recognizing that being experienced and still having more to learn aren’t mutually exclusive.
2. Let go of comparison and honor your own path
“Don’t worry about what the person next to you is doing.”
I’ve said some version of that sentence countless times while teaching. “Keep your focus on your own mat.” “Take the variation that works for you.” “Everyone’s body is unique and needs something different.”
Apparently, this advice is easier to dispense from the front of the room.
Back in training, I caught myself doing exactly what I tell students not to do: looking around the room and comparing.
Someone could pull anatomical terminology out of thin air while I was mentally sorting through muscles and bones. Instead of just thinking, That person knows a lot about anatomy, it was easy to add an unnecessary second thought: Should I know that too? A difference suddenly became something I needed to account for.
However, when I caught myself taking out my measuring stick, I decided to tuck it away and take my own advice: “Honor your own strengths alongside those that other people bring to the room.”
I began to find my footing by leaning into the creativity and memorization tricks that have always helped me learn, while also paying attention to what I could pick up from the people around me. Their knowledge became motivating, and what I didn’t know yet was exactly why I was there.
I became increasingly appreciative of all the different kinds of experience gathered in one room. One person had gotten their start with 26/2, another with Sculpt, and another with Ashtanga. Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “to yoke” or “to unite,” and there was something fitting about seeing that union take shape as our different paths brought us to the same place.
It reminded me of looking around during a yoga class. We tell students to keep their eyes on their own mats, but sometimes looking around can be part of the experience too. The person next to us might take a variation we’ve never considered, approach a familiar shape in a way that makes us curious, or have a motivating energy that encourages us to stay in our own shape a little longer.
And while we’re noticing them, someone else may be noticing something in us.
The problem comes when observation turns into measurement.
Maybe staying on your own mat doesn’t mean never looking beyond its edges. The goal isn’t to stop noticing the people around us. It’s to let what we see add to the experience instead of changing how we see ourselves.
3. Find yourself within the structure
Coming from a Vinyasa background, creativity has always been one of my favorite parts of teaching. I can play with the physical puzzle of a sequence: "Swivel to face the back of the mat." "Blossom open into Warrior II." I know the framework well enough that I’m not thinking three poses ahead, so I have the mental space to get creative with the words I use to get students there.
Hot Power Fusion gave me much less room to rearrange the puzzle. The sequence was already there, and at first I wondered how much space that left for me to make it my own.
Part of yoga, though, is learning to stay with what’s in front of us. Tapas, a Sanskrit word often translated as discipline or committed effort, is the practice of staying with the work rather than always reaching for what’s next.
In Vinyasa, a foundational pose can become something we pass through on our way to the next transition or peak shape. This format requires students to stay with a shape, refine it, and pay attention to details we might otherwise flow right past.
That repetition has value for students, too. Returning to a familiar shape gives us the chance to notice where we’ve been moving on autopilot, revisit our alignment, and build a stronger foundation for whatever comes next.
Also, this teaching structure didn’t turn out to mean sameness. I started taking classes with different teachers and noticed that while the poses stayed largely the same, the classes didn’t. Music, language, pacing, and personality changed the experience without them needing to alter the sequence itself.
Viveka, the Sanskrit word for discernment, is about seeing clearly enough to make thoughtful choices within what we’re given. As I became more familiar with the format, I started playing with my own music and bringing in the humor and connection that already felt natural in my other classes.
The same applies on the mat. A teacher can give an entire room the same pose, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to experience it in exactly the same way. We can work within the structure, take the variation we need, and still leave room to explore.
4. Sit with the discomfort and notice what shows up
On day two of training, I was still learning the sequence when we were asked to teach part of it. I didn’t know it well enough yet, so I asked if I could sit that round out and observe. Instead, I was encouraged to get up and try anyway.
What showed up first was resistance. I fumbled over my words, lost pieces of the sequence, and felt embarrassed struggling to teach something I had only just learned. I wanted to wait until I knew it better before putting myself in the position of getting it wrong.
But there’s a messy stage to learning something new, when you’re being asked to try before you feel like you know what you’re doing. As students, we find ourselves there all the time. We avoid the pose we always fall out of, hesitate when a teacher offers something unfamiliar, or decide something “isn’t for us” before we’ve given ourselves much time to figure it out. The temptation is to retreat to what we already know rather than sit with what comes up when we don’t.
By the time I got home after hours of learning, teaching, and practicing in a 108-degree room, I was overheated, depleted, and wondering why I had added this to an already full plate. When I told my family how burnt out I felt, they asked if I was going to quit.
I wasn’t. I was just in the messy part of learning.
It made me think of Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh’s phrase, “No mud, no lotus.” A lotus grows from murky water before it reaches the surface and blooms. The mud is part of how it gets there.
Once I had rested and refueled, I wrote out the sequence, studied it, and started committing it to memory. I came back the next weekend better prepared. What had felt scrambled started to settle into place.
As students, we often want to skip that same part of the process. We want the balance without the wobbling, the bind without the fumbling, and the confidence without the attempts that came before it. But learning doesn’t usually happen that cleanly. The pose that feels impossible today may eventually become the one we move into without thinking, but only because we were willing to keep meeting it when it was still unfamiliar.
That’s the mud. It’s not the part we tend to celebrate, but it’s the part that gives us the opportunity to learn, adjust, and eventually do what we once couldn’t. Sometimes, we grow by letting ourselves get a little dirty.
5. Practice is the point
I can still picture myself before the first class I ever taught back in September 2016. I was nervous and rehearsing what I was going to say. I knew more than I felt like I knew in that moment. At the end of class, I told everyone it was my first time teaching, and the room broke into applause, including my supportive mom sitting in the front row.
This past weekend, I found myself teaching something new once again: Hot Power Fusion, as part of our final graduation class. I noticed how much more comfortable I felt than I had during those first practice-teaching sessions, joking with the class and bringing more of my own personality into the format. I also got to see some of the different paths around me come full circle: one trainee, brand new to teaching, had bravely brought all of her friends to support her, while another had brought her daughter and affectionately corrected her Standing Bow Pose.
At our closing ceremony, we each had a chance to reflect on what the experience had meant to us. I shared how much I appreciated the program leads and fellow trainees for pushing me and inspiring me throughout the training, but also how proud I was of myself for choosing to become a student again in the first place.
Today, I know considerably more than I did 10 years, and even four weeks ago at the start of this training, and I hope I never mistake that for having nothing left to learn.
That may be one of the stranger things about practice: the longer we spend doing something, the more we realize there isn’t really a finish line. Some lessons are entirely new. Others circle back years later and ask something different of us. A pose we’ve practiced hundreds of times can reveal a new detail. A familiar cue can suddenly make sense in a different way. And sometimes the thing that teaches us most is stepping into a role where we don’t feel quite so practiced anymore.
There is a Zen Buddhist concept known as shoshin, or “beginner’s mind,” which is defined as approaching something with openness and curiosity regardless of how familiar it has become. This means allowing what we already know to coexist with the possibility that there is still more to discover.
Because practice is not the stage before we become good at something. In yoga, practice is the point. We bring everything we’ve learned with us, and then we step onto the mat willing to see what today has to teach us.