On Wednesday I got some rather shocking news at work: my boss, who’s been with the company for 20 years, is leaving for a new position. My coworkers and I spent the afternoon in haze; although we’re happy for her to have a great new opportunity, the announcement was a huge surprise and an injection of uncertainty into our work lives. On the way home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to focus my attention on my yoga class. It turned out, though, that teaching yoga that night was the best thing for me.
We had five people in the class again this week. Starting class at 6:30 definitely helped everyone’s commute, so that all my students were present and ready to go on time. This week I was more proactive about arranging people in the room and we came up with a good layout for five mats in the space. I put one of the more experienced students up front, since I wouldn’t be demonstrating poses myself, so that the beginners would have someone to look to. During class, I moved around the room more, made more adjustments, talked more confidently, and felt more confident. I think I did a better job of teaching this week.
Some notes: I had meant to teach Chair pose but totally forgot. I’m now considering this to be not a failing on my part but an unplanned gift to one of my students, who was evacuated from the 23rd floor of an office building after the earthquake on Tuesday and whose thighs were still sore from climbing all those stairs. He will be very happy to read that I forgot to teach Chair pose! Next week I’m definitely planning to teach it (I’m not sure why I want to teach Chair so much but I’m just going to go with it). We tried half moon pose and it was hard, but people seemed to like the challenge. That’s how I feel about half moon myself so I think I’ll definitely be teaching this one again. At the end of class, I did a guided relaxation again, but chose a tense-and-release relaxation rather than just the awareness one I did last week. Not sure what I’ll do next week.
I also taught shoulderstand for the first time, which was difficult. N & J have cautioned us to be careful teaching shoulderstand, because it’s possible to injure your neck if you do it incorrectly. I found it hard to remember all the little details that I wanted to mention about alignment in the pose, and my beginning students weren’t able to do the pose at all, which distracted me from describing it well to the others. I helped lift one person into the pose, and now she understands where it’s going, but she couldn’t hold the pose on her own and seemed a bit downcast that she wasn’t able to do it. I think this weekend I’m going to experiment with doing shoulderstand on a blanket for extra support, and also with doing shoulderstand at the wall, which will give me more options for teaching it. I’m thinking that next week I may leave a little extra time at the end of class just to play with inversions. We don’t have a ton of wall space in our yoga area, so doing legs-up-the-wall or using the wall for support in a harder pose won’t be an option for everyone; what I’d like to do is give my students a good foundation so I can tell them to go ahead and do whatever inversion they like, and then some people will work on shoulderstand or bridge and some can use the wall. Doing a bit of an inversion intensive next week may help with that, so people know what options they have.
Next week I think I want to teach ujjayi breathing. F told me that he thought he could use more reminders to breathe during class, so if I teach ujjayi breathing that will give me a concrete way to do that (rather than just saying, “don’t forget to breathe” repeatedly). I’m also considering some themed classes – breath is an obvious theme, and I’d start that class with crocodile pose instead of child’s pose and then try to work on the breath more throughout class. Another theme I thought of is surrendering/letting go. At least one of my students is very much an on-the-go person, very in charge, and practicing letting go might be good for this person, a benefit of yoga beyond the physical. Not that I want to plot out my classes weeks in advance, but I am happy that I’m getting excited about the things I might teach.
Rox Does Yoga 