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Photo: Cora Wen discussing downward facing dog ©2011 Barbara Denowh
A week to deepen my practice of teaching and find out what works for me
BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST BARBARA DENOWH
For me there is always that apprehension before a yoga class and especially for this teacher training. Will I be in over my head? Do I know enough? Can I keep up?
Am I good enough?
I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing. Appropriate for a training where I am digging deeper not only in my teaching but my entire practice. Writing is very much a part of my practice.
I have spent a good many years since–too many, I think–being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sing, I suppose), someone will make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.
~ Stephen King
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It is a funny thing to have so many teachers together. So many people with common interests and common goals. It is refreshing after plugging away on my own in my sweet little studio to have someone to relate to.
The best part is that we talk about yoga. The worst part is that yoga is all we talk about.
So I am learning other’s backgrounds, their thoughts on the practice and chanting and sequencing and so on. It is hard not to compare.
Should I be doing that in my classes? Do I need to incorporate that into my practice to be a better teacher?
Adjustments
A big one for me: adjustments. I’m not a handsy teacher. I make assists by verbal cues. I don’t like to touch people. Just like how I’m not a hand holding teacher. I don’t tell my students how to align mats or baby them by fussing with their props with them. Not that there is anything wrong with that… it just isn’t me.
This is a week to deepen my practice of teaching and find out what works for me, what I will take home with me and what I will leave here.
And not feel lousy about it.
– from Cora today, something that I have learned and she constantly reinforces, “pushing hard can be doing less.”
Barbara Denowh is a yoga teacher in Helena, Montana. You can find her in cyberspace on Facebook or at her website denowhyoga.com. She also rambles about yoga, teaching, her wonderful husband, and her hound at babsbabble.com