P o c k e t CT

So my totally wonderful yoga teacher is taking over the studio where I’ve been attending his classes. This is good news for me on many counts. The most exciting of which is that he is going to do teacher training so that he can stock the studio with teachers and he has invited me to do it.

So I have been thinking about what makes a good class, a good teacher, a good experience. I have my list of things I like and don’t like and I have been lucky to have a few really inspiring teachers. I have been thinking about what I have been doing with yoga and what is next.

I first started at Gold’s Gym with Katie who was Anusara trained and would remind me often to keep my belly in and up. She gave me a firm base for where the muscles work in the poses. Understanding of the rotations of upper and lower parts of the limbs opposing each other. In anything tough, say Navasana, she would call out for us to shine and smile.

Then I had a teacher whose name I can’t even recall because I just called it “gay yoga.” He was attractive and had a soft soothing voice that he miked over Tantra Lounge. Slow warm ups and then to a nice flow of poses. The music made the time feel special. I began to associate certain songs with inversions or balances. The mood he set could almost overcome the dance music and clanging of the gym beyond the door, almost. He set off my gaydar with a steady blip blip blip that later I found was completely off – but I still keep that name in my head.

Then because it fit in my schedule I started taking an Ashtanga class with Rick. His deliberate pace and tips to get more out of the poses or take it to the next step was totally fabulous. I did a five week intensive to learn the poses in the primary series and started to try to do it on my own. Parts in the middle were out of my reach by practicing on my own was sometimes totally divine. At home I listened to techno with an India flair. I paced perfectly sometimes and kept the flow until it felt like I was making a kinetic prayer to be whole. Changes at the gym and requests of people to have more advanced classes and Rick had the one level II class. However people who had only been to one or two yoga classes would also attend and for safety reasons the focus was on the beginners. During these classes Rick would sometimes tell me something to work on but the classes were falling flat. I had outgrown the gym yoga variety.

As I was shopping for new yoga classes I found that one of Claudia’s NYC instructors started teaching classes in Hadley. He has a studio in Brattleboro, VT and I was actually thinking of doing the drive regularly to take his class, he is that good. Well now I didn’t have to. He systematically walks around the room going from student to student giving adjustments while giving solid well paced voice instruction. He was an automatic “sure you can” to the minds fearful hand wringing of “I can’t do that” and after will add the caveat of “it just may take a few years.” The classes are a good balance of strong, flexible and woo-woo. There would be no getting neglected for being too good for that reason as well as the fact that I was surrounded by people with much stronger practices than I have. It was inspiring and it totally kicked my ass physically to start with. I went from getting one new or one challenging pose every few weeks at the gym to doing what felt like endless sun salutations and trying something like flying crow or hummingbird. I would leave the studio blissed out, tired and sweaty.

All of this time everything I learned in yoga was focused on me. I am well versed for modifications for tight hamstrings since I started out like that. I know very little about what to do for tight hips since I am almost freakishly flexible there. I have paid hyper-attention to me until now. Time to broaden up my focus and to finally learn left from right or I’m not going to be any good at this.

So I am also running through my head what made a bad experience. I am thinking of the worst yoga classes I have taken. The one teacher in Washington whose class is exactly the same mediocrity-every.single.time. That poor town had her train the second yoga teacher and she just repeats that. Oh and that guy who kept us doing gentle stretching yoga in a freezing cold room. When he said now rest after down dog I wanted to do push-ups in retaliation. Or how about the ego-maniac power yoga guy who stepped on my hand to get my attention and then chided me for being too loud in a jump back. Then there was the guy who would ask if there were requests and do the same thing he planned to do all along. “I want inversions” I would say, and he would point out the inversions that were in his usual routine. To add insult to that he was demonstrating the poses all the time like “watch me… watch me….watch meeeeeee!” and didn’t even notice when people were doing things that other (better) teachers would have asked them to adjust for their safety.

I am very happy that I will be learning from someone whose focus is on the students and who will teach me with the same value. So this will be different for me as far as teaching goes. I have only ever formally taught things requiring “click here” every two words. I know that a good deal of folks reading this blog maybe aren’t interested in yoga so much so I will ask about teaching all things physical instead of mental– What is going to make an inspiring teacher?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.