teaching

I've been here three weeks and one day, and I've taught roughly 28 classes so far. 10 classes a week, mostly back-to-back doubles, and I'm getting the hang of teaching once again. I've got a ways to go before I know the dialogue cold (which will be a first) and before I'm fully comfortable with timing, but it feels like things are coming together. Part of being comfortable with teaching (as with just about everything else) is accepting the inability to control everything. So many factors go into the fabric of a class, all we can do is teachers is guide the flow. We are vital to the class yet our role is nothing away from the students, the postures, the heat, the infinite multitude of air currents, car horns, even the puddles of sweat collecting on the floor.

Something I keep learning again and again is the importance of letting go of a minute detail for the sake of the overall flow of the class - even though I am doing everything I can to help the students focus and understand as many details as possible. The relatively new student today who was sitting out of fixed firm pose in first set - the student didn't seem to know how to get into the posture without major prodding and special correction from me, but I hung on to the idea of making the corrections (without actually biting the bullet and making them) to my distraction from teaching the full posture to the rest of the class. When I realized what was happening I realized it was time to end the posture anyway. So I explained to the sitting-out student how to get into the setup during savasana between sets, and then was able to focus on teaching the posture with my full attention in the second set. In the next posture, half tortoise, when the same thing happened, I was able to let go of the student getting in at all in the first set, and teach both sets with my attention more broadly distributed among all the students. It can be satisfying as a teacher to have all the students doing every posture, moving together, flowing together, but to be attached to that ideal as a measure of our success is to deny the individuality of our students and the intensity of a yoga series that is designed to push students to edges where they come up against their limits - sometimes knocking their wind out or preventing them from riding the wave of the group's motion.

As for the dialogue, I keep rereading and rememorizing postures. Our students who are going to training in two months are an inspiration - the better dialogue I use, the more they will have the dialogue burned into their brains. So I am trying especially hard with the first few postures in the series so that they'll have as strong as possible a grip on those early postures. I find myself reading the dialogue like a series of prose poems. To really get it emblazoned in my mind, I have to do more than just understanding each posture's basic structure and trajectory, looking for the internal rhymes, finding the rhythm of the phrases. Sometimes the lines are obviously poetic and roll gracefully out of my brain, "nice and loose, comfortable, easy, flexible." The poetry is there throughout, however, and the more I can find it and understand how it applies to the posture, the more I will feel ownership of the dialogue.

OK, bedtime. Don't forget to drink lots of water!!
Warmly, Carol