Thursday 27 October 2011

Yoga Teachers vs. Guiders revisit

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Its funny how posting something and having people comment on it can open up our perspective.

A had posted something really interesting about our last blog - Good yoga teachers are both.

Both?!  What?!  It can't be black and white?!

And we agree with her.  As both S and M have been school teachers they can see A's point of view.  There comes a point where you guide people along on their journey allowing them to find the answers for themselves.  This is true with yoga teachers.  We will have to guide them along their journey hoping their bodies will come into alignment and find the true positions.  However, in order to be that guider you have to teach a bit first.  We'll give you an example:
S tried side crow.
S failed.
S watched our friend K rock out side crow.
S tried again.
S failed.
A wonderful teacher L taught S how to align his body in side crow.
S tried again.
S succeeded.

The moral of this story is....where was L to begin with!
Seriously, S tried to align his body and was guided into it.  He couldn't quite get it, something just wasn't work.  Then when L taught him, he took off.

Education, and yoga are very similar.  You can't guide someone into something with out teaching the fundamentals first.  If you know your class and you have the same students all the time - much like you do in education - guiding takes over.  But Yoga teachers have it more difficult, there are some regulars, but you always have a few new ones that may need some teaching.  So while you guide the others you will have to teach the few - but as we said in my last post, it might be better to reteach all just to be on the safe side.

Now S can be guided into side crow - but its been a few weeks since he last did it with L so some teaching may be good as a refresher.

So as we stated in our last post:
We are yoga teachers.  That's our title.  And we have to deal with it.

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