Beginnings
I first started studying with an Iyengar teacher (Mary Dunn) in New York City in 1985. At that time I was a struggling musician drawn to yoga mainly by its philosophical roots. I had been going to classes where a very different style of yoga was taught and no concrete instructions were given. Everyone just followed the teacher as best they could and no one was corrected.
When I began studying with Mary Dunn I had also begun conducting yoga classes of my own. I was thirty-four years old and those who attended my classes were very similar to me—athletic women in their twenties and thirties. My classes had no older people, no people with injuries, no “couch potatoes,” and very few men. They were young, female, physically fit, and full of energy.
Right away I noticed that my Iyengar teacher’s classes were filled with a much wider range of students. Seventy-year-old women who had never done much in the way of exercise were practicing right alongside professional dancers! Office workers who sat at desks all day, weight lifters, marathon runners, retired seniors, people of varying ages and lifestyles from all walks of life—all attended the same class. There were people with knee injuries and various hip, shoulder, neck, and chronic back problems. Under Mary’s guidance they practiced side by side and returned week after week, month after month, each improving at their own pace. Over time I witnessed their, and my own, transformation. We changed! Stiff people became more flexible. Flexible people gained strength. Older women learned to stand on their heads for five to ten minutes at a time.
I realized that my own teaching was missing something. My classes for some reason attracted only a small segment of the general population—as if they were all clones of me! The majority were excluded.
How do we make yoga accessible to everyone?
Forty years later, to this very day and in spite of its popularity, when the subject of yoga comes up in general conversation, “I can’t do yoga” remains a common remark. The idea that you must be young, female, and flexible to “do” yoga has taken a firm hold in the mind of the public, aided and abetted by advertising and the media in general. A multimillion dollar branch of the clothing industry has arisen which exploits this notion as the central premise of their advertising. “Normal” people do not show up in their ads. Instead we have slender fashion models advertising “yoga clothes” to convince a young, female public that they actually need these garments to practice yoga.
Given this reality, when so many are afraid to even attempt a yoga class, is it enough to say “Beginners welcome!”? When the actual teaching addresses the real needs of everyday people, then yes, it becomes a perfectly true thing to say.
How do we teach the general population? Older people? Stiff people? Flexible people? What is the difference between teaching a flexible student and a stiff one? What does each student have to learn in order to transform? How do we teach all of these different people in the same class and at the same time?
Yoga should heal, not harm—Ahimsa
Is it enough to tell a student with an injury to “be gentle,” “don’t work too hard,” or even “don’t do this pose”? Should we tell them to come back when their injury has gone away? Or can we give them a way of working on an asana so that they may practice it safely, without pain, allowing the injury to heal and the student to keep up with the class?
And what about the student who says they were injured by practicing yoga in the first place? No teacher wants to hear that! No matter how much we exhort our students to be gentle and no matter how gently we speak to them, if they are repeatedly practicing with a misalignment they may invite injury where there was none to begin with.
Is it possible for a student with an injury to practice safely and deeply at the same time?
B.K.S. Iyengar passionately believed that yoga should be for everyone. He believed that the practice of asana should be safe and transformative and he made it his life’s work to bequeath us a system that would do just that.
His method, developed over 70 years of practice and teaching, focuses on precise anatomical alignment of the musculoskeletal system and he invented props to allow people to achieve that precision when it is otherwise unattainable. This attention to detail helps the practitioner to work safely and allows the body to gradually transform. Everyone improves at their own pace, individual help is given as needed, and all start right from where they are. No one is excluded.
The four foundations of teaching
There are four main cornerstones of teaching the Iyengar method to beginners (including yoga practitioners/teachers from other traditions):
- Demonstration: The teacher names the pose and demonstrates it to the class.
- Instruction: The teacher gives step-by-step instructions to the class as they do the pose.
- Observation: As the teacher instructs, she/he watches the students perform the pose.
- Correction: Based upon his/her observation of the students performance, the teacher gives corrections and has the students repeat the pose.
The above applies to teaching just about anything that is method based, from learning to drive a car to learning to play a musical instrument.
I am grateful for the honor of teaching this upcoming workshop! I have raised many questions in this article which I will address in class. I hope to give students a taste of Iyengar yoga that will make them want to delve more deeply into the subject.
Sarveṣāṁ Svāgatam. Everyone welcome!