Transform Your Teaching: 8 Mindful Yoga Tips

Teaching yoga can be physically and mentally demanding. Learn how to prioritize self-care and create a more sustainable practice with these 8 mindful tips for yoga teachers. I’ve found each of these techniques helpful to me in different situations over my 20+ years of teaching. Based in my training in Alexander Technique, these simple practices to release tension, improve focus, and bring greater awareness to your teaching.

How to use the tips

Each one of these tips is a practice in and of itself. Read through them all and pick one or two that resonate with you the most. Let each one be an exploration to implement in your teaching to see how it works for you. Give it time to settle in and become a habit before moving on to something else.

1. Claim Your Space For Yourself

You might be familiar with the story of the actor’s nightmare, where the actor finds themself on stage performing in a play for which they know none of the lines. In my twenty-plus years of teaching yoga a couple  of times a year I have the same recurring dream where I’m alone in a room and trying to teach a class that’s taking place in another studio and no one is paying attention to me. One of the biggest challenges a yoga teacher faces is negotiating the stress of standing in front of a room full of people expecting to be guided through a practice. 

Even if you’ve been teaching for a long time, there’s a shift in energy when you start the class as you move from mundane social interactions to the heightened state of a yoga practice.

A great solution to navigating that transition is to create a ritual that helps you claim the space for yourself. It could be something very small that no one else knows about, but helps you connect yourself to the space and your role as a teacher. My teacher, Donald Moyer, used to go around the yoga room and change the blinds, raising them if they were down or lowering them if they were raised. I like to adjust the lights and take time to lay out my mat and props neatly before anyone else enters the room. Even if you’re teaching in a less than ideal situation, you can frame the way you enter the room and adjust the environment to your liking. 

How do you normally transition into teacher mode before class? How does it help prepare you to teach?

2. Center Yourself in Your Body and Release What You Don’t Need

With so much to keep track of as a teacher, its easy to be in your head and to forget about your own experience. When I’m teaching, I’m always keeping track of at least three things at the same time: what I’m saying, what everyone is doing, and what I’m going to say next. When things are going well, I find myself in a state of flow where I’m focused and adaptable, responding creatively to the moment and the needs of my students. But even a blissful flow state can be taxing. Focused attention draws on the sympathetic nervous system, which revs you up to meet the challenge. 

Centering yourself in your body is a great way to help you self-regulate, settling or activating your nervous system as necessary. There are many centering techniques you can employ, but the simplest is to notice the sensations of your body, whatever they may be: how you feel energetically or emotionally, how your muscles and bones feel, the movement of your breath, or anything else that might come to you.

As an extra step, notice what’s going on in you that’s not needed. Are you holding too much tension? Are you restricting your breath? Are you thinking about something other than the task at hand? Whatever you notice, invite it to release. You might not be ready to let it go, in which case, perhaps it can lessen its hold on you. If not, hold the idea as an intention to give the non-conscious parts of you a message as to what you’d like to have happen, and let your larger self get on with figuring out how to make it happen.

3. Open Your Attention

As a mindfulness practice, opening your attention to include yourself and your environment can help you access many faculties that narrowing into details tends to block off. Intuition and creative thought are best stimulated by seeing the world as a unified whole, along with flow states where you are immersed in the process of what you’re doing, energized, connected and fulfilled in the present moment.

If you’re practiced in it, opening your attention can happen in an instant, but here’s a short guided practice to help you find it. Try this in a safe environment in a comfortable position, either sitting, standing or reclined.

1. Become familiar with where your attention usually goes. Do you tend to zero in on the details of whatever task is most pressing? Do you zone out, your mind wandering? Do you gravitate toward the sensations of your body or the stimulus of the world around you?
2. Bring your attention to your body, to whichever sensation is the strongest in the moment. The sensation of your weight is a good place to start, and easily accessible if you’re new to the process. Notice how your body settles into its support.
3. Expand your awareness softly to include the whole of yourself. Softly is the key word here. Let the impressions you receive be an easy wash of sensation, rather than a series of data points you’re dividing your attention between.
4. Without losing your inner awareness, notice what you can see. Let your gaze be soft, both the muscles around your eyes and the quality of your seeing so that you can be more aware of the periphery of your vision.
5. Open your attention further to include other sensory inputs. What are you able to hear or smell? How warm is the room?
6. Remain like this for a few moments, allowing impressions from within and without flow through your awareness, coming and going as they please.

4. Return to Yourself

You’ve claimed your space. You’ve centered yourself and opened your attention. And then class begins and you lose it all. You become focused on what you’re saying and what your students are doing, and you lose all sense of yourself. It’s an inevitable part of the way consciousness and attention work when faced with a challenge. 

As you’re teaching, remember to come back to yourself occasionally so you don’t become stuck in the details. Find a flow between narrowing in on what’s in front of you where necessary and expanding and opening whenever you can. Your nervous system will thank you for it.

5. Watch Without Judgement

This tip is a specific application of opening your attention and returning to yourself. As teachers, we hold space for technique and form as part of the container of experience that is the class we’re teaching. The standards of technique that we’ve learned in our training and through our experience can lead us to reduce our students to what they are doing correctly and incorrectly. This right/wrong binary can undermine our perception of each individual student and the group we’re teaching as a whole, blinding us to the experience they’re having and all the benefits they’re deriving from what they’re doing. On a practical level, if you’re thinking about all the corrections you need to give, either verbally or manually, you’re limiting your own access to your intuition and creativity.

When you’re teaching, notice how your attention might narrow into the performance of the student, either to what they’re doing that might be perceived as “wrong” or to when they execute a pose or an instruction particularly well. If you find that happening, take a mental step back and release the associations that have arisen.

You might find this changes your relationship to your students, inviting more empathy and compassion for their practice. It will also help lessen the tendency to micromanage the student’s practice with overcorrection and the tension in both of you that comes with it.

6. Pause Before Acting

Instinct and training are wonderful things to rely on when teaching. Responses can emerge from deep within the storehouse of memory without bidding. But, your first response to a stimulus is always a response from habit, and not necessarily the best course of action in a given moment. Giving yourself a moment’s pause, even for a fraction of a second, between stimulus and response will open up choices that you might not have thought of.

This can apply both to the way you interact with your students and the way you react in your body. Giving yourself permission to pause can give you the instant you need to reduce tension in your body, to return to a state of ease and poise, and to let yourself breathe.

7. Free Your Neck and Expand Your Torso

When you’re teaching, you’re projecting your voice, you’re moving around the room, you’re demonstrating and adjusting. Any one of these things is taxing on their own. Put them all together and you’re most likely building up tension and compressing your body every minute of class. Doing the odd pose with your students won’t be enough to free you up the way it would when you’re practicing at home because your attention is divided.

A simple solution is, whenever you return to yourself, let your neck soften so that your head can release away from the top of your spine, and to let your whole torso expand. Giving yourself this micro-break several times throughout class will help you down-regulate the enervating effects of your sympathetic nervous system and take pressure off your joints and spine.

8. Free Your Breath

It might seem silly to give you a tip about breathing when breath is a key component in many styles of yoga, but teaching yoga is not doing yoga. The demands of projecting your voice while moving around, adjusting, and demonstrating yoga poses can create patterns of misuse around your breath.

During a quiet breath, where you aren’t speaking or exerting yourself, your exhalations require no extra effort than the elastic recoil of your lungs and ribcage. Each quiet exhalation can be a release of tension that resets your breathing coordination:

1. Give yourself a few seconds during class here and there where you don’t speak.
2. Find the passive release of your exhalations by letting your breath flow out of you without force.
3. Let your exhalations be as long or short as they need to be to gently let all the air out.
4. Soften your neck, back, shoulders and abdomen.
5. Let your inhalations be light and free.

Teaching yoga is a rewarding journey, but it can also be demanding. By incorporating these mindful tips into your practice, you can cultivate greater presence, reduce stress, and create a more fulfilling experience for both you and your students. Remember to prioritize self-care, connect with your breath, and approach your teaching with an open heart and a curious mind.

Have fun and transform your teaching!