How To Teach Better Yoga Online
Zoom Yoga
After months of leading live Zoom Yoga classes, We’ve begun to Wonder, “Is Zoom Yoga good for us? How can we make it better?”
Teaching Yoga Online
Within hours after our mayor ordered yoga studios to shut down, the tech-savvy owner of our studio immediately had classes up on Zoom. Facing iphones balanced on tripods and starkly empty rooms, we promptly began our attempt to offer students the analog to their in-person experience. Through garbled audio, fuzzy video, and profound camera shyness, I’ve taught yoga by Zoom nearly every day since then. Until yesterday when I decided that I would no longer perform yoga online. To be fair, there are different ways of teaching yoga online. Here we’ll look at a few.
Three Ways To Teach Yoga Online
Performance
Presence
Instruction
Online Yoga Performance
Yoga performance, the method we adopted with virtually no forethought, is what I call the attempt to replicate in-person class experience by modeling breath, movement, and shape while verbally cueing the same without seeing the students most of whom will have their video and audio off. The biggest problem with this is that it is really hard to teach people you cannot see, hear, or touch. As more and more yoga teachers work to make their teaching accessible, this poses a real challenge when teaching online. As one yoga teacher has explained, part of teaching involves actively listening to students’ bodies.
“We have to remember that there are many ways to listen. I have learned to use my entire body as a giant ‘ear.’ Listening becomes hearing the different breath patterns during a posture sequence — one student may be breathing easily, while another wheezes or is laboring. Listening becomes watching body movements; noticing arcs of emotion, restlessness, frustration, elation, laughter, tears, and whatever else may show up; as well as noticing the way in which all of these awarenesses meld together to create a more holistic class experience. Paying attention to these cues, and others, helps me determine when to leave more space and silence, when to cue a falling out breath or call attention to a transition, when to increase the pacing, when to add a posture or modification, or layer a cue.”
Obviously this kind of whole-person listening is not possible in a virtual class. It is also really hard to perform asana and pranayama and lead others at the same time. Even in person, teachers who demo many of the poses do not demo every movement, breath, and shape as they lead the class. But that is what we attempted to do when we went virtual. And despite the fact that students were very grateful to be connected with teachers they loved after the abrupt loss of in-person practice, much was lost.
Online Yoga Presence
Another method of teaching yoga online is leading embodied awareness. In class, live or in person, these were what I considered the choicest moments both in teaching and practicing. In this method, the teacher is not “doing poses,“ though they are modeling one rather challenging asana — being fully present. While some students may miss seeing the teacher model poses, this method offers students the space to connect with their own inner teacher and be more present to themselves with the additional presence of a guide.
Online Yoga Instruction
Another method of teaching yoga online, one used more by teachers who have been online for years and likely have their own training school, involves instructing with a live model student. Here use of the word instructing instead of teaching is intentional. The origin of the word instruct has two parts; in, meaning upon or towards, and struere, meaning “to pile up.” In other words, instruction piles up knowledge on one’s brain. It is not the kind of teaching most teachers offer in studio unless in a workshop or teacher training. And this kind of online tutorial is probably not what most people want as their daily practice. Yet it can be helpful for yoga teachers and practitioners who are looking to refine understanding of a specific pose or set of poses. It’s also helpful for those looking to target a physical ailment. Below is an example of some nice online yoga instruction focused on “lower back pain.”
Beyond the Body
Throughout the five or so months of daily online teaching, my own experience shifted through at least a few stages of understanding how to connect better virtually. In the first stage, my primary focus was battling poor sound, which meant more or less shouting while in downward dog or even headstand about long slow inhales, long slow exhales, and equanimity. My sister “attended” one of these online classes and said, “It felt like you were shouting at us!” Getting a good microphone closer to the mouth is really important and helped resolve this. High quality ear buds or a really good mic are recommended. Either way, no more shouting about resting the mind in the present. We’re all grateful.
With basic sound issues resolved, the next challenge was facing the desire to give students at home the feeling of me being with them instead of me talking to the back of a phone in an empty room, which was actually what was happening on my side of the screen. I am not a trained actor; so this was hard. Really hard. How was I showing up? What was in my yoga toolbox to deal with this? After all, it is just another thing happening on the mat, another thing happening in life. I looked to the classic yoga text the Bhagavad Gita for guidance. Do your best and offer the results to something bigger than your ego. And you know, this really works! Not thinking so hard about how to connect with students, not making it so much about me, relieved much needless stress. Teaching online yoga classes began to feel much better.
The Bhagavad Gita Online
The Living Gita is a pretty accessible Gita in written form. But there are many other wonderful translations and commentaries out there. If you are more of a listener than a reader, the Gita lectures by Swami Sarvapriyananda are highly recommended. You can find more on YouTube and also in podcast form at Vedanta Talks.
Bringing It All Together
As I continued teaching online yoga classes, I began to suspect that the students I was teaching from afar did not really need me on a screen telling them what to do with their body or breath or mind. If they had endured virtual teaching for this long and were still waking up at 6 a.m. for yoga practice, I felt they were able to practice with their own teacher, not the one on Zoom, but the one right there within themselves.
For me, practice on the mat had always been time to practice the intention of being in this bodymind with awareness. It was time to notice ego, impatience, what pulls me, what repels me, along with body things too like ankle strain or a tight muscle. It was also time to explore where pulse meets breath, where emotion meets matter, and sometimes to gently touch or brightly ecstatically meet the basis of it all. An hour or two could be lost just in this. And I didn’t need someone else to tell me how. Perhaps no one does.
But once, a couple of years into my teaching, long before the Zoom experience, a friend said that for her there was no difference between attending a yoga class in person and practicing with a video at home. As I listened to her, I realized that she viewed yoga as exercise, and viewed exercise as a daily chore. She was looking for someone to tell her how to move her body so she didn’t have to think about it. She was looking for a convenient and entertaining drill sergeant. In my experience, however, a good yoga teacher transmits something beyond simple cues. Even the worst yoga teacher shares something more than just suggestions for how to move. And aside from the teacher, it really feels like everyone in the room contributes to everyone else’s experience. In fact this it true.
Science helps us understand how. Body and mind are linked and we are all linked to each other. In the forward to The Molecules of Emotion, Deepak Chopra writes,
“[Candace Pert’s] research has provided evidence of the biochemical basis for awareness and consciousness, validating what Eastern philosophers, shamans, rishis, and alternative practitioners have known and practiced for centuries. The body is not a mindless machine; the body and mind are one.”
From the yoga perspective, Georg Feuerstein echoes that when we mistakenly view the mind as separate from the body and the body as separate from its environment, we lose touch with our own feelings and sensations and experience conflict with the world around us. See Tantra: Path of Ecstasy (1998) by Georg Feuerstein.
But we are never truly disconnected. In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist, simply and powerfully shares her experience of actual connection to others that became apparent when her left brain shut down in a massive stroke. She explained what she experienced through her right hemisphere —
“I can no longer define the boundaries of my body . . . the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the molecules of the wall . . . all I could detect wat this energy, energy. . . . I felt enormous and expansive.”
Then she knew —
“We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. Right here right now we are brothers and sisters on this planet here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect we are whole and we are beautiful.”
In contrast, Jill says, the left hemisphere alone tells us the lie: “I am separate from you.”
If we are all connected, is it important to practice yoga i.e., being in our bodyminds together, with others? To me it feels essential to practice reaffirming our connection to each other as long as we have a tendency to forget. Is it possible to truly and effectively practice together virtually? Surprisingly, or maybe not, something Elon Musk (and possibly Isaac Asimov) suggested makes me wonder, “We are all collectively programing a giant artificial intelligence as one giant cybernetic collective.” As we share bodymind practices online — though it is hard, and it feels different and we make mistakes — we are connecting and contributing to a massive, programmed intelligence. We’re in this together with lessons from the Bhagavad Gita to guide us. In time, our teaching — even online — becomes God Song.
“When I say I am separate from you it is a lie, a terrible lie. I am one with the universe. . . . I am one with the air that surrounds me, one with heat, one with light, eternally one with the whole Universal Being, who is called this universe, who is mistaken for this universe, for it is He and nothing else. . . . I am one with That.”