104. Revisiting Atha—The Yoga Sutras' First Word

It’s Sunday night. You have three classes to teach this week and you’re staring at a blank notebook, 45 minutes into scrolling for sequence ideas, five browser tabs open, nothing right for the actual students who’ll show up tomorrow. That’s the first arrow: the real challenge of building a class. Somewhere around minute 30, a voice crept in. Everyone else just walks in and teaches. What’s wrong with me? That’s the second arrow, and it hurts a lot more than the blank page ever did. In this epi...

Sooner or later, a student stops you on the way out the door with three words: “More core, please.” For a long time I answered that request badly, tacking three rounds of bicycles into the middle of an otherwise unrelated class and calling it giving the people what they wanted. This episode is the case I wish someone had made to me early on: learning to teach core well makes you a more useful yoga teacher, in the room, in your students’ actual lives, and in your own career. I start with the w...

Autumn is my favorite season for a slightly embarrassing reason: as the light gets lower, everything casts a longer shadow, and I find that weirdly reassuring. The shadows were there all summer. You just couldn’t see them at high noon. That’s the whole premise of this episode, which goes somewhere more specific and more uncomfortable than the survey I gave you back in episode 91: what the five kleshas, yoga’s five obstacles, look like when they follow you into the teacher’s seat. Because they...

Twenty minutes of continuous talking to a room full of people lying still with their eyes closed has scared off more experienced yoga teachers than any arm-balance workshop ever has. I hear the same question from teachers who can sequence a 90-minute class in their sleep: what do I actually say for 20 minutes? If that question has stopped you from offering yoga nidra, this episode is your orientation session. I’m walking through what yoga nidra actually is, why it’s a distinct practice rather...

Every September I watch teachers, myself included, sign up for something new: a fresh planning system, a training, a whole approach to class we’re sure will finally stick. By October, most of it has quietly stalled out. In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between motivation and discipline, and why the surge you’re feeling right now is weather, not climate. I dig into tapas, yoga’s teaching on disciplined effort, and why the structure that looks like it limits your teaching is ac...