Change Up Your Yoga Cues

As yoga lecturers, we face completely different learner sorts in each class we educate. Some persons are visible learners. Demonstrating poses clicks in for this group. Others reply to handbook changes. (There’s additionally a considerable quantity of people that desire to not be manually adjusted, particularly with out permission. However that’s one other submit.) Nonetheless others are verbal learners. For that group, we use yoga cues.

Final yr, I posted a weblog on the best way to simplify your cues to offer college students some quiet time as nicely to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. Immediately I’d wish to tune in a bit extra to language.

Why Change Up Your Yoga Cues?

I’ve been blessed with many long-term yoga college students. Lately, a pupil who’s been attending my lessons for 30 years informed me that I mentioned one thing within the class that utterly remodeled her follow. I used to be shocked—and happy. The cue was one thing I’ve mentioned numerous instances earlier than. (Do you ever get uninterested in listening to your self give the identical yoga cues? I do!) Anyway, on this latest case, I modified the wording a bit, and in that second, my pupil understood one thing she hadn’t gotten earlier than.

Our college students differ not solely of their responses to visible and verbal studying. In addition they differ of their response to completely different phrases. Altering your language simply would possibly give even your most stalwart college students a brand new means of experiencing their follow.

As a author, I’m continually striving to make use of phrases which can be extra descriptive and fewer generic—with out turning into overly flowery. That is tougher to do on the fly, after I’m educating a category. But it surely’s doable. Listed here are a number of methods to discover increasing your yoga vocabulary.

A Few Ideas

• One of the best ways to reword your yoga cues is to replicate on what you’re about to say forward of time. You would possibly be capable to do that on the fly, particularly should you educate a slower-paced, non-vinyasa-type class. Earlier than you end up about to talk your tried-and-true yoga cue, cease your self for a second. Is there one other solution to convey what you’re about to say? Perhaps the cue you’ve all the time used actually is one of the best ways to get your level throughout. However it could’t damage to strive one other wording.
• If it’s simpler, you may discover altering up your cues whenever you’re not educating. Make a listing of your commonest yoga cues. Almost certainly, your most well-liked wording will come to thoughts first. Write it down. Then take into consideration the way you would possibly phrase it in a different way.
• It may be actually instructive to file a number of lessons. Then hearken to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to provide you with artistic methods to convey the ideas you need to share, with out dropping readability?

I discover developing with artistic wording to be a good way to juice up my educating. It not solely helps me attain extra college students, but it surely additionally retains my very own educating recent. Instructing yoga is an ever-changing course of. Altering up your yoga cues may also help you evolve as a trainer.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started educating in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third e book is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and folks sextet Purple Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards.