Change Up Your Yoga Cues

As yoga lecturers, we face completely different learner varieties in each class we educate. Some persons are visible learners. Demonstrating poses clicks in for this group. Others reply to guide changes. (There’s additionally a considerable quantity of people that favor 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 12 months, I posted a weblog on methods to simplify your cues to present college students some quiet time as properly to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. At present I’d prefer 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. Not too long ago, a scholar who’s been attending my lessons for 30 years advised me that I mentioned one thing within the class that fully reworked her apply. I used to be shocked—and happy. The cue was one thing I’ve mentioned numerous occasions 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 scholar understood one thing she hadn’t gotten earlier than.

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

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 more durable to do on the fly, after I’m instructing a category. Nevertheless it’s doable. Listed below are a number of methods to discover increasing your yoga vocabulary.

A Few Strategies

• The easiest way to reword your yoga cues is to replicate on what you’re about to say forward of time. You may 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 strategy to convey what you’re about to say? Perhaps the cue you’ve at all times used actually is the easiest way to get your level throughout. However it will possibly’t damage to strive one other wording.
• If it’s simpler, you possibly can discover altering up your cues if you’re not instructing. Make a listing of your commonest yoga cues. More than likely, your most popular wording will come to thoughts first. Write it down. Then take into consideration the way you may phrase it otherwise.
• It may be actually instructive to document a number of lessons. Then take heed to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to give you 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 instructing. It not solely helps me attain extra college students, but it surely additionally retains my very own instructing contemporary. Instructing yoga is an ever-changing course of. Altering up your yoga cues may also help you evolve as a instructor.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Follow and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third guide 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 people sextet Purple Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards.