As yoga academics, we face totally different learner varieties in each class we educate. Some individuals are visible learners. Demonstrating poses clicks in for this group. Others reply to handbook changes. (There’s additionally a considerable quantity of people that choose 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 tips on how to simplify your cues to provide college students some quiet time as nicely to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. As we speak 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. Not too long ago, a pupil who’s been attending my courses for 30 years instructed me that I mentioned one thing within the class that fully remodeled 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 pupil 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 totally different phrases. Altering your language simply would possibly give even your most stalwart college students a brand new approach of experiencing their apply.

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

A Few Recommendations

• 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 in the event 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? Possibly the cue you’ve at all times used actually is one of the best ways to get your level throughout. However it may well’t harm to strive one other wording.
• If it’s simpler, you’ll be able to discover altering up your cues if you’re not educating. Make a listing of your commonest yoga cues. Almost certainly, your most popular wording will come to thoughts first. Write it down. Then take into consideration the way you would possibly phrase it in another way.
• It may be actually instructive to file a number of courses. Then take heed to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to give you artistic methods to convey the ideas you wish to share, with out dropping readability?

I discover arising 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 contemporary. Educating yoga is an ever-changing course of. Altering up your yoga cues will help you evolve as a trainer.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced educating in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third ebook 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 Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.