Change Up Your Yoga Cues

As yoga lecturers, we face totally different learner sorts in each class we educate. Some individuals are visible learners. Demonstrating poses clicks in for this group. Others reply to guide 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 put up.) Nonetheless others are verbal learners. For that group, we use yoga cues.

Final 12 months, I posted a weblog on simplify your cues to provide college students some quiet time as properly to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. As we speak 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. Lately, a pupil who’s been attending my courses 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 occasions earlier than. (Do you ever get bored with listening to your self give the identical yoga cues? I do!) Anyway, on this current 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 range not solely of their responses to visible and verbal studying. In addition they range of their response to totally different phrases. Altering your language simply would possibly give even your most stalwart college students a brand new manner of experiencing their follow.

As a author, I’m always striving to make use of phrases which might be extra descriptive and fewer generic—with out changing into overly flowery. That is tougher to do on the fly, once I’m instructing a category. Nevertheless it’s doable. Listed below are a couple of methods to discover increasing your yoga vocabulary.

A Few Options

• 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 of do that on the fly, particularly for those who 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 technique to convey what you’re about to say? Possibly the cue you’ve at all times used actually is the easiest way to get your level throughout. However it could actually’t damage to strive one other wording.
• If it’s simpler, you possibly can discover altering up your cues whenever you’re not instructing. Make an inventory of your commonest yoga cues. Probably, your most well-liked wording will come to thoughts first. Write it down. Then take into consideration the way you would possibly phrase it otherwise.
• It may be actually instructive to report a couple of courses. Then take heed to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to provide you with artistic methods to convey the ideas you wish to share, with out shedding readability?

I discover arising with artistic wording to be an effective way to juice up my instructing. It not solely helps me attain extra college students, nevertheless it additionally retains my very own instructing recent. Instructing yoga is an ever-changing course of. Altering up your yoga cues will help you evolve as a instructor.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply 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 Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.