Change Up Your Yoga Cues

As yoga lecturers, we face completely 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 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 provide college students some quiet time as effectively to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. Right this moment 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 scholar who’s been attending my lessons for 30 years instructed me that I stated one thing within the class that fully reworked her observe. I used to be shocked—and happy. The cue was one thing I’ve stated numerous occasions earlier than. (Do you ever get uninterested in 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 scholar understood one thing she hadn’t gotten earlier than.

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

As a author, I’m continually striving to make use of phrases which are 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 just a few methods to discover increasing your yoga vocabulary.

A Few Solutions

• One of the simplest ways to reword your yoga cues is to replicate on what you’re about to say forward of time. You may be capable of do that on the fly, particularly if you happen to 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 option 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 will probably’t damage to strive one other wording.
• If it’s simpler, you may discover altering up your cues whenever you’re not instructing. Make a listing of your commonest yoga cues. More than likely, your most well-liked 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 just a few lessons. Then hearken to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to give you inventive methods to convey the ideas you need to share, with out dropping readability?

I discover developing with inventive wording to be an effective way to juice up my instructing. It not solely helps me attain extra college students, but it surely additionally retains my very own instructing recent. Educating 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 writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe and Yoga for Meditators, each printed 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 Crimson Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.