Enliven Your Teaching: From Routine to Animated

How to revise and renew when your teaching becomes tired.

By Brenda K. Plakans

Experiences outside the realm of yoga will also be reflected in your teaching. Anatomy classes at a local college or courses on Hindu religion provide background information on yoga's foundations. Meditation or silent retreats deepen individual practice, and you will bring this mindfulness back to your students.

Berch says, "I recommend people have a personal retreat once or twice a year. Not a professional training, but an immersion, an experience. Maybe you just take a yoga day. If you lay in that experience for yourself, your teaching will be so animated, so inspired, so rich, for weeks afterward, because you know it on the inside."

Armed with perspective and renewed enthusiasm, your teaching and practice will be noticeably stronger. Your students will be aware and, more importantly, you will be equipped to assess and refine your methods while deepening your own understanding of the tradition. Berch concludes, "You need yoga to be more than a rote discipline, or a challenge. You need it to be nourishing you and feeding you and filling you."

Brenda K. Plakans lives and teaches yoga in Beloit, Wisconsin. She also maintains the blog Grounding thru the Sit Bones.

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