Correct with Kindness

Cultivate excellence and a sense of contentment in your students—and yourself—without promoting excessive striving.

By Melissa Garvey

It's every teacher's dream: rows of students bowed in Down Dog, four corners of the palms pressing into the ground, tailbones reaching for the sky, heels stretching toward the earth, with a beautiful mix of internal and external rotation in all the right regions of the limbs.

But if alignment is not taught in a skillful and artful manner, you risk turning your class into yet another place in life to achieve and get ahead.

"The problem is that teaching alignment involves a dichotomy between showing [students] how the pose 'should' be done and telling them to trust and listen to themselves," says Ganga White, founder of the White Lotus Foundation and author of Yoga Beyond Belief.

The delicate art of teaching alignment lies in navigating the fine line between high standards and perfectionism, says senior Iyengar Yoga teacher Patricia Walden. Whereas high standards breed contentment, perfectionism breeds hunger—a sense that it's never enough.

So how can you tell if your students are spending too much time striving for an unrealistic and unhealthy brand of perfectionism?

Assess Your Students

"Often people will use their tongue and their eyes like an arm or a leg instead of organs of perception," Walden says. Bulging eyes, pursed lips, or clenched teeth signal that students are pushing rather than feeling their way through a pose.

Labored or restricted breath, mechanical movement, and wandering eyes are also telltale signs of strain, says Doug Keller, a yoga instructor at the Health Advantage Yoga Center in Herndon, Virginia, and author of Yoga as Therapy. These red flags signal that your students may be striving to compete with an unrealistic standard in their minds or, perhaps, with each other.

Conversely, when students are in balance, they work patiently and remain grounded in their bodies.

Adjust Your Attitude

It may seem impossible to access and influence such an internal dimension of students' practices. But according to White, it starts with adjusting your teaching attitude.

"When the teacher is teaching from openness and flexibility, it is communicated to the students," he says. "If the teacher has fixed ideas of right and wrong, that gets transmitted also."

Charles Matkin, a senior teacher at Yoga Works' Manhattan locations, recommends reflecting on whether you are in control or in service. From a place of control, you compare the pose in front of you to the pose in B.K.S. Iyengar's Light on Yoga and dole out corrections to change and perfect the pose. From an attitude of service, you accept the pose on the mat and work with the student to uncover the perfection that is already present.

"As a teacher, I try to see the beauty that's in front of me and speak to it," Matkin says. In other words, look for what students are doing right and acknowledge it out loud.

Keep It Constructive

Every pose harbors seeds of growth, and the timely, skilled adjustment can encourage enhanced body awareness and protect students from injury. The risk of triggering perfectionism, says Keller, comes when you overwhelm students with too many instructions.

Page 1 2

See All Methodology Articles »