75. Why Teaching Yoga Is Not Like Teaching Other Subjects

A vivid dream about teaching Spinning brought me face to face with something I've known for years but never quite articulated: teaching yoga is fundamentally different from every other kind of teaching I've done.

In this episode, I'm drawing on my background in Spinning instruction, university English literature, and public radio to show exactly where those skills help in the yoga room—and where they actively work against your students' experience. From the constant monologuing of radio to the performance energy of Spinning, I had to unlearn a lot to become an effective yoga teacher.

I'm also sharing the surprising overlaps—like helping students find comfort in their setup, using breath as an anchor, and navigating students' desire for intensity. These are transferable skills that serve you beautifully when you know how to adapt them.

If you've come to yoga teaching from fitness, academics, broadcasting, or any profession where you were trained to fill space and hold attention, this episode will help you identify the habits you're carrying and give you concrete steps to shift from performing to witnessing.

Listen now!

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? The other night I had an extremely vivid dream that I was back teaching Spinning, you know, cycling on a fixed- wheel stationary bike. In the dream, it was my first class back, which I last taught in 2010, though I did teach for several years before that as part of my work at the UNC Wellness Center, where I also taught yoga. But teaching yoga is not like teaching Spinning. In the dream. I started a little apprehensive and rocky, and the class was small, but folks kept filing in and I was very busy getting them all set up on the bike, adjusting seat heights, moving handlebars in or out, helping folks get their feet into toe cage pedals, or clip in if they were wearing fancy, hard sold cycling shoes. Every bike in the dream was unique and different. Right before I woke up and immediately came to my computer to start making notes for this podcast episode, I realized my subconscious was telling me something important about what yoga teaching actually is and what it isn't. Today I want to talk about how teaching yoga is not like other forms of teaching. It's not like teaching other forms of movement. It's not like teaching English literature. It's not like working in radio. These are all formats I've taught in over the years. Teaching yoga requires good teaching skills, but it demands a very different skillset. And if you've come from another teaching background, you may be carrying habits that don't serve you in the yoga room. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. Let's start with Spinning, since my subconscious, so helpfully served it up for me in Spinning, you want your students' eyes on you. In fact, often you're trying to distract them from the present moment for most of the class until those few powerful times when you really drop them fully into the sensation of their effort, you're telling them to go into the pain cave, into the intensity, but a lot of the time you're just helping them get through 45 to 60 minutes of hard work. You do this through a near constant monologue. You do this through an artful playlist. You do this by being a magnetic and attractive figure at the front of the room, keeping their eyes up, keeping their energy focused on you. Not only do you want to keep your students distracted, you literally want to keep their eyes on you so they don't drop their heads, which is a very natural thing folks do when they're in that extreme cycling effort. If a student drops their head, that becomes a problem because they don't receive full access to their breath. Teaching yoga does none of these things. In yoga, we don't want our students' eyes glued to us. We want their attention turned inward. We don't blast music to distract them. We create conditions for presence. We don't monologue for 60 minutes. We issue invitations and let silence do its work. We are not trying to be the magnetic center of the room. We are trying to step back enough that our students can have their own experience. Now, let's talk about teaching English literature, which I did for years while I earned my PhD at the University of North Carolina. When I taught English, especially the literature side, not the composition side, I was trained to fill time with the sound of my voice. Tons of monologuing lecturing, tons of trying to get students to engage in discussion. If there was a silence in the classroom, that felt like a failure. My job was to be articulate and insightful and to draw students into a collective reading of the text. I was the engine of that room. If I wasn't performing, nothing was happening. And then there's radio. I spent six years in public radio at WFDD and WUNC as an announcer and producer. And radio is a different animal entirely. It's not teaching, it's broadcasting the number one rule in radio, no dead air. You fill every second. You keep talking. Your voice has to do all the work. Informing, entertaining, connecting because the audience can't see you. Radio made me very, very good at filling silence with the sound of my voice. So here I am arriving at the yoga room with a PhD in English literature, six years of public radio training, and a nascent career teaching Spinning every single one of those backgrounds. Train me to do the same thing, to fill space, to perform, to hold attention, to be the center. Here's the thing. In yoga, we don't need to do any of that. We simply ask an open-ended question, like notice what you feel in your front thigh or issue an invitation toward movement or focus, and then we let our students fill in the other half of that conversation. It is not a seminar where you get to hear both sides of the discussion. It is not a broadcast where you carry the entire experience with your voice. It is a space where your students do the real work internally and quietly, and your job is to get out of the way enough to let that happen. So why does this matter? Because if you've come from any of these backgrounds, movement, instruction, academic teaching, broadcasting, sales, marketing, presenting slide decks at work, or really any profession where you're trained to perform, to fill space, to hold attention, you may be carrying habits into the yoga room that actively work against your students' experience. And here's where it gets interesting. There are some real overlaps between these kinds of teaching and yoga, and they're worth paying attention to. Remember my Spinning dream where I spent most of my time helping folks set up on those unique different bikes. I think my subconscious was telling me something. Your students' bodies are also unique and different. The confluence of a student's unique body and the equipment they have chosen or been issued means they need individual attention from the teacher To find comfort in Spinning, I would raise or lower seats, adjust handlebars help with pedal clips. In yoga, we do the same kind of work with props, helping students find a comfortable seat, adjusting block height, suggesting a blanket under the knees. If the equipment doesn't match the body, the student can't settle. In Spinning. A bad bike setup means you're bouncing, and when you're bouncing, you wind up with a very sore bottom. In yoga, if props don't match the body, students slide around in their downward facing dog, they strain, they fidget, and they have a subconscious experience of discomfort that pulls them out of presence. So helping students with their setup, that's a skill that transfers beautifully. Another overlap is breath. I spend a surprising amount of time in both Spinning and yoga, simply reminding people to breathe to do what their bodies are naturally going to do for them. In Spinning. I used breath as a tool to gauge intensity. During the warmup, I'd want folks breathing in and out through the nose with their mouths closed at the upper ranges of effort. Their mouths were open and they were gasping, and that was all by design. By the end of the cool down, we wanted them breathing easy again, in and out through the nose. In yoga, we also bring constant attention to the breath, but for a different purpose. We are not only using breath as an intensity gauge, we are also using breath as an anchor to the present moment as a way to help students drop into their experience rather than push through it. And here's one more overlap that might surprise you. Students in Spinning class often show up, wanting it to be all out all the time. Turn up the resistance, make it harder, and that is not sustainable. Those of you who teach at a studio where students are always asking for more, more power, more heat, more flow, more chaturangas, you understand this one, the desire for intensity is the same, and the teacher's job is to balance that desire with what actually serves the student's body. It's also the same. We have to give them what they need, not necessarily what they want. Now, here's something I want you to sit with because I think it might be one of the most important distinctions between yoga and everything else I've taught in those English classes. If I looked out and saw my students had fallen asleep, that was a bad sign. It meant I had lost them. Blank expressions were the kiss of death. In Spinning. If I saw my students grimacing, that was a good sign. It meant they were in the work. In yoga, if I see someone who looks like they've fallen asleep in Shavasana, or even during a long hold like some football players have, that's a beautiful sign. It means they've let go. They've dropped into something deeper than performance. And if I see someone grimacing in yoga class, that concerns me because yoga isn't about effort and intensity. It's about depth of connection, connection to breath, to sensation, to the present moment. A student who looks like they're suffering might be pushing past their edge, and that is not what we are after. When I first took over that Spinning class, I taught at the wellness center. I got it from a woman who regularly ended what was already an extremely hard class on an all out sprint. She would scream, write it like you stole it, and the class would go wild. I, however, had a background in exercise physiology and experience as an endurance sports coach, so I wanted to make the class periodized. That is to offer cyclical workouts with progressively building load over time, not all out all the time, which I know is what students think they want, but which is not good for their bodies, as you might imagine, when I took over, a lot of people dropped off. They were used to the calorie burn extravaganza the former teacher had offered, but the ones who stuck with me and the new ones who found me were my proper students. Many of them went on to become athletes, both on and off the stationary bike racing in sprint distance triathlons or riding long distance charity rides. The moral, you can't be the teacher you took over from. You have got to do things your way and trust that your people will find you. And that's exactly what I want to talk about Now. If you've come to yoga, teaching from another background, whether that's fitness, academics, broadcasting, or anything where you were trained to perform, fill space or hold attention. Here's what I want you to think about. First, identify the habits you are still carrying. Be honest with yourself. Are you talking too much in class? Are you queuing every single breath because silence makes you uncomfortable? Are you trying to be the most interesting person in the room? These aren't character flaws. They're skills you developed for a context that rewarded them, but yoga asks for something different. Second practice the discomfort of silence. This is a big one, and it was especially big for me. In almost every other context I'd worked in the English classroom, the radio studio, the Spinning room. Silence meant failure. In yoga, silence is where the real work happens. When you stop talking and let your students breathe, move and feel without narration, you are not failing them. You are giving them the space to have their own experience. Start small. Let five seconds of silence follow an instruction. Then 10. Notice what happens in the room when you stop filling it with your voice. Third, I hope you'll shift from performing to witnessing. Your job in the yoga room is not to be brilliant or magnetic or entertaining. Your job is to see your students to notice who's struggling to observe, who has settled into something deep and quiet, to adjust your teaching in real time based on what's actually happening in front of you, not based on the script in your head. And fourth, and this is the one that takes the most courage. Hold on to the general skills and release the specific techniques, the general skills transfer beautifully presence, reading the room, caring deeply about your students' experience, meeting individuals where they are. Those are gold no matter where you developed them. But the specific techniques, the constant queuing, the performance energy, the drive toward intensity, the need to fill every second with your voice, those you can let go of. As a teacher and a singer, I sang chorus in high school and sang back up in abandoned college, and as the child of two educators who moonlighted as musicians, I was used to being on stage. Yoga is different. You wouldn't lecture from the back of the classroom, but you do cue your yoga class out of the line of your student site so they can focus on their drishti or their breath or their inner experience. This took a lot of getting used to. But what I have learned over 20 plus years is this, the less I perform, the more my students connect. Not to me, but to themselves. And that's the whole point. This is exactly the kind of shift we work on in my mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing mentorship. It's not just about what poses to teach, what lesson plans to walk into the room prepared for. It's about how to hold space, how to develop your own voice, and how to trust that your teaching is enough. We use proven frameworks like the 6 4 2 system and the Serve method to give you structure so you can stop over planning and start being present with your students. Mastering the Art of Yoga sequencing is fully half of the comfort zone. Yoga 300 or 500 hour yoga teacher training. Visit sagerountree.com/mentorship or the link in the show notes to learn more. Here's what I want you to take away from today. Teaching yoga is not like teaching anything else, and that's actually good news. It means you don't have to be the most charismatic person in the room. You don't have to fill every second with your voice. You don't have to perform. You just have to be present. See your students and trust that the practice does the work, not you. Remember the moral from that Spinning class. You cannot be the teacher you took over from. You have got to do things your way and your people will find you. If you want more support on your teaching journey, join us in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga. It's the free community for yoga teachers at comfortzoneyoga.com. And if this episode helped you, I would really love it if you would rate and review the show. It helps other yoga teachers find us. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential. Thank you for joining me. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time.