278 - The Craft of Cueing Engagement

When we talk about what it means to "engage" in yoga class, what do we actually mean? Do our students understand? How do we want them to be moving? 

And is engagement something we should all be teaching? 

Today, we explore the concept of engagement and the nuances of teaching it, including the importance of the language we choose, the assumptions we make, and some of the influences of our personal experiences and learning on our teaching and cueing. 

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The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner

Transcript

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (00:01.368)
Hello, lovely. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we are gonna get a little yoga teacher nerdy. Yeah, ready? Okay, recently I was on one of my mentor calls with one of the teachers that I mentor and she was saying that she saw somebody on Instagram, a teacher who was saying that you are not being, this is me paraphrasing.

You're not doing it right. If you're not telling people to engage and giving engagement cues. So this person that I mentor is like, Sabani, I don't know if you're engaging, if you're telling people to engage and what is your thoughts on this and do you, and what do you think about this?

And it turned into this really beautiful conversation and made so much sense to now bring here to you. So the shortest answer I can give you, I'll give you the short and the long, you know that I'm going to sit here and talk to you. Okay. So the short answer is yes, I give engagement cues, et cetera. And no, I don't use the word engage.

So there's a little bit of nuance in this and in the ways that we might cue engagement and what the hell engagement even means. You ready? So I feel like often the word engage might show up in a class when teachers might say engage your core. And I have also been in classes when it was said in other times and it is not a bad word. And if you are using the word engage, great, use it.

And keep listening, because maybe there'll be other words to add in that will also be supportive to your students. Can you say engage your glutes? What would that mean? What does it mean to engage your quads? What does it mean to engage your bicep? Okay, so let's talk about these. If I were to engage, what does that mean I'm going to do to them?

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (02:22.644)
really, when I think about the word engage, that is a flexing that happens. That means is the shortened version of the muscle. All so our muscles can get long and they can get short. And if you shorten the muscle, then that I feel like is most typical of what people are meaning by engage, like you're turning it on, which turning it on, you can certainly have your muscle, like you can have your muscle be engaged in it's a long stance though.

So this is where it gets tricky because I feel like you can say like engage your, your glutes, which is your ass, right? And if I were in a chair pose and I say engage your glutes, then what I'm really thinking about is flexing my glutes. And if I were to flex super hard, there was other muscles at play, of course here, but if I were to flex super hard, then I might actually get stand all the way up. Cause in Tadasana, if I were to stand all the way up and squeeze my ass, then

our butt muscles and our squeezing of our butt muscles make our hips move forward. And so it depends on which part of the glutes we're talking about, because the glutes are more than one muscle. And it depends on what shape we want to keep our body in, or if we're trying to move our bodies into another shape. So then it gets interesting because

when we use that word to engage our glutes, whenever I hear in a class, I'm like, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to stay in this pose? Do want me to squeeze my ass so much that I move from chair post to standing? Because engaging my glutes, if I engage my glutes and straighten my legs, right? there's like a, those things can work together now I'm standing. Is that what you want you to do? Now, if we were to say engage your quads.

When in my hot dog teacher training one of the cues that I felt like was really commonly said was in Tadasana's of your standing at the top of the mat, right and You to engage your quads you think about lifting your kneecaps up Is sometimes we don't know what their quads are they don't know what their glutes are so as teachers sometimes we use even anatomical words of the body and people are like What are my glutes? Because there are literally people in your classes that have never

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (04:43.33)
been to a movement class ever. Ever. And they're like, I'm just gonna try yoga. That's gonna be great. Because I saw this one person doing it and I think, you know, I could like to try it. And then they come to class. Sometimes it is really an entry point for some people. There's not weights to worry about. There's less like things you have to like pick up and move around. So it might be a draw for people to come into. So they don't know what glutes are. They don't know.

What quads are, they don't know what the word engage means. So that makes it interesting for us as teachers. So if I standing at the top of the mat, straight, legged, standing all the way up and I said, engage your quads, I you to lift your knee caps up. Even that phrase, I go like, it just sounds funny. I love the things that we say as yoga teachers because.

Shit is weird and it only can come for us. And that's why we can do weird things to their body and be like, it's already weird. We're already rolling around on the floor here. But it's really hard to speak to the body and for people to really start to develop this relationship with themselves, which is part of the gift of yoga. But it's also the thing that we have to remember as teachers that we have to scale our students with not just the movement, but also with the language that we use.

We want them to feel successful in their body. We want them to walk out of strong and powerful. That doesn't mean it was a hell of fast class or hot. It could have been like chill, roll around on the floor, do everything just once. Like, I don't care. Like you can still feel strong and powerful in yourself and feel bigger in yourself, regardless of the class. So we want people to come out feeling like that.

And part of that is understanding the language that we are teaching in. So not only scaling the physical experience for an all levels class, but I think we need to think about scaling the language experience for an all levels class. And that's not something I hear talked about very much because people don't understand the language of yoga, let alone the language of anatomy and of movement science. And then if you put Sanskrit on top of that,

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (07:07.586)
There's like so much, there's so many layers for people to understand when they don't even know where their right pinky toe is in relationship to me. And their left is becoming their right and their right is becoming their left. And you tell them to straighten their arm and it's still bent. So yoga is this invitation for students to really develop this relationship with themselves.

And I think we're here as teachers because we understand the impact of that on our own lives. And now we're like, oh, I want to give that because it changed our lives. And so we stepped into this teacher role. So we're like, oh, this, this makes a difference. This matters. So when it comes to engagement, yes, I do teach engagement, but I don't teach it the same way as everybody else. Right. So just like any of us, we're going to use different language because I teach action. So,

engagement, I really think when I was talking to this teacher, I mentor, is really talking about action. Do you give people action words of things to explore in their bodies? And a hundred percent, right? And it depends on the class that we teach. If you're going to teach a class that's super restorative, the odds of you teaching some action and like,

you know, for our purposes here for our engagement. If you're going to try to teach engagement in a restorative class, that's probably not the class to be teaching that in. I'm mostly just wanting people to roll around on the floor and feel super relaxed and feel like restored in themselves. So that's a different class, right? So it's going to depend on the class, but the queuing that I give, and I'm going to use Anjaneyasana, a low lunge where your bottom knee is down on the ground.

When I set people up for that, I will say, I want you to think of the space between your belly button and your pubic bone. Lift that up. Now keep that lifted. Now lean forward into your front knee. with both of your arms up in the air. Now, if I have my right leg forward, reach your right hand down towards the ground with your left arm reaching up. Now lean over to the right. Keep that low belly lifted. Keep shifting forward into your front knee.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (09:32.312)
Now see if you can take that lean, take a breath in there. Now turn your chest just a little bit towards that right side. All right, you're still keeping the left, you're still keeping the lean, you're now, or the bend forward and you're now having the lean. Now I could say, maybe experiment, squeeze your left butt cheek. Now, if you teach an Ajayasana, a low lunge like that,

the engagement that people are going to feel because what's the hope? If we're gonna cue engagement, what are we really trying to talk about here? To me, I think we're trying to talk about helping students feel their body and helping them be able to feel the sensation in their body. And I don't think it's appropriate for us to say you're gonna feel this because...

they're gonna feel something different than we are. And we're just teaching from our own bodies. You can say, you might feel, or when I do this, I feel, but you might feel something different depending on where you've been and what you've been doing. If somebody has been, they just came from leg day one or two days ago from the gym, poses are gonna feel hella different in their body after leg day and they like totally hit it hard, and that's gonna be a different yoga class for them.

Sometimes after some workouts, I drop into malasana and I think, this is why this pose exists. So it depends on where people are coming from and their body and what their other life is besides yoga class. So we can't really tell people where they're going to feel all of the things. Now, could there be some general places that we can feel things and specific poses? Yeah. But giving people the actions to take and say, just

Notice, be there, breathe with the sensation and using words like the sensation, name where it is you feel it, like in your mind, name where you feel the sensation of this pose. See if you can take a breath into that place. So that's just one pose example of a way that I cue engagement and all of those cues are then to help people drop more into their own bodies.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (11:53.73)
and not me telling them what they need to feel, but knowing that those cues give a variety of experiences.

I don't think in this conversation that just using the word engage is very helpful because it's not very specific. And so if we go back to the idea of saying engage your core, your core muscles are so many muscles. it's, do you want me to engage my diaphragm? Do you want me to engage my arctis abdominis, which are my front ab muscles?

All right, so rectus abdominis, if you're saying rectus abdominis in class, nobody knows. Do you want me to cue my obliques, internal or external, right? How are we doing that? Is that different? How about the muscles around my sphincter? Okay, those are also your core muscles. How about my hip flexors? How about my rectus spinae on my back, core muscles? So to say engage your core,

Is that what you want people to do? And why do you want people to do it? Because sometimes we can over queue that too, and get more specific around what you want people to do and why, and if it actually matters. Sometimes the language that we are guiding people in and out of posture becomes outdated and it becomes, but it also becomes part of our oral tradition, truly.

of where we learned it from other teachers who learned it from other teachers and now we've repeated it so many times and now it feels natural and then all of a we're like wait that's not actually even sound or like there's all this research that backs this thing which is why I like to lean on movement science combined with traditional yoga I think we can have a really beautiful modern blend of what is offered because yoga is does include a movement practice is yoga more than movement absolutely but do I believe that

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (13:57.812)
moving bodies changes people on the inside 100 % because we are connected. And it's part of why I still think it's worth what I'm doing to call it yoga because it continues to add more validity I think to the movement practice and because a movement practice can be so diverse. So many different types of yoga and all of them get to exist and we can still have meditation. We can still have the self-awareness of

of all the other limbs of yoga and movement still gets to exist. So when you want people to quote unquote engage their core, get interested in what and why. And this is why in flow school, I, there was no core section that I'm like, you got to do this, but we are going to have a hinge. We're going to have a forward fold and that can exist a lot of ways, right? And

depending on if you're in a forward fold in boat. I want you to think about boat pose. You might not think of boat as a forward fold, but boat pose is a hinge. A hinge pose is a forward fold where you're standing. Stand at the top of the mat, fold forward, right? That's a forward fold. Now take that exact same shape where you're standing on your feet and you're folding forward. Keep your body in that exact same shape and in your head, can you pick up that little person in your head, turn it over and set yourself down on your ass. Now you're in boat.

It's a forward fold, right? That's a hinge position, but now you're changing the muscles that are working. So it's interesting, because when you start to flip the poses over, it's a lot of the same pose, but different muscles create and ask different demand in the body, which is exciting. So when I teach flow school, we have the body positions. It's a huge lesson of flow school.

Online flow school is now a membership. So you can listen to this and be like, great, I want to go learn more. It's 65 bucks a month. You can cancel any time you can binge all the lessons. Then you can come to the lives twice a month. Like you have so many options here, but the body positions are so important because I'm not, I don't have a core section or you have to do this with your core. You have to move in all the ways you have to hinge your body. You have to do that. You also have to do backward bends, which is spinal.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (16:18.958)
extension, which is then turning on your, all your muscles on your back. It's really like if we're to talk about the shortening of your muscles, the flexing of them, that's flexes your back muscles. So we're flexing the front muscles or flexing our back muscles. And then we're also going to flex our side muscles and we're going to go sideways. have to need, we need sideways leaning and we need twisting. So even just these where we're going to bring our legs and our, our upper body together. And then we're going to do a backward bends.

And we're gonna lean sideways and we're gonna twist. All of these things need to be included in your flow. These are all ways that the trunk of your body is really in like this area that especially is a part of your pelvis. Backward bends are, I mean, it's your whole spine. So it's your whole torso, right? But all of these body positions are gonna be important to include in your flow.

They do not have to be in a solo section. They are really incorporated in your entire circle flow and creating a 10 post flow and centering your entire class around that peak flow. Peak flow doesn't mean the hardest. means like child's pose is full. So that could be part of your peak flow. So I teach that method in flow school and there is so many ways to go about making sure that we teach a kind of class that allows people to really move their body in so many ways. And you can teach engagement.

without having to teach them like a gazillion words or saying the word engagement, we can give them more specifics about how to get into and out of postures, how to explore sensation and so much about returning the autonomy to the students to pay attention to their own selves, right? If we believe that yoga is a practice of paying attention, how do we build it within our class that they get to pick that up for themselves? I'm not here as a teacher to tell them what they need to feel.

You know, I grew up Mormon and left the church, I think about 90 years ago, something like that. And so I grew up in the Mormon religion and so much of the language. I've been, I've been having several conversations about this and this feels the appropriate time to share this too. So here we go. Let's jump into religion y'all. Um, cause you can very much be thought of as religion as well. So here we are.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (18:47.689)
I grew up being told that any feeling that I had was because of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, however you want to say it, but we call it the Holy Ghost, which is a separate being of the Godhead. There was God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost is three different beings, not one. And that if I had a feeling that something was bad, it was the Holy Ghost telling me that, and if it was something good, it was the Holy Ghost telling me that. So any feeling of

of a choice that was wrong or right or a feeling in my body was never my own. And that kind of is hard, y'all. And Mormonism is not the only religion that that exists. And we can be really good at outsourcing our pain or our joy and our pleasure, all the things to things outside of us. We can be really good at being so busy that we forget to slow down.

to sit with ourselves and so much of my own journey with yoga was saying like, yeah, I need to move. Like give me a class where I have like this body brain challenge that lights me up and then I have to sit my ass down. that's what I needed, right? So we can be good at distracting ourselves and being distracted and having little kids. Y'all, that was like a whole trip. It is hard.

And so part of the as teachers and in holding and building these yoga spaces, is helping people return to their own feeling and own it. That it's nobody else telling them what they have to feel or not, and that it's truly in them and they get to decide. So if you're using, let's flip it all out.

If you're using the word engagement, get more specific. What do want them to do? What do you want them to explore, to experiment? If you want to try this, try lift this, right? Extend here, play with this here. If it feels interesting to you, try, right? So you could use invitational language for them to try on some things, right? And not pushing people to an edge.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (21:11.448)
where you're almost cackling at like, ha ha, like they're gonna fill this pain. Like what if we design classes where we're like, ooh, they're gonna feel how fun this is. And it's gonna be work, but this is gonna be so fun. And it's gonna be challenging in this way and this way and this way, but I'm gonna scale it in this way and this way and this way because I want this all levels class to feel successful.

regardless of who's in the room and what experience they have and what comfort they have with understanding their body and how new they are to yoga and what flexibility, mobility, strength, stability they have. I mean, that's beautiful. It's hard. It's hard, but it's really beautiful to be able to offer something that way and to really help people not fear themselves.

and to layer the experience of not just movement, then language and to use language that is in the native language that you speak and then layer movement language in there. So if you want to talk about your glutes, then say the words like you're to sit down on your butt on your glutes, right? So layer it in there. You're going to sit crisscross applesauce. You're going to sit down and cross your legs.

You're going to sit in Sukhasana. All so you can layer Sanskrit with your native language. You can layer those in there together. You can talk about extending your spine. You can talk about a backward bend. You can talk about, what do we want to say? Arvamukha Svanasana, right? Upward facing dog. So now we could...

we can add a Sanskrit on there and we can say upward facing dog and then we can say the Sanskrit. So there's a lot of layers. let's like help people walk into the layers of the language as much as we're walking them into the layers of the movement so that then they really feel like one, they're like learning things. They're like, my gosh, I like learn shit today. That's cool. And also they come out feeling successful in their bodies because they understood you enough because it's all brain games. And I tell classes all the time, like this little bit of brain games.

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (23:35.95)
We're going to figure this out. We're going to repeat enough times that you can drop into your body and into your breath. So layer it together, walk with them, let them know when it feels weird to you, let them know it's weird. You're like, yeah, that was weird. Let's do it again. Right. All right. I don't know if that made sense. So watch your people. 95 % rule. Watch your people. Are they understanding what you're saying? Yeah. Teach engagement. Yeah. Teach them how to hold things and how to be stable in things.

Something like chair pose. Chair pose, people hate chair pose often. I'm like, oh, I wanna bring back chair pose. Like I want people to be like, bring back as in, make people love chair pose because it's just a transition. It's just a point, it's just a pose. It's just one thing, but maybe we feel like we have to burn it up for students that like it has to be hard for it to count. And maybe one version of hard, maybe there's other versions of hard.

And for chair pose is very traditionally with like feet together and knees squeezing together. Everything's squeezing together. Have you really done that in a minute? Cause it sucks. It hurts my knees, my inner knees. If I can squeeze my legs, if you stick a block between my legs, then that feels better. It also feels way more stable. Just squeezing your knees on knees. Like that doesn't feel very good. A way that I really like to do chair is keep your feet hips with distance apart. So just stand up, bend your knees. Now.

Keep your feet exactly where they are on the mat, but push them apart from each other. Keep the bend in your leg, you're still keeping chair. You can even drop your arms, reach them directly forward rather than up and over. And now when you do it that way, you're probably gonna feel your butt lighten up. It's gonna feel really stable and strong, but it's gonna be lightened up a little bit. That chair is a different chair than trying to squeeze together.

You could do the same thing in Eagle Pose. In Eagle Pose, very traditionally, it's thought to cross your legs, do the whole leg-windy thing, and then squeeze everything together. Have you ever tried? Do the leg thing, and now try to pull your legs apart. I want you to try it. If you've never done it, try it, because the stability that you will feel in your hips might be surprising and exciting. And...

Bonnie Weeks (she/her) (26:01.642)
All of this is really just about asking more questions and being willing to have a different answer. Like truly. And that doesn't, doesn't mean that we're bad teachers. It doesn't mean that. Like we shouldn't be doing what we're doing. It means that we continue to like, we continue to learn as we lead and then we can change our minds. I've changed my mind out a lot of different things and a lot of different ways I've teach. And I will know that I will continue to, because I am.

planning on being a teacher for a long ass time, which means that I will continue to grow and learn and refine how it is that I wanna show up. And that's exciting. And if you're here with me, then maybe you're in that same boat and we get to learn and lead together. Thank you for being here. I would love to hear your notes on engagement. So if you have any feedback, if you're like, wow, but Bonnie, what about this? And what about that?

I do it this way, drop me message or share this podcast on Instagram and share the thoughts you have and your stories. Then I can see them, tag me and you can send me a message there or send me an email, all the things and be an Online Flow School. Of course, I have several in-persons available because in-person is so damn good, but Online Flow School, makes it so easy. It makes it so easy.

And this is a new structure rather than running cohorts. This is a new structure of a membership, but being able to have our touch points of having live in-person, like not in-person, live Zoom classes. So we can actually sit and have conversation and talk about sequencing and talk about these lessons. So it's the exciting place to be. Okay, friends, thank you for spending this time with me. Thank you for being a teacher. Thank you for caring and.

wanting to bring an experience to your students that helps them feel powerful. It really matters. Okay, talk soon.