The art of relating (or ‘I have a difficult student’)

“A good teacher does not so much fill the space as open it up for others.”—Parker Palmer

In some ways, teaching yoga is like parenting. This is not to say that our students are children (unless they are), but that as the teacher we are responsible for holding the situation, for creating a safe container and being the adult – even when we feel that someone in it is behaving badly. That we will be triggered by our students from time to time is a given. Teaching is a practice in and of itself, which means that at some point every piece of the psycho-emotional junk stuffed in our closet is bound to come tumbling out.

Going towards
When we’re experiencing difficulty with a person, it’s natural and human to want to move away. We may create distance by not adjusting the person, not greeting them or speaking to them at the end of the class, communicating with them by email rather than in person, and so on. One of my teachers, Andrea Juhan¹ (who has been teaching conscious dance, and training conscious dance teachers for over thirty years) suggests that when difficulty arises with a student, we actually need to find a way to go towards them.

One of the most powerful ways to go towards is simply physical: we wait for a moment when we feel relatively grounded and centred, and visit the person’s space in the room. The intention is not to make the person behave better, or conform to a way we’d like them to be, or do a posture in the way we feel they should be doing it. It’s just to hang out with them for a few moments – to receive them, in a spirit of curiosity, and note any somatic information we receive: for example, ‘When I’m near this person I feel angry / sad / hot / cold / distressed / confused’. This information is about us, but it may also offer important clues to what the student is experiencing. While it’s important not to project our own feelings and sensations onto a student, it’s safe to say that if your general mood is positive but when you enter the student’s space you feel overcome by sadness, this is an indication of something the student is experiencing. Making this physical approach may in itself be enough to create a shift in the relationship dynamic, or it may suggest some other way that you might change how you are being in order to be able to accompany this person more effectively in their practice.

Yoga teacher Donna Farhi² (another practitioner and teacher trainer of more than three decades) refers to the movement towards as ‘the yoga of vulnerability’,³ because entering another’s space naked like this – without assumption, or the need to be seen in a certain way, or the wish to make something happen – requires us to take a risk. We have no idea how we will be met, and we go on in in acceptance of that. We are willing to allow the student’s response to be legitimate and to be theirs – we don’t take it personally. Donna Farhi notes that when confronted by someone she finds difficult, she often initially spends a few days just witnessing her own aversions and projections in relation to them. This is important because our first impulse in this situation is often to shore ourselves up in the wrongness of the other person’s behaviour and the rightness of our own stance. In order to enter their space empty, however, we have to allow these kinds of self-fortifying thoughts to loosen. Rather than hardening around our own view, we melt a little. We become a little fluid – so that we are responsive and available to receive another person’s experience and perspective.

Reflection
Take some time to get embodied, before you respond to these questions.

1. Is there a student you have experienced – or are experiencing – difficulty with?
2. What did / do you feel when you are around this person?
3. Do aspects of this person remind you of aspects of yourself that you find difficult to be present to? Or aspects of someone else in your life – for example, a parent, ex-partner, friend, teacher?
4. Did you / are you noticing yourself creating distance between yourself and this student?
5. What is it like to imagine yourself making an approach of some kind towards this student? (Note that you do not have to actually make this approach if that feels like more than you can handle or you don’t feel ready.)

Isolation and exclusion
Donna Farhi notes that when a ‘difficult’ person is in one of her teaching spaces, she often becomes aware that the assistants have stepped back from them, leaving them in isolation. She offers this example:

I am remembering a student with severe scoliosis who was very unpleasant to my teaching assistants and to everyone in the group: like having a stinging wasp in the room! A few days into the intensive I asked her whether she would like to explore a new way of being in her body and when she gave me permission to enter into that inquiry with her, I said, ‘I can see that you have been very challenged by your spine. It must be very difficult to live in a spine such as yours.’ Within minutes, this angry, bristling bundle of tension, dissolved into tears, and the curtain came down for us to enter into a very warm and productive exchange. She became like a tender child again.

It’s not uncommon for other students to step back too, excluding the ‘difficult’ student from conversation before and after the class, and from any post-class activities, such as going for a coffee. Sometimes students will even gang up and seek to ostracise the student. Maria, a teacher participating in one of my monthly mentor groups, described how this happened in one of her classes:

I have a student in one of my vinyasa flow classes who likes to ‘do her own thing’. She’s very flexible and will always be in some sort of extreme ‘advanced’ version of any posture I teach. The other students have got really fed up with her showing off. They’ve even asked me if I can tell her to leave the group.

This is a very clear example of a situation in which no one in the class is being held. As she talked more, Maria noted that she often wondered if she was ‘too liberal’ in her teaching, whether she ‘let people get away with doing anything’. Sometimes when she taught a technical point she would see that no one in the class had taken it on board, but she felt uncomfortable about adjusting or verbally cueing the students back towards the teaching she had offered.

When a student is diverging from the ‘choreography’ of the class, the first response as teacher is to notice our own reactions: there will often be irritation, projection and judgement there. It’s human. Our minds work like this. If we can peacefully greet – rather than suppress or reject – the normal reactivity arising, it becomes easier to re-centre in the teacher place, which is one not of outrage but of service to the student. The second response is to witness the student. Although it can, by the by, elicit a lot of useful information, there’s no objective to this witnessing. It’s just a way of quietly being with the person – attuning with them. If you have a sense that the student may be receptive, the third response is to enter into an open dalogue with them. This is initiated by asking a question based on something you’re seeing. It’s important that the question arises not out of the need to make a point but out of the desire to serve in the most effective way possible. If you’re still feeling it for the point-making, you’re not ready to ask yet. An opening question might be: ‘Is your knee comfortable in this position?’, or ‘What sort of edge are you feeling here?’, or ‘Would you like some help with this posture?. There’s an infinite number of questions because there’s an infinite number of students in an infinite number of situations. You ask the question that feels kind, helpful and relevant. Based on this interaction, you and the student may be able start an exploration together.

Mainly, you’re seeking opportunities to listen and to collaborate. You don’t know why a student is practising in a way that looks show-offy to you. They may be in pain, they may be exhausted, they may be bored / scared / angry. They may be feeling uncontained and pushing to see if they can find a boundary. They may be having difficulty learning the sequence, or they may have missed some of the places where they can find the challenge in it. The student who introduces unelicited ‘more advanced’ versions of postures, is often hypermobile and dyspraxic, and is therefore receiving limited information about how much they are stretching, where their body is in space and how that relates to the positioning that has been cued by the teacher. This is a physiological deficit, not a part of their personality.⁴ If the student is also autistic (as a significant proportion of hypermobile and dyspraxic people are), they may also be limited in their capacity to ‘read’ the effect they are having on other people in the group.⁵

In the mentor group we used role-play to look at some practical ways Maria could keep the class moving and, at the same time, clearly and steadily adjust the off-piste student in a way that enabled her to find the boundaries of her own body, of the posture on offer, and of the class. In doing this, Maria was holding structure for the student in a basic, kind, unforceful physical way. We also discussed why the students in Maria’s class might appreciate reinforcement of her teaching with individual adjustment and repeated explanation and cueing – if people weren’t doing what she had taught, it might be that they hadn’t understood and needed help to integrate it. By making these kinds of interventions, Maria was not being dictatorial but was demonstrating to the class that she was holding the container and looking after what happened inside it. The class could therefore become a safer, more settled space for the students.

When the mentor group met again, a month later, Maria reported that she had found a new authority in her teaching from stepping in and affirming what she was inviting her students to do. The students were delighted and felt that they were learning a lot more in her class. The ‘difficult’ student had expressed appreciation for Maria’s new imput. She appeared to Maria more embodied. She was able to follow the form of the postures on offer more closely, seemed more ‘with’ the class energetically, and was noticing that she felt stronger. There had been no more requests that she be asked to leave the class.

Reflection
Take some time to connect with your body.

1. Have you ever had a student like Maria’s in your class?
2. How did you handle the situation?
3. Did you feel that the outcome was positive?
4. How might you look after this kind of situation differently in the future?

Holding boundaries: the third way
Maria had a core belief that holding boundaries was something to do with making people follow directions. This is a not uncommon view – lots of us went to schools with a do-as-you’re-told ethos. This belief produces a binary in which freedom is equated with absence of boundaries, and everyone can do what the hell they want. In actuality, boundaries function in a third way that stands beyond this binary. A strong, clear, expansive structure creates a safe space for the people in it to explore, ask questions, take measured risks, and express feelings and preferences. In this kind of structure, it’s safe to be yourself. Our students want secure but elastic holding, in which there is permission, but there is also containment. When we we are able to be this kind of container, we are serving their needs.

Whose attitude is it anyway?
Whenever I hear someone – one of my mentees or another teacher – refer to ‘a difficult student’, I wince. Perhaps in part because I know I’ve probably often been seen as that student, but also because for me this statement expresses an abnegation of responsibility. A key aspect of the teacher role is being the one who holds the difficulty. When a person in our class presents us with a challenge to relationship, it’s our responsibility – not theirs – to breathe, feel and find the space where something can transform creatively. Whenever I feel tempted to describe a student as ‘difficult’, I find it helpful to pause, reflect and turn things around: ‘I am having difficulty with this student’. This shifting of the onus is crucial and powerful. My student is just being my student. I am the one having difficulty. This is about me.

Sean brought this experience to online mentoring:

I had a difficult student on my retreat. I don’t mind if people modify postures because they’re injured or there’s something they can’t do, but it wasn’t that. The guy told me he had done a teacher training course, but his alignment was all over the place and he seemed to have no understanding of the basics. I tried to correct him, but he just ignored me, so in the end I left him alone and focused on students who were more willing to learn. Was that the right thing to do? Should I have insisted that he did what I was teaching or was I right to let him get on with it however he wanted to?

The language Sean used to describe the interaction between himself and the student was striking to me: ‘difficult student’, ‘correct him’, ‘he ignored me’, ‘students more willing to learn’, ‘insisted’, ‘let him get on with it’. It spoke to me of a polariisation in Sean’s thinking about the teacher–student relationship in which the teacher directs and purveys the ‘correct’ information, and the ‘good’ student responds by taking on the teacher’s view and doing what they say. I asked Sean how it would be if he considered teaching as a shared exploration in which the student held some information and the teacher held some other information, and they shook it all up together to see what emerged. A few days later, Sean wrote to me:

When I really thought about it, I realised that underneath, I’m not all that confident as a yoga teacher. I’m quite recently qualified and I rely on the rules I’ve been taught about alignment. When someone comes into my class with a different background and different rules, I suppose I’m confused, but it makes me want to impose my rules on them. I think in this case, that antagonised the student and made him want to completely ignore me. Maybe I could have found out more about his approach to yoga and seen if there was some way I could work with that.

Outside the window of tolerance
The window of tolerance is a term used in trauma work to refer to the experiential space we are able to inhabit with full, easy presence. There may be challenges within this space, but we are able to meet them adequately and process our feelings about them. When we operate beyond our window, we move into either fight / flight mode (for example becoming rigid, obsessed, impulsive or resorting to addictive behaviours) or into freeze mode (disconnected, depressed or shut down). The window of tolerance is different for each of us, and for each of us may be different in different moments and different situations. For those of us who are are engaged in practices of awareness, it’s likely that over the years our window will gradually expand.

We all, at times in our teaching life, encounter students in relationship with whom we are not able to stay within our window of tolerance, and it’s healthy to be able to recognise when this has happened. In this situation, it’s not only OK to refer the student on, it’s necessary – from the point of view of your own and the student’s well-being. Explain to the student that you feel you are not the right teacher for them at present and that you think they would do better with this teacher, or in that teaching situation. Don’t backtrack. Don’t waffle. Be kind, be clear and be firm.

Students with developmental trauma
A significant proportion of the students we perceive as ‘difficult’ in our classes will be the survivors of serious developmental trauma – ongoing early trauma such as neglect, and physical, emotional and / or sexual abuse. When trauma is thorough-going and happens very early in a person’s life (sometimes starting before birth), it has profound effects on their neurology and their capacity to formulate an effective sense of self. A person who has not experienced unconditional love, a safe environment or secure boundaries as a child will have immense difficulty in understanding, believing in and identifying these things as an adult. The force of the trauma often causes them to reconstitute the traumatic events around them again and again – so if you are teaching a person with a traumatic history, you may find yourself cast in a series of roles that seem to have little to do with who you actually are and how you are relating to the student. These may include abuser, idealised mother, and even victim (with the person believing that they have done something awful to harm you).

Tom was one of my yoga therapy clients, so I already knew he had a history of profound trauma when he joined a group yoga class. Before he left each class, he would always tell me, usually more than once, what a brilliant, inspiring teacher, and wonderful, nurturing person I was. These affirmations were uninvited, inaccurate and felt thrust upon me. Any disavowal of them, however, was to Tom just proof of how modest and self-deprecating I was.

Tom continued attending the class for a few weeks, never failing to praise me disproportionately at the end. Then he stopped coming. A few weeks later, I received an email from Tom, asking if he could carry over classes he hadn’t used in his block-booking. It was stated in the terms and conditions that block-booked classes weren’t transferable, so I explained to Tom that unfortunately this wasn’t possible. (Because Tom had developmental trauma, I was aware of the need to uphold particularly clear boundaries with him.)

Tom replied that he felt hurt and disillusioned. ‘I thought you were such a kind person, but now I see it’s all about money for you.’ I responded that in order for our work to be effective, we needed to be clear about the exchange we were making and the boundaries we were setting around it, and that Tom was very welcome to come back to the class at any time. A week passed. I then received another email from Tom: ‘I’m so sorry I hurt your feelings. I really didn’t intend to. I don’t know why I was so horrible to you. You’re such a lovely person. I’ve been really mean. I’m so sorry.’

When a profoundly traumatised student is in your class, you may have a sense that they are not in their body. Traumatised people have often learnt to make this separation in order to protect themselves from physical, emotional or psychological pain. Sexual abuse survivors, for example, may describe how they floated out of their body and watched the abuse from the ceiling as if it was happening to someone else. Traumatised people may not be able to feel basic sensations or to follow simple body-related cues. They may breathe in a stilted way and be unable to relax. They may appear like a rabbit in the headlights, frozen and unable to run.

It’s beyond the scope of this book to offer a protocol for teaching yoga to traumatised people. Several have already been created – perhaps the best known is the Trauma Center’s Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY).⁶ However, the following are a few general suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls that can arise when we attempt to include traumatised people in a general group yoga class.

Hold clear, strong boundaries
Traumatised people have often had little or no experience of appropriate boundaries. By definition, their own most basic personal boundaries have been violated repeatedly. Typically, traumatised students will test every boundary you set – often by what feels like covert means – and will become upset, angry or ashamed if you try to point out to them what they are doing. This is because on a volitional level, they did not set out to transgress. The tugging and pulling at the limits is happening outside their conscious awareness and control. As a result of their dysphoria around boundaries, these students have often ended up in abusive adult relationships with teachers and therapists. You will best serve traumatised students, yourself and your other students by clearly stating and simply insisting on basic boundaries. Don’t be tempted to make any exceptions. For any reason.

Be a safe person for the student in class
A traumatised person may have a pronounced startle reflex and may appear very jumpy. Don’t approach them suddenly. Let them see you coming and give them time to acclimatise to your presence. Be mindful about physical adjustments – but don’t assume that a student with trauma won’t want them either. This is a place for sensitive dialogue. Be aware that some traumatised people cannot give meaningful consent because they have been conditioned to consent to everything and feel that they have no choice. Be slow and gradual with any agreed touch, and use your intuitive and animal senses to feel into whether the person really wants it, regardless of what they are saying. Re-check with them often and encourage them to give you verbal feedback on how they are experiencing the adjustment – in a way that acknowledges their power to change it: ‘Is this too strong, just about right or not strong enough?’ ‘Would you like me to stop?’ ‘Would you prefer not to be adjusted at the moment?’

Don’t take it personally
A traumatised person is, to a greater or lesser degree, a captive of their past experience and is continually replaying the past in the present. This may blinker them to what you are actually saying and doing. Their tendency will be to fit you into a limited repertoire of known roles from their past. When they can no longer square the circle of who you are with the role in which they’ve cast you, they may catapult you into a different one. This dynamic is happening on a neurological and somatic level, and this is where resolution needs to happen. The person cannot change their beliefs or behaviour by thinking about them and rationalising, or by trying. The most helpful way to be with this is to remain completely neutral, letting the student’s projections slide off you like the proverbial water off a duck’s back. This is, of course, a lot more difficult than it sounds. Subconsciously, the traumatised student is constantly trying to hook you into their drama, and they will be very good at this. Expect to feel alternately protective, insensed, afraid, compassionate, confused and more when you are interacting with a student with trauma. Know that this is not about you, or about the student, but is about the way that trauma impacts upon a human being and how they relate with others.

Refer appropriately
If you are over your edge, it’s ethical to tell the student that you feel you are not the appropriate person to teach them. Make yourself aware of trauma yoga teachers offering classes in your area (see Note 5), and of somatic therapists, yoga therapists and body-based psychotherapists with a specialism in working with trauma, so that you can have some referral suggestions ready. Ideally, rather than feeling ditched, the student should have a sense that you are concerned about their welfare and guiding them to a place where it can be looked after more effectively. Trauma yoga teachers teach yoga to traumatised people in an appropriate way, but they do not work therapeutically, so you may need to refer the student to a teacher for their yoga practice and to a therapist for deeper, more thorough-going work.

It goes without saying, but let me say it anyway … Your job as a yoga teacher is to teach yoga. Never attempt to address the person’s trauma in (or outside) a yoga class. And even if you are trained to work with trauma, do not attempt to do this in a class environment. A class is not a safe or appropriate container for a therapeutic intervention.

Don’t be attached
It’s easy to believe that you can be the one to turn things around for a traumatised student – especially when (as often happens at the beginning of the relationship) the student is idealising you and constantly telling you how beneficial they are finding your teaching to be. Yoga and other body-based practices can indeed be very helpful to traumatised people, but trauma is deep-seated, and change usually happens gradually, over a long period of time. It’s common for traumatised students to disappear suddenly and unexpectedly. Their lives are often internally and externally turbulent. Their window of tolerance is quite narrow, so they quickly hit the limit of how much they can integrate. Embodiment can be fraught for a person whose only experience of body is rape, violence or humiliation, and even simple and apparently unthreatening embodied practices, such as noticing a sensation or feeling their breath, can trigger traumatic memories for them. Know this, and allow the person to disappear without notice or explanation when they need to, and leave the door open for them to return if and when they’re ready.

Be prepared for things to go ‘wrong’. It happens – regularly – even to those of us who are experienced at working with trauma. As my own trauma therapy supervisor, reminded me, the real work of trauma recovery happens through relationship, and the painful lumps and bumps of relating, are essential to this process. Know that, as the space-holder, you did your best, and take what may feel like failure in your stride.

Davina was new to yoga when she joined a restorative yin yoga class, where she was receiving help from an assistant teacher as well as from me. She didn’t declare trauma on her client history form, but it was quickly obvious that she was traumatised. She appeared terrified, breathed shallowly, had difficulty identifying simple sensations and seemed to be floating several inches above her body. She was unnaturally ‘co-operative’, and it was difficult for us to find out what she was actually experiencing in different physical positions and therefore to know if / how to help her to modify them.

Davina found it difficult to organise props and place herself in a comfortable position, but we kept working slowly and steadily, and she kept coming to the class. One day, I spent some time helping her to place a bolster and blanket in a supported back bend. I left her with the assistant teacher and when I next turned around was startled to see Davina rushing out of the room with tears in her eyes as the assistant teacher looked on stunned.

When I went out to find out what was happening, Davina said, ‘You’ve been unnecessarily harsh with me. I just don’t need this. I came here to learn yoga, not to be told off. I think you’re being really strict and it isn’t nice.’

I hadn’t told Davina off; I had been trying to find out where was comfortable for her and what support she needed. But Davina wasn’t experiencing me or my interventions; she was re-living an event from the past and re-construing the meaning it had had for her then around what was happening now.

Reflection
Take some time to connect with your body before reflecting on these questions.

1. Do you ask students about PTSD / developmental trauma / history of physical or sexual abuse in your client history form?
2. Do you have students who have divulged developmental trauma? Or students who you suspect have experienced developmental trauma? How does the trauma show up in the way they are in your class and how they relate to you?
3. Have you experienced any difficulties in working with these students?
4. Are there ways that you might want to change how you work with them?

Autistic students
Autistic people are another group often perceived as ‘difficult’ in yoga classes. Autism is a variation in neurological processing style, with a variety of ramifications in terms of the kinds and amounts of different types of information the person receives and how they make sense of it. The needs of autistic people in a general yoga class is a big subject, and I’ve written about it at more length elsewhere (see Note 4). Here, I’m going to touch just briefly on some of the main misunderstandings that can occur when an autistic person enters an allistic (not autistic) setting. Be aware that not every autistic person in your class will have a diagnosis or any inkling themselves that they are autistic – autism is still massively under-recognised. And even if they do have a diagnosis, they may choose not to declare it on your class joining form. Autism is still very stigmatised, and many autistic people are closeted. But autism is also fairly common, and it would be unusual if you never had an autistic person in one of your classes.

Articulate the ‘rules’
An autistic person may not pick up the unspoken social rules about how to behave in your class in the way that an allistic person would. So if, for example, an autistic student asks a question in the middle of savasana, it’s probably not because they are being demanding, but because you told them questions were welcome but didn’t say that savasana is a silent section of the class. If they place their mat at right-angles to everyone else’s, or at the front next to yours, it’s less likely that they are showing off or trying to be disruptive and more likely that you have not explained that all the mats should be level with each other and parallel, with the short end facing the front. ‘Everyone else is doing it like that’ may not strike an autistic person as a good reason to do it like that too. We tend to do things in original ways.

Be aware that even if the autistic person in your class appears to be socially adroit, they aren’t. Some of us are adept at imitating others and using learnt scripts to fake social intelligence. This method is not foolproof, and we often get it, if not totally wrong, then a bit off-kilter. Those autistic people who ‘pass’ in this way are perhaps the most at risk of being branded ‘difficult’ rather than seen simply as lacking capacity to ‘read’ socially.

Linda told me:

In my big classes, I have teaching assistants. They usually practise along with the class until I need them. In one class, I gave the nod to my assistant, Morag, and she got up and went over to help a student who was struggling to keep up with the sequences. I quickly saw that things weren’t going well between them. The student didn’t seem to be taking on board what Morag was saying and was more or less ignoring her. Afterwards, Morag said she was really rude and unco-operative and didn’t seem interested in learning anything. I decided to investigate, and the next time the student was in the class, I asked her whether it had been helpful to have an assistant working with her. She looked puzzled. ‘You know, when Morag helped you in the last class?’ I said. The student went bright red and stared at the floor. Finally, it emerged that she hadn’t realised Morag was an assistant. She had thought she was another student who had just started telling her what to do! I later found out that this student was autistic. I now realise that I should have explained to the student that Morag was an assistant rather than assuming she would just get it.

Create a low-sensory environment
Autistic people are very sensitive to sensory stimulae and may be driven close to the threshhold of sanity by a humming light fitting that you can’t even hear, or by the sensation of the carpet, or by a (to you) almost invisible dirty smudge on a wall in their sight line, or by the vestigial smell of incense from a class three days ago. Deirdra, a dynamic vinyasa flow teacher, told me about this experience:

Part-way into one of my classes, an autistic woman who is a regular student told me she was having difficulty with the body odour of a couple of the people in the class. To be honest, I didn’t take this very seriously. I mean, everyone gets sweaty in a dynamic class, and it’s something you just have to live with. Anyway, they didn’t smell that bad to me. I thought she was being a bit melodramatic. I suggested that she move her mat, helped her relocate it, and didn’t think anything more about it. Some way into the class I became aware that she was curled up on her mat. When I went over to find out what was wrong, I realised she was actually retching. The body odour was so intense for her that she was literally nauseated. Until I talked to you, I didn’t know that autistic people have heightened senses. At the time it all seemed a bit weird, but now it makes total sense.

Auditory sensitivity can combine with verbal processing difficulties, as in this story that Darryl told me. He was teaching a private class for an autistic student in a studio space divided by curtains:

I was explaining something, and for some reason – I didn’t know why – he was looking increasingly distressed. Then he put his hands over his ears and buried his head between his knees. A few moments later, he got up quickly and left the studio. When I found him outside, he explained to me that he couldn’t separate my words out from what he could hear other people saying in the other curtained-off spaces. The words had got all jumbled up and he had felt as if his head was going to explode.

Reflection
Take some time to get in touch with your body.

1. Do you ask students about autism and other neurodivergence (ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, etc) in your class joining form?
2. Do you have autistic students or students you think could be autistic? How have you helped them to manage the physical environment and the social expectations of your class?
3. Have there been any misunderstandings? Were you able to rectify them in a positive way?

To sum up
It’s not unusual for a teacher to come for mentoring annoyed because something in their interaction with a student seems to be getting in the way of them actually teaching the student: ‘They’re resistant and don’t want to listen to my instructions’. In my view, this is back-to-front. I see teaching yoga as essentially relational. It may look as if we are teaching postures, alignment and breathing techniques – and these are not unimportant – but they are the structure, not the content. They are a pretext for one human being (the student) to come into relationship with another human being (the teacher) in such a way that the student is offered an opportunity to witness their own emotional, physical and mental tendencies and perhaps change some of them. In fact, this is a two-way process. Our students offer us an opportunity to notice our tendencies too – which is one reason why teaching is also a practice – but for the teacher this is something that happens not in the company of the student but in the alembic of our own reflective space, and perhaps with the help of our own teacher or mentor.

The shift to teaching from this perspective can be transformative. When you work in collaboration with your students, in service to their own process of discovery and with their best interests at heart, you no longer have to be an expert with an answer for everything. Phew! What a relief! You are simply an interested and informed companion, committed to creating conditions in which each person’s own authentic embodied intelligence can emerge.

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This post is an earlier version of a chapter in my book The Yoga Teacher Mentor: A Reflective Guide to Holding Spaces, Maintaining Boundaries, and Creating Inclusive Classes.

All names of people have been changed, and some details have been altered in the examples in order to maintain confidentiality.

Photo by Shawn Ballantine Photography.

References
1. Andrea Juhan: www.openfloor.org/about-us/founders

2. Donna Farhi: http://www.donnafarhi.co.nz/wp

3. Donna Farhi, ‘Embracing Vulnerability is the Most Powerful Yoga’ (Body Mind Love blog, 2017) http://www.yogauonline.com/yogau-wellness-blog/donna-farhi-embracing-vulnerability-most-powerful-yoga

4. For more about teaching yoga to hypermobile people, see my article ‘Hypermobility on the Mat’ and my book, Hypermobility on the Yoga Mat: A Guide to Hypermobility-Aware Yoga Teaching and Practice.

5. For more about working with autistic people, see my article ‘Autistic Movers and Shakers’.

6. The Trauma Center’s Trauma Sensitive Yoga: www.traumasensitiveyoga.com. London TCTSY trainings are hosted by The Yoga Clinic: www.theyogaclinic.co.uk. The Yoga Clinic will soon have online a register of UK-based TCTSY teachers