Excerpted from Teaching Yoga, Chapter Five, “Creating Space for Self-Transformation”

The early Hatha yogis discovered that awakening and moving energy in the body gave them a feeling of radiant well-being and wholeness while opening wide the portals of conscious being. But the pathway of yoga—to yoke, to make whole—may not reveal itself automatically. Indeed, our tendency as human beings is to separate the body, breath, and mind, a disconnection that creates suffering as we become alienated from our essential nature as whole beings.1 This alienation is expressed in everything from stress and confusion to disease and despair. Hatha yoga offers an array of tools for unraveling the knots that bind us to this limited sense of self. “The transformation that yoga brings makes you more yourself,” Joel Kramer (1980) intones, “and opens you up to loving with greater depth. It involves a honing and refining which releases your true essence, as a sculptor brings out the beauty of form in th...

Excerpted from From Teaching Yoga, Chapter 4, "Subtle Energy"

In Chapter One we saw how the rise and spread of tantra eventually gave rise to Hatha yoga as a practice of conscious embodiment. Rather than starting with meditation or other practices, the original Hatha yogis worked with the immediate experience of their physical bodies to move through the layers of being that seemed to separate their sense of individual being, including body and mind, from connection with all of nature or the divine. Drawing from the deep well of ancient wisdom found in the Upanishads and a wide variety of esoteric traditions handed down through ritual, songs, and stories, they undertook this exploration with an expanding map of consciousness and being that today still gives us the primary concepts of anatomy and physiology from a traditional yogic perspective.

For many these concepts are treated literally, while others view and use them in practice and teaching as symbolic ideas that help chart t...

Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Teaching Yoga

Teaching yoga will change your life. It will continually bring you back to your earliest motivations to practice and add abundant clarity to the first questions you asked yourself about yoga. These questions are almost invariably philosophical and personal, the answers shifting amid the currents of our lives. Who am I? What makes me feel happy and balanced? How can I make things easier and steadier in my life? Even after years or decades of practice, most teachers’ motives are still evolving. Jim Frandeen, sixty-five, a yoga teacher for many years and a student since his early forties, just completed his fourth teacher-training program in part because, as he puts it, “the more I practice and teach, the more I realize there is to learn about myself and life—so here I am, feeling like it’s all just beginning.”

Students come to yoga for a variety of reasons. For many it is a way to relax and reduce stress from living in a world of ...

 A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

—Lao Tzu

Teaching yoga is at once profoundly personal, predicated on sharing, and shaped by context. It is also inevitably surprising. We have no choice but to start from where we are and who we are, with whatever knowledge, skills, and experience we have in the moment. We also have little choice but to work with whomever shows up for class, teaching students whose conditions, intentions, learning styles, and needs are widely varied.

On any given day, unanticipated events can make a class much different than what you might have envisioned. The changes that happen from class to class also have everything to do with whoever is in the class, the time of day, our own mood, and myriad other factors that invariably come into play in teaching. If your classes are always perfectly predictable—if you feel the same, the students seem the same, the environment manifests as exactly the same—you might benefit from reflecting on...

The primary goal in teaching asanas is to enable students to perceive and understand more clearly what they are doing in developing a sustainable personal practice, whether in a class or independently. But there are many different ways of learning that require a varied approach to teaching. How people learn is closely tied to what educator Howard Gardner (1993) refers to as “qualities of multiple intelligence,” which vary considerably in any given class of yoga students.

In yoga classes, where the learning objectives include conceptual, emotional, physical, and metaphysical elements, the full range of multiple intelligences are in play. At the same time, a human being is more than his or her intellectual powers; motivation, personality, emotions, physical health, and personal will are more significant than a particular learning style in shaping how, where, and when one learns. This suggests that effective yoga instruction takes into account these variables in engaging with students ...

Teaching yoga is an extension of practicing yoga. Whether you are just stepping onto the teaching path or have spent many years there maturing into a mentor teacher, as you practice so you discover anew the essence of yoga as a tool for self-transformation. Like in the practice, in teaching there are unlimited opportunities for seeing more clearly, feeling more fully, and living more happily. Teaching is also an extension of your larger life, for how you live is expressed in your teaching. Committing to this path will deepen your personal practice and bring yoga more into every aspect of your life. Doing this consciously—making a considered and deliberate decision to teach yoga rather than casually assuming the role of a teacher—will make every part of your teaching practice a more natural expression of who you are as a person while allowing you to sustain yourself more simply in the teaching profession.

Your students will always be your best teachers. Listen to them, to what they s...

Virabhadra—the fierce spiritual warrior. When Shiva’s consort Shakti was killed by the chief of the gods, Daksha, Shiva tore out his hair in grief and anger, creating the fierce warrior Virabhadra from his locks. With a thousand arms, three burning eyes, and fiery hair, Virabhadra wore a garland of skulls and carried many terrifying weapons. Bowing at Shiva’s feet and asking his will, Virabhadra was directed by Shiva to lead his army against Daksha to avenge Shakti’s death, which he did with immediate success.

Like Shiva, Virabhadra’s aim in destruction is not revenge but to destroy the real enemy, which is the ego standing in the way of humility. Approaching the asanas named for Virabhadra—Virabhadrasana I, II, and III—we can encourage students to cultivate the mind of the spiritual warrior, aware of all sides, unattached to attainment, centered in one’s being.

Staying focused in the practice, holding on in the midst of fear and intensity, the spirit of Virabhadra helps students...