This is excerpted from Yoga Adjustments: Philosophy, Principles, and Techniques (Available June 3, 2014 from Random House)

Using your hands to accentuate and refine what you are trying to convey with words or visual modeling can make all the difference in a student’s ability to comprehend and internalize whatever you are trying to share. (When discussing hands-on adjustments, guidance, assisting, touch, and so on, we’re using hands-on in both the general and specific meaning of the term—the general referring to tactile guidance that might involve using one’s hands, arms, shoulders, torso, hips, legs, or feet, and the specific referring to the hands. Unless specifically indicated, the general use of the term refers to its general meaning.) With clearer, more manifold communication comes deeper learning, and with it the promise of yoga—to be healthy, integrated, fully awake—is gradually more fully realized. Touch, which immediately reaches our students in a direct and personal way,...

Common Urban Yoga Myths

Despite being a source of health and wellbeing, yoga is not immune to cultural forces. As yoga gains increasing popularity in the West, the popular “no pain, no gain” mentality easily finds its way into yoga classes. Often advertised as a challenge rather than an invitation to personal health and sustainable self–transformation, many yoga styles and teachers go all out in trying to get their students to go all out, often in conditions that create more tension, not less. That approach revolves around three common myths:

Myth #1: It’s Gotta Be Hot

Despite volumes of scientific medical evidence showing that exercising in intense heat is more a source of stress and injury than sustained openness and strength, much of the yoga scene heats the room far higher than necessary. How much heat is necessary? Just enough to relax. It’s relaxation of the nervous system, not passive heat, that leads to the release of muscular tension. Warming the body naturally through...

Connecting the femur to the tibia, the knees receive considerable stress from above and below, making their stabilizing muscles and especially ligaments among the most frequently strained in physical yoga practices. Athletes, runners, even committed sitting meditators discover that the stress created in the knees from their athletic or spiritual avocation can lead to debilitating injury, especially when lacking the beneficial effects of a balanced, appropriate practice of physical asanas. Even in a balanced yoga practice, the knee still has to handle considerable forces, primarily from bearing weight but also due to twisting forces exerted from above and below. In more strenuous yoga practices, the knee has to handle very powerful physical forces. Primarily a hinge joint capable of extension and flexion, with minor capacity to rotate when flexed to about ninety degrees, sudden or excessive movement in any of these motions can tear one of the supporting ligaments or cartilage. Underst...

Whether one seeks the meaning or purpose of yoga from ancient texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Hatha Yoga Pradipika or looks to more modern or contemporary sources for guidance and inspiration, awakening to or cultivating conscious awareness, more awakened being and a better, healthier life are constants. Standing on the edge of the mythical battlefield of the Mahabharata War, Prince Arjuna was frozen in inaction due to misunderstanding the nature of his being; in finding his path (dharma) he would become clear in his awareness and thereby able to act consciously and forthrightly in his life. Patanjali similarly identifies the source of human suffering (klesha) that motivates yoga in ignorance of one’s true nature (avidya) that is rooted in a confused bodymind, offering an eight-step approach to betterment that includes moral and practical observances, asana, pranayama, pratyahara (relieving the senses of their external distractions), and meditation as a d...

Hands-on cues and assistance are only one of several methods of giving clear instructional guidance to students. To the extent that you give clear verbal cues combined with effective demonstrations, most students will not need tactile cues. To make your verbal cues most effective, speak slowly while simultaneously moving slowly into the asana you are teaching, giving slightly dramatic emphasis to whatever you most want to highlight while transitioning in from a position in which you mirror your class with maximum visual contact between you and all of your students. Try not to say what not to do; instead, emphasize what to do. (Saying what not to do often confuses students, especially if they miss the “not” part of your instruction.) Try to order your verbal cues as discussed in detail in chapter 4 of Yoga Sequencing. Try to verbally cue to what you are seeing students doing or not doing as they transition into the asana, and give them a chance to physically express the cue before rus...

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 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 ...

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...

 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...

When casually standing or sitting, the tendency is to connect passively with the earth. The effect is that the body collapses into itself, each joint compressing as the body slumps and sags. But the moment you consciously root down into whatever is on the floor, the immediate effect is creation of space in the body. Referred to as the “rebounce effect” by Dona Holleman (1999, 26), this relationship between roots and extension is an expression of the “normal force” explained by Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

To the extent that you apply effort through intentional muscular action—for example, pressing down more firmly through your feet and into the floor when standing—the “equal and opposite reaction” of energy drawing up the body occurs. Emphasizing the application of consciousness in the discovery of foundational elements in each asana, yoga teacher Chuck Miller has referred to this as the intention of seeking the origin...