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...