How to Create A Yoga Class Your Students Will LOVE!

Yoga classes are organic in nature.  By that I mean they are a living, breathing entity that exists while your students are in the yoga studio and then dissipates just as quickly as when they leave.

As yoga teachers our highest purpose is to hold the space for our students.  To do that is to truly serve them and offer all that yoga has.  Great yoga teachers watch a class.  They see who shows up.  Knowing that we are all different each day and even in each moment, they see how a person is.  Even if the student has taken this class 100 times before, the teacher watches.  They note if there is high energy or low energy in the room.  Are people talking actively or quiet and withdrawn?  How are the mats placed–closely around friends or isolated from everyone.  How do the students go through the first asanas?

This watching, looking, seeing the class, happens the entire time.  As teachers we use this information to make adjustments in our teaching style.  Perhaps a word of encouragement is needed here; a dharmic inspiration injected here.  How can you help balance the students with your poses, your voice, your music but most of all how you give space?

The class is not about you.  That is both a blessing and a curse.  For people newer to teaching it can be a weight, “What do I do then if it’s not about me?”  We’ve all been to classes where teachers have this struggle.  You leave the class feeling like a teacher got something out of it but know you, as a student, didn’t.  And you won’t be back.

For more experience yoga teachers, it allows us the freedom to be the conduit yoga flows through.  We don’t have to be funny, entertaining, deep, or anything else.  We simply have to get out of the way of our students connection with themselves.

We hold the space so our students can be.  Yoga is never about the pose.  It is merely a way to come within, to get deeper, faster.

Watch your students and make adjustments in your class—the entire class.  They’ll tell you everything you need to know to deliver a class where they say, “That was exactly what I needed.”