Why I (Still) Need a Yoga Teacher

by Nina

The Ballet Class by Edgar Degas

Recently I learned that my long-time yoga teacher, Donald Moyer, is retiring from teaching. (Baxter and I will be writing something about him in the near future.) I’m very sad that this teacher, who has influenced me more than any other I’ve ever had, will no longer be guiding me through a two-hour practice every Friday (and saying those magic words when he notices me internalizing his instructions, “Thank you, Nina.”). But I also know that he’s made the right decision for himself, and I’m focusing now on cultivating gratitude for all the years I had with him rather than dwelling on what I’ve lost.

But now I need to find a new teacher, and that’s an interesting dilemma for someone of my age and level of experience. You might be wondering why someone like me, who has over 25 years of yoga practice behind me and is a trained teacher with has a really solid home practice, would even still want to go to a public class on a weekly basis. But there are three very valuable benefits I get from going to a good class that I can’t image ever outgrowing or wanting to give up.

New Ideas

Even though I have years of decades of experience taking classes from a wide range of teachers and a nice library of yoga books, I tend to get stuck in a rut in my home practice and perhaps even in my thinking about topics such as alignment and sequencing. So it’s good for my practice and my thinking about yoga to be exposed on a regular basis to someone else’s point of view on yoga, especially someone who is thoughtful and creative, and is experimenting with new ideas themselves. Also, it just makes things more fun for me; I really get a kick out of learning new-to-me yoga pose (recently, some very old yoga poses) or a new version of a familiar one. That helps keep me enthusiastic about a practice that is so woven into my daily life I can take it for granted sometimes. And I’m sure it makes me a better blogger as well.

A Good Pair of Eyes

Although we practice yoga without mirrors by using our proprioception (our sense of where our body is in space), I’ve definitely noticed that if unchecked for long periods of time, many of us can develop physical habits that make our poses feel comfortable and aligned but are maybe not actually good for us. And I’m betting that left to my own devices, I’d be doing the same thing, too. So for me, there is really nothing like having the trained eyes of a good teacher on me, who can assess my alignment from the outside and offer verbal cues or physical adjustments to bring me into a healthier alignment. Ah, that feels much better.

Yoga Community

In my post Eight Ways to Join the Yoga Community, I talked about the importance for healthy aging of being a part of a community and how being part of the yoga community can help fulfill that need. I also think it’s important for my mental and emotional health as I spend a lot of time alone at home, both writing and practicing yoga. For me, going to class regularly provides me with a sense of belonging and continuity. Aw, reading that old post about joining the yoga community made me homesick for my old class, because here’s what I wrote:

"I always arrive early to my Friday morning yoga class, not because I want my usual spot in front of the window—okay, fine, I do want that spot—but because I want the extra fifteen minutes to chat with my yoga friends. And I think I’m not the only one who feels that way because by the time the clock strikes 9:30, the teacher often has a hard time getting our attention because so many of us are busy catching up with each other."

Yes, sometimes Donald would even ring a bell to get our attention! Before Donald officially retired, he was on a sabbatical, and I thought he would eventually return to teaching. During those months, I just didn’t go to class at all. Eventually I found that I was really missing not just him but everyone else at the studio, and I decided that even if I couldn’t find the perfect new teacher, I wanted to go back to the Berkeley Yoga Room. So I told my husband I was going to go to beginners classes there with him, as a way of forcing him to do yoga again, which he had gradually dropped (you’d think he’d practice at home with me, but that’s another story), and he recently surprised me by agreeing to my plan. He surprised me even more lately by saying one reason he liked going regularly to classes at the studio now was that he valued just spending that time with some good people.

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Voting With Your Feet: Avoiding Abusive Teachers

by Baxter

Another View of Clear Water by Nina Zolotow

After Nina posted yesterday about abusive yoga teachers (see When to Fire Your Yoga Teacher), we received a follow-up message from another reader who had a similar experience of being humiliated when she attended the workshop of a visiting teacher to her community. In her case, she voted with her feet and did not attend a follow-up visit by the same teacher this year, but instead chose to study with a local teacher, and loved her experience. 

In discussing the humiliating teacher’s behavior with her regular teacher, the student was told, “That’s how they do it in India.” Well, this may indeed be true, but does it make this kind of behavior acceptable? In my own experience of studying with many teachers over the past 19 years at workshops and conferences and retreats, I have come across my fair share of angry, condescending, overtly or subtly demeaning behavior by teachers from at least two different traditions. In fact, I  studied with a well-regarded teacher a few times before a more subtle way of demeaning students on a fairly regular basis made me decide to give up the class despite some "good" asana instructions I was learning.  I could not justify continuing to support that kind of treatment of me or my fellow students.

 I also heard stories about a teacher I came to respect about how he had been a bear to study with when he was younger and how he had mellowed out as he aged. I felt blessed to have missed his “abusive” period since I learned so much and witnessed compassionate behavior from him regularly. I did carry a background concern about whether the other side might re-surface at some point; fortunately, I never had to encounter that situation from this particular teacher.

I do feel that teachers who study in a “lineage” that permits or even subtly approves of this bullying, degrading treatment of students tend to be more likely to participate in such behavior and maybe are even drawn to it. I don’t want to get into some deep exploration of trauma and its long-term effects, as it is a complex topic and I am not an expert in it. But, as Nina pointed out yesterday, you can vote with your feet, and I myself have done so more than once over the years. And that old observation that a happy customer tells one person about their experience, but a dissatisfied one will tell ten certainly has played out for me. I am asked all the time for referrals to other teachers or recommendations for teachers to study with at conferences. If a student happens to ask about a teacher I have had a bad experience with, I will recommend someone else instead.  I do not always go into the why of it, but do on occasion share my specific experience if I know that my personal experience was also confirmed by other yoga friends of mine. The good news is that we have more and more choices all around the country—and even internationally—when it comes to yoga instructors. So, don’t settle for anything less than a good instructor who is also respectful and kind.  

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When to Fire Your Yoga Teacher

by Nina

Clear Water by Nina Zolotow

Yet another famous yoga teacher has been in the news recently for improper conduct. A former student has sued Bikram Choudhury, accusing him of sexual harassment, discrimination and defamation (see Lawsuit Accuses Founder of Yoga Empire of Misconduct).

Well, I could go on about that, and the tendency toward sexual abuse that appears to be a serious risk for some high-profile male teachers, but actually I’d like to focus on something a little more mundane. Recently we at YFHA received an email from one of our readers saying that she, a very long-time student, had attended a class where the female teacher had humiliated her in front of the class by angrily correcting her pose (which she was adapting for her particular body type) telling her that she was doing it completely “wrong.” This experience made our correspondent very upset. So, you see, abuse by yoga teachers comes in many forms, including simple verbal abuse and even, so I’ve heard, physical abuse.

Our correspondent was still trying to decide how she should handle this—maybe she should be considering forgiveness?—and asked us to address some of the issues that this situation raised. Because our reader was so upset, I decided to respond immediately by writing directly to her. And it was actually pretty easy for me to respond, because I said what I always tell people in this situation: you should never study with a teacher who you don’t respect or who doesn’t respect you.

In this case, I recommended, talking with the teacher, if possible—since it was a one-time occurrence, maybe she was just having a bad day—and seeing if an apology was forthcoming. But if a confrontation was out of the question or if the teacher defended her behavior, I recommended simply leaving the class for good. After all, you are paying your teacher to help you. Why would you put up with mistreatment? And isn’t the only way to stop this kind of behavior to vote with your feet (and your wallet)?

The question is, why does this kind of behavior continue? Why aren’t these teachers shunned by everyone? This brings us back to the NY Times article on Bikram because it included a quote that I found very perceptive about why students of any school of yoga will put up with inappropriate behavior from their teachers.

“Vulnerability and devotion are big parts of the practice,” said Benjamin Lorr, the author of the memoir Hellbent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga. “Bikram creates this mentality that the outside is phony. There is no path but this path, and everything that happens in this path is just a part of your yoga, that you have to learn to be strong and get past it.”

I think this myth that “There is no path but this path, and everything that happens in this path is just part of your yoga” is cultivated by more than one school of yoga and maybe even by some teachers in all the schools. Students feel like they can’t leave the teacher because of their emotional investment in "the path," their financial investment in "the path," or because they’ve been encouraged to believe this is a “good” teacher to guide them on "the path." And it takes strength and courage to resist this ideology.

But can a teacher who is abusive or corrupt really have anything important to teach you?

So, please, don’t hesitate to fire a yoga teacher who is mistreating you in any way. And if your teacher isn’t mistreating you in particular, but you witness him or her mistreating other students, you might want to consider the same action. That is the only way we can bring about change. And, trust me, there are many wonderful teachers out there who know that being a “good” teacher means something different than being able to get you into challenging poses or giving you access to some particular “lineage” of yoga.

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Studying with Our Teachers

by Nina

One of the frequent questions we get here on Yoga for Healthy Aging is: how can I study with your teachers? The answer is that the best way is to attend the special workshops and retreats that our teachers offer throughout the year. While we previously had some of this information on the blog, I’ve now updated it for 2013. And to make it easier for you to find the information for a particular teacher, I’ve created separate pages for each teacher. To find the listings for an individual teacher, simply click on the tab at the top of the page that displays that teacher’s name. A new page will be displayed, which lists the teacher’s workshops and retreats in chronological order, and includes links to the web sites where you can find registration information.

We hope to meet some of you in person soon!

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