Dear Yoga Teachers: Shut The Fuck Up and Just Count Down The Poses

Dear Yoga Teachers:

Shut the fuck up.

Just call the posture, count down the breaths, and then shut the fuck up.

“Reach reach reach reach, taller taller, spread your toes, relax your jaw, feel your heels drawing down into the floor, scissor your legs together, try to get a little more length in your spine” etc etc.

This is not helpful.

You have 5, 10, 20, 40 people or more in your class. Each one has their own needs that day, that minute for their bodies and their stage of practice. For the love of God STFU and let them have their own experience.

Your neurotic chatter is not our enlightenment. What we need from you is not endless distractions, we need from you a structure from which we can sink into whatever our bodies need from each pose in each moment.

There is no way you can know that for us. WE may not even know it until our hip opens up, our quadriceps relax, or we finally find balance in a pose we have struggled with for years. Your priorities - lengthen here, relax there - are nothing but distractions, keeping us from dropping into our poses and listening to what our bodies are telling us. They are distractions from us learning what we need, from having our own unique “a-ha” moments when we have quiet time to settle into our bodies and let them reveal their teachings to us.

When you yap on about whatever nonsense comes into your mind from your training, your own personal practice, or whatever other irrelevant source, you pull us out of that experience. Then, instead of concentrating on what our muscles and ligaments demand, we’re spending all of our energy filtering out your stream of consciousness until you give us the next bit of relevant information: the next pose.

When you yammer on - or worse, when you deliberately go on some long tangent while we are in a challenging pose - you are inhibiting our practice, slowing our learning, wasting our time, and increasing our likelihood of injury because instead of listening to our bodies, instead of growing in our own unique practice, we don’t know how much time or space we have to settle into a pose. We thus can’t give our bodies the attention they deserve because either a) you are going to pull us out unexpectedly before we get the full learning of the pose or b) you keep us in a pose so long that we don’t know how much to challenge ourselves since we’re in a constant state of uncertainty.

Instead of all this, just STFU and give us the certainty we need to have our own experience. Give us that “container.”

There is no way you can know what every person in the class needs in the moment. How many people need to reach higher and higher? How many people are struggling not just to pass out and can’t focus on keeping their ankles flexed? How many super advanced yogis are there who know all this shit anyway, and you're just holding them back?

Try this:

“Warrior One:
Inhale, 5 Exhale
Inhale, 4 Exhale
Inhale, 3 Exhale
Inhale, 2 Exhale
Inhale, 1 Exhale "

“Reverse Warrior :
Inhale, 5 Exhale
Inhale, 4 Exhale
Inhale, 3 Exhale
Inhale, 2 Exhale
Inhale, 1 Exhale "

"Triangle Pose :
Inhale, 5 Exhale
Inhale, 4 Exhale
Inhale, 3 Exhale
Inhale, 2 Exhale
Inhale, 1 Exhale "

Forever and ever.

Sounds boring, right? That’s perfect! Because it takes the attention away from you and lets each person have their own experience of their bodies.

With the predictability of a countdown, they know how hard they can push themselves. They know how much time they have and how deep they can go before the next pose is called. They get to listen to their own bodies instead of being dragged out of it by your caffeine buzz and having to filter out everything you say until you give them what they actually need to hear: “Reverse Warrior.” Everything else is *literally* noise.

If you have some great spiritual vision you need to enlighten everyone about, that’s great. Write a book. Start a podcast. Start a cult. Hand out copies of “Autobiography of a You” after class. Then let people who are looking for that go and find you and become your disciples. DON’T take advantage of your captive audience who just wants to develop their bodies and spirits so you can drop your trip on them when they would never take the time to hear you out otherwise. This is unbelievably selfish and egotistical. So if your trip is about how to give up the ego, here is a *great* opportunity to just STFU, take your ego out of the equation, and let people have their own experience.

Oh, and also, we’re not your captive group therapy session either.

Whatever bothered you this morning where you accidentally judged someone or body shamed yourself or were impatient and perfectionist where you were trying to be allowing or some guy at the coffee shop didn’t notice your new haircut or whatever. . . we don’t care about this shit or your 45 second mood. We’re here to practice yoga. If you want to start a group therapy session with your class, print up a flyer and set it up.

But in your yoga class, just STFU, call the pose, and count it down. That’s all you have to do. We’ll heal our inner child on our own time, thank you.

Because if you’re a student taking a yoga class, you are lucky to get one or two actionable, integratabtle “hits” per class that create the micro growths in your practice that will make you a better yogi over time. If instead of listening for these hits, you are concentrating on filtering out the noise from the teacher, you are losing out on your practice.

There is simply no way that anyone can make use of 40,000 cues coming to them over an hour during your stream of consciousness. At best they will get 1 or 2. At worst they will get none because they were too busy trying to ignore you to listen to their bodies.

Beyond just STFUing, you can also help by being more cognizant of your music selections.

I once took a yoga class the week after the Bohemian Rhapsody movie came out.

I LOVE Queen. I have been a fan literally for decades. But this teacher decided to play the entire soundtrack from Bohemian Rhapsody for his yoga class. This was moronic. The beauty of Queen is its complexity, its intricacy, and its ability to take you through myriad different emotions. Queen is music you LISTEN to. You can’t ignore it.

However in yoga class, rather than listening to my glutes, my psoas, and my hamstrings, I was listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. WTF did this do for my practice besides take me out of my own experience? The only good that came of this was that it distracted me from the teacher talking a mile a minute about all the micro adjustments all 40 of us needed to make during every posture. Insane.

I’ve taken other classes where gangsta rap was the soundtrack. I love booty shaking and pussy slapping in da club as much as the next guy. But this music does nothing to help me relax my hips while I'm in sleeping pigeon. I don’t care who you are, but ass shaking and pussy slapping cause contractions in your loins, whether of fear, excitement, pleasure, or pain, and these are the worst possible stimuli for sinking deeply into a hip opener. What they ARE good for is showing how woke your yoga instructor’s musical taste is. Bravo! You’re amazing. Pass out mix tapes at the end of class.. . .Then STFU and let us have our own experience.

I have heard Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, and lots of other classic rock played during yoga. WTF is the point of this? Do I want to be reminded of the time I drunk made out with that girl at the dive bar in the 90s listening to the same song? Or the 1000s of other associations I’ve had to these songs which I’ve heard 100s of times? No. I want to make sure my back foot is angled properly for Warrior 1 and that my arms are high enough. Every ounce of energy I spend reminiscing about my road trip in ’08 listening to “Brown Eyed Girl” on the radio is a distraction from that.

STFU and play something that is *background* music with no associations, sudden distractions, or complex emotional sentiments. We have plenty going on without that.

Instead, play something without words.

The mind is the enemy of yoga for the most part. Thinking about words and lyrics puts us in our left brain, our analyzer, and makes it harder to sink into our bodies (yet another reason you need to STFU during class) . Play something that supports the sequence (energizing, relaxing, etc) but that doesn’t pull our attention away from what we are doing, having our own experience with our own bodies.

That means no “Top 20 New Age hits of 2018.” Just play something that takes us where we need to go but otherwise gets out of our way - just like you should with yourself.

Also, turn the fucking music down. Most of you have no idea how to project your voices, and since most yoga rooms are cavernous and boomy, when the music is too loud, it is almost impossible for us to hear what you are saying. Because most of what you are saying is useless and distracting, and we are straining to listen so we can filter all of your brain vomit out so we can get to the point (what is the next pose?), straining to hear you over “We Will Rock You” just makes it worse.

Are you catching my drift here? It’s simple: STFU and let us have our experience. You can’t know what each of us needs in the moment. Our bodies will tell us if we have the space to listen. Put your ego, your need to re-regurgitate whatever crap they taught you in yoga school, and your own need for validation aside and just STFU.

Does this make you unimportant? Absolutely not. You are *vitally* important to the class. Think of the class as an organism and yourselves as the bones. You provide the structure for the class, but you don’t need to do that much. The bones more or less just hang out and don’t do anything. But they ALLOW the blood vessels to expand and contract, the muscles to flex and release, the digestive process to unfold, the lungs to be supported and all of the trillions of micro-processes that the body uses to sustain life are supported 100% by a skeletal system that basically does nothing.

That’s your job! Do NOTHING! Don’t yell at the blood vessels to try to expand a little bit more and really go for it, or encourage the gall bladder to make some more bile but don’t leak any into the large intestines, or tell the heart to relax a bit and focus on the universal OM. All of these body parts know what they are doing and they are figuring out what they need in real time without your input. Just STFU and let it happen.

In a previous life, I was a private pilot and spent hours in different airports around the country with scores of different flight instructors. Without question the best instructors I ever had were the old geezers with nothing to prove, who spent their time just staring out the window. They barely taught me anything, but they gave me something infinitely more valuable: the space to figure out how to fly the plane for myself.

Each lesson with one of these “masters,” I would make a new discovery about how to keep the ball centered during a stall, how to better track a VOR radial, or how to navigate using cues on the ground. I figured all of these things out - usually only one or two per lesson - as my own experience showed me what I needed to learn AND how much I could integrate in real time for use in the future. The old guy would keep staring out the window and would occasionally look up to say something like, “You see that mountain over there?” “Yup.” “Are you sure you want to fly into It?” “Oh,” I would say, and adjust my course. He would make sure I was safe, and then he would go back to looking out the window, STFU and leave me alone. Perfect! Do that, Yoga Teacher!

By far the WORST instructors I had were the young bucks straight out of pilot teacher training. They would not stop “teaching” me every fucking second of the lesson. "Do this, don’t do that, pay attention to this, here’s what I would do in this situation, OMG you’re going to kill us give me the controls!," etc.

Rather than feeling out how to fly a plane, I spent all my time trying to filter out the constant stream of useless “help” coming from their gullets to try and get something out of the lesson. Invariably I wouldn’t, and I came away from these lessons not just having wasted an hour or two (and 100s of dollars), but demoralized at my lack of progress.

You are doing the same thing to your class when you don’t STFU and let them figure out what they’re doing. You are wasting their money, their precious time, you are slowing down their personal progress and sense of accomplishment, and you are increasing the likelihood of injury. A pretty awful combination, when it would be so much easier to just STFU.

Also, when you just STFU, you all of a sudden have much more awareness YOURSELF to look out for real problems within the class, like someone who’s actually about to hurt himself. Or maybe someone else needs to make a small adjustment that you can guide them with physically. That kind of direct contact can be a wonderful teaching experience that WILL last and will be actionable, as long as the person isn’t struggling so much that you’re just making it harder. Once you STFU, your intuition can kick in more and you can start to sense who in the class needs a personal assist - like just one! - that will make a difference in their practice.

But for the love of God, don’t lose track of the count while you are doing this!

Don’t lose sight of the whole class when you are helping one individual.

Give us the count. Give us the structure so we can have our own experience. And if you can’t do two things at once, then don’t offer individual help and just count down the poses. That’s plenty!

Also, DON’T lie to us and add “2 and a half, 2 and three quarters” at the end of the count. Don’t slow down the count at the end or forget which number you were on. We are TRUSTING you to give us the structure so our bodies can determine how much to push ourselves. We don’t need you trying to trick us, taking us out of our experience, causing us to lose trust in you so we can never settle into a pose properly in the future (since who knows if you will try to stretch us just a bit more ha ha ha).

Everything about this kind of distraction is awful, and frankly it is nothing but a colossal power trip for the instructor. You are not helping us, you are not “challenging us,” you are simply riding your own micro power trip and serving your ego rather than the class. Fact.

Now maybe some of you are nervous about “public speaking” and your rambling is a way to calm yourself down. Here’s another tip: Don’t drink a triple espresso before class to psych yourself up. That is the wrong direction. Instead, try a cup of chamomile tea before you go in. That will put you in the right mind frame to remain calm, get out of the way, STFU and let people have their own experience, relaxing into their bodies and opening themselves up.

In another old life, I was a massage therapist and would often drink chamomile tea before giving a massage. This helped relax me and would transmit that relaxation to the client even when I wasn’t touching them. By letting them relax, by not talking, my massage helped them get into a deeply relaxed state where their bodies could heal themselves and they could grasp new intuitions from within that were inaudible during the noise of the day.

This is exactly what you want to do for your class. Give them the space to settle into their bodies, hear the teachings from within, and learn at their own pace. You do this by STFUing, calling the poses, and counting them down in a constant, rhythmical, predictable way so that they know how long they have before they need to change.

It’s so incredibly simple if you can just get your ego out of it. Again seriously, write a book, start a podcast, make a Spotify playlist if you’re so damn interesting. I can’t wait to buy it! But don’t take advantage of your students for your own self-glorification that you are as amazing as you think you are. Do that on your own time.

I once had a yoga teacher in Las Vegas teaching a restorative class. There were only about 5 or 10 poses the entire class, and the rest of the time the guy spent sermonizing as if he were Strip Baba revealing messages from on high. I didn’t fucking sign up for that. I can go to church or an ashram or listen to one of 1 million “inspirational” podcasts without this jerk taking advantage of our open, relaxed state to try to program us with his particular trademark dogma that nobody was interested in anyway. Particularly in restorative yoga, the goal is to open up, get out of your head, and let you body have its own experience, not fill it with his dime store spirituality.

So ask yourselves: Who am I really serving with my actions? Am I trying to validate my training, validate myself as a “leader,” pump my own ego as the center of attention in the room, show off how enlightened I am by spitting philosophy I read in somebody else’s book that morning, process my neuroses and/or recent breakup (cough) in front of the class, prove how essential I am to the class, or justify my paycheck by stuffing the class full of useless information that only gets in the way of THEIR practice cause it is really all about ME?

Or am I serving my class by humbly getting out of their way so they can have their own experience, allowing their bodies to grow, strengthen, lengthen and heal?

The best way to find out is to just STFU, count down the pose, and then do it again until class is done.

I promise, this will be your best class ever, and your students’ bodies will thank you for getting out of their way and unlocking the true healer within.

This is your job, Yoga Teacher, to be the “bones” that support your dozens of students through the thousands of unknown and unknowable adjustments that give them everything they need from your class on that day. That’s it. Then go home and work your shit out on your own. And seriously, you can tell us all about it in your podcast.