Part II: Inner Practices of an Embodied Yoga Teacher

A reflection on presence, self-study, discernment, and surrender.

Teaching From Something Greater Than Ourselves

Something shifts when we begin teaching from a deeper place rather than primarily from what we often label as the small self, the part of us that worries about performance, approval, control, and getting everything right.

It can be surprisingly easy, especially when we care deeply about teaching, to begin holding ourselves mostly responsible for every outcome in the room. Did the sequence land? Was someone moved by what we shared? Did we perform the role of teacher convincingly enough?

Of course caring about what we offer matters. Preparation, continued learning, attention to safety, and responsiveness to the people who trust us enough to practice with us are ours to tend. Yet there’s a distinct difference between taking responsibility for our part and believing ourselves to be the sole author of what unfolds in a room full of human beings breathing and moving together, or for that matter, in life.

When we allow ourselves to be animated by something greater than the small self, whether we call that the higher Self, God, consciousness, love, or use no name for it at all, there’s more spaciousness around the outcome. We can prepare carefully, care deeply, and offer what we have, while relinquishing the way in which others may or may not receive it.

I often return to the thought that what is done in love rarely fails. I don’t mean that love guarantees a particular outcome. In some ways, I mean the opposite. Love allows us to stop requiring the outcome to prove that what we offered mattered. We can take responsibility for our part, remain open to what the experience may still have to teach us, and leave space for mystery.

I wrote more about this kind of presence in The Art of Holding Space as a Yoga Teacher, if you would like to sit with that idea a while longer.

Returning to the Essential Practices

One of the most reassuring things about all of this is that we don’t need to attend another intensive workshop to become more embodied teachers. So much of what’s needed is already contained within yoga itself. It’s there in meditation, pranayama, self-study, in the ethical teachings, and in the philosophy many of us encountered during teacher training and may have unintentionally set aside once the practical demands of actually teaching classes took over.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about this. Teaching requires energy. There are classes to plan, schedules to manage, students to support, continuing education to consider, and, for many teachers, the very real necessity of earning a living. It can become easy for the aspects of yoga that are harder to display, package, or fit neatly into a sixty-minute class to slowly move toward the edges.

Yet when we continually invest in the postures and leave much of the rest, something important can become thinner. The evolution available through yoga depends partly on our willingness to remain in relationship with more than the parts of the practice that come most easily to us.

Meditation and pranayama have been especially meaningful practices for me, although even here we can turn the inward path into another accomplishment. Many ask, “How long should we meditate? Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour?” We can become so occupied with the number that we forget the more interesting invitation, which is whether we’re actually attempting to be present for the time we sit. Five honest minutes can sometimes reveal more than thirty spent wondering whether we are doing meditation correctly.

If you’re looking for a place to begin, or perhaps a way back after some time away, I wrote more about that in How to Start a Meditation Practice at Home.

The Practice of Witnessing

Much of becoming a more embodied teacher has very little to do with asana and much more to do with recognizing the places where we become reactive, protective, eager to please, overly responsible, or convinced that our interpretation must be the best one. This is one of the ways our practice of svādhyāya can grow richer. At some point, we begin studying the person doing the studying, perhaps noticing patterns that quietly shape the way we move through life and meet others.

We may notice which students draw us in and which ones stir a subtle irritation, whose approval matters more than we care to admit, when we begin performing instead of teaching, or when a sincere desire to help has crossed into trying to manage another person’s experience.

These moments can become fertile ground for svādhyāya. When we’re paying attention, we can notice what arises without immediately becoming identified with it. We witness the reaction, become curious about what it may be revealing, and remember that there’s also a deeper place within us that remains untouched by it. Perhaps part of self-study is learning to make room for both the light and shadow within us, meeting each with enough grace to see what is there.

Often, the first sign of this incongruence is something we feel. The body tightens, defensiveness arises, we make a quick assumption, or suddenly realize we’ve stopped listening because we’re already preparing a response. These reactions are all part of the human experience. But we can also begin to witness them as a way of deepening our self-understanding. And while it can be uncomfortable to acknowledge certain parts of ourselves, staying present to what’s arisen gives us an opportunity to understand ourselves a little more clearly.

In some ways, asana has been teaching us how to do this all along. We move into a posture and the body braces, the breath shallows, or we instinctively recoil from what feels uncertain. With practice, we learn to notice the contraction rather than immediately resisting it. A similar pattern can arise in teaching and in relationship. Someone challenges or disappoints us, touches a tender place, or simply sees something differently, and suddenly there is a narrowing. Curiosity gives way to certainty, openness to defensiveness, or perhaps the desire to retreat.

The practice isn’t about becoming endlessly open, perfectly accepting, or capable of some idealized version of unconditional love. Perhaps it’s something rooted in greater humility. Can we notice the contraction and become curious about what we’re wishing to preserve or protect, what feels threatening, or what we may be unwilling to see? Just as in asana, the contraction itself doesn’t need to become another thing we judge or try to eliminate. Sometimes it is simply feedback, another place where life is asking for our attention.

Becoming a Conduit

Over time, I’ve found it helpful to imagine the teacher less as a container and more as a conduit. We inevitably receive things when we teach: energy, emotion, stories, questions, expectations, and sometimes the unspoken weight someone has carried into the space. Teachers who prioritize listening tend to notice these things, but being deeply present with another person doesn’t necessarily require us to hold onto everything we perceive or make ourselves responsible for changing it.

The breath offers such a simple image for this. We breathe in fully, but we do not try to keep the inhale. We allow it to move through us, release it, and make space for the next breath to arrive. There is a natural receiving and releasing happening all the time, and perhaps we can imagine ourselves in much the same way. We can receive what another person brings with care and attention without believing that everything entering our awareness must become ours to carry.

Somewhere in that movement between receiving and releasing, discernment becomes possible. We can begin to ask what truly belongs to us to respond to, what may simply need to be witnessed, and what we can allow to continue on its way without taking it on as our own.

Our intention can be loving: I want to help, protect, support, make this easier. But what is the impact when that loving intention leads us to hold onto something that is not ours to tend? Presence doesn’t require possession. Sometimes one of the most respectful things we can offer another person is our full attention while still allowing their experience to remain their own.

If this touches on the exhaustion that can come from carrying too much for the people we teach, I explored that more directly in Empathy Without Burnout for Yoga Teachers.

What Embodiment Looks Like in the Room

For all the philosophy we can explore around embodiment, much of it eventually becomes surprisingly ordinary. It can look like making real eye contact and listening when someone speaks rather than waiting for our opportunity to respond. It may mean reflecting back what someone has shared instead of rushing past it, asking a question because we are genuinely curious rather than because we already know the answer we hope they will give, and being willing to take responsibility when something we’ve said or done lands differently than we intended.

There is humility in teaching this way because it asks us to remain curiously open rather than relying entirely on who we think we’re supposed to be as a yoga teacher. We can learn enormously from our teachers and carry forward what has served us, while still allowing what we offer to become increasingly shared and embodied. With time, the need to reproduce someone else’s voice can become quieter, along with some of the expectations we’ve gathered about how a yoga teacher should sound, teach, move, or relate to the people in the room.

Perhaps this is part of what we are being asked: to continue noticing whether our teaching still feels connected to what we are actually discovering through our own practice.

There may be places where the two move beautifully together and others where habit, expectation, or old ways of teaching have created some distance between them. The invitation is simply to notice when that happens and remain willing to begin again.

A Closing Contemplation

Patanjali gives us a remarkably simple trio in the teachings of kriya yoga: tapas, svādhyāya, and Īśvara praṇidhāna. Disciplined practice, self-study, and surrender to something greater than ourselves.

The more I sit with what it means to teach from an embodied place, the more these three seem to contain much of what I’ve been trying to understand. There’s the willingness to keep practicing rather than becoming too comfortable with what we already know, the courage to look honestly at our own patterns and motivations, and the humility to offer what we can without believing we must control what happens next.

Perhaps before your next class, you might sit quietly for a moment and ask yourself where your teaching has become habitual, where you may be teaching from expectation rather than conviction, and where you might soften your grip enough to allow something deeper in your own practice to enter the room.

There is no need to force an answer.

Maybe part of embodiment is simply remaining willing to keep asking.