One afternoon, I walked into the familiar yoga studio for the second time that day. While my first foray into the room was in the role of teacher, my second was as a student. I believe that a yoga teacher is always first and foremost a student of yoga. But 15 years of practice and three years of teaching meant that I was by far the most experienced student of the group in the yoga teacher training course at Glendale’s Yoga at the Village, so I felt a bit out of place.
AS A BUDDHIST PRACTITIONER, I recognize the importance of maintaining the attitude of the beginner’s mind, the ability to take in experience with a sense of freshness and openness. I decided to enroll in the teacher training course to place myself squarely in the role of student, to renew my teaching and practice – to fully become a student again.
This particular course offered an array of approaches to the practice and teaching of yoga; I felt I would benefit from this diversity. I don’t tend to think in terms of one, ultimate, universally “correct” yoga. Yet at the same time, I noticed rigidity in my relationship to my yoga teaching. Something in me wanted transformation.
Transformation is not always immediate. I could see very quickly that my perception was clouded by bias and clinging. The beginner’s mind was elusive. So, it emerged that this quandary of being both teacher and student would be my primary lesson. The experience allowed me to delve into what I now call the apparent roles of teacher and student. These roles exist simultaneously; we are both teacher and student – always.
In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali teaches that there is no external teacher separate from the innate teacher. I found it useful to remember the niyama of Isvara pranidhana in Patanjali’s thread. Isvara pranidhana is variously translated as devotion or surrender to the divine but can also be interpreted as the surrender to one’s highest potential. From Sahaj Yogi’s commentary on the Yoga Sutra, “Isvara is the innermost teacher and is always accessible inside. In yoga, the practice (Isvara pranidhana) is indeed the teaching, the teaching is in the practice, and the teacher is in the teaching. Every time we practice in an attentive way all of this comes together in our own embodiment of it.”
The lessons I needed to learn from the course’s external teachers and from the inner teacher, the Isvara principle were less about form and structure and more about process and relationship. I began to realize that my ability to see the room and the students in the room was clouded by my own rigid conception of what it means to teach yoga. Was I really in the room today with specific students or was I attempting to teach to a fixed notion of who yoga students are? I needed to feel the unfolding process of the individual students and the classroom as a whole, and teach to that experience.
“Take what you can get,” I often heard Carl Dawson (the lead teacher of the Village program) give as advice to the apparent student. To the apparent teacher, we might advise “offer what you can.” See what the embodiment of Isvara in the guise of your accumulated experience, knowledge and insight can offer as illumination to the students in your classroom today.
Abandoning my preconceived notions of what a student should get from my class changed my relationship to teaching. I’ve learned to surrender, to let the inner teacher guide me into any classroom experience, whether it is as the apparent student or the apparent teacher, with a true beginner’s mind.
Steven Vincent teaches yoga and meditation in the San Fernando Valley from Woodland Hills to Pasadena and is involved with Peace Is Every Step-LA which leads public, mindful peacewalks. Pranayoga-LA.com and PeaceIsEveryStepLA.org, steven.vincent@sbcglobal.net
