Being able to perform advanced yoga poses has little, if any, bearing on one’s capacity to teach effectively.
Effective teaching is one of my primary goals in teaching yoga. The various Alignment Yoga Teacher Training programs focus on helping teachers-in-training become good teachers… Who just happen to teach yoga. Sadly, the focus in much of the yoga teacher-training world is on the flash and dazzle of yoga: doing ever-deeper poses, or pushing students into emotional release. While there is a time and a place for both of these skills, I think we’d all be better off if we spent more time focusing on the fundamentals of effective teaching. I can clearly remember the first time I recognized that I was in the presence of a very effective teacher. I was in the third grade at Desert Shadows Elementary School in Scottsdale, Arizona. My usual classroom teacher announced that the principal, Muriel Rickard, would be coming into the classroom to teach us the 9’s of our multiplication tables. I was a pretty sorry student of multiplication tables, as memorizing isn’t one of my great strengt...