As a teacher you can play a vital role in ensuring that your students feel safe while they practice yoga. When people feel safe, infinite healing can occur.
Part of the power of yoga is its ability to help people release past hardships, pain and trauma.If you haven’t faced hardships in your life – wonderful! – that is the way it should be. If this is the case you may not think about your actions in the same way someone might who has used yoga as a healing modality. Below I have some suggestions on how to make your students feel safe during class. You’ll notice I don’t suggest using a cheesy, soft, airy voice during class. My suggestions are straight forward and hopefully useful.
How & why to make your students feel safe
Avoid using words like “trauma” in class
It’s one thing to think about yoga’s ability to help people heal from trauma, but I don’t think words like this should be used in class. For someone who is in a posture, their heart racing, saying the word “trauma” can have a negative impact. Your job is not to stir or conjure up hardships from the past. That will happen on its own timeline, one that feels right for that particular student. Instead I suggest focusing on phrases that talk about healing and growth rather than what it is that student is leaving behind.
Don’t touch students, unless you have asked for their verbal permission before class
In general, just don’t touch students while they are practicing. Not everyone agrees with me on this point, but I hope you take the following into consideration. You have no idea how someone has been touched in his or her life. If you are touching someone when they are open and vulnerable in class, you can make them feel unsafe. If a teacher asks me if they can touch me while in class, I find it hard to say no since it’s usually happening in a quick moment. Please do not put your students in this position. If someone is a “regular” and has been practicing a long time, do not assume that you can touch them in class.
I have had many teachers – who mean well- touch my inner thighs, hips, our approach me from behind to physically adjust my postures. For some yogis this may not be an issue at all. For others it will make them feel unsafe and as a teacher you cannot make assumptions as to which category your students will fall. Use your words to offer corrections, and if you want to really help a student please do so after class when you can ask and then give physical adjustments. This is particularly true for male teachers (regardless of intent or sexual orientation) and female students. You have to realize that women, in general, are on guard when we walk down the street at night, in our apartments alone and getting out of our cars. These are the things we need to think about in life, so having a yoga room where we don’t have to think about being touched or approached is very important.
Be mindful of the volume of your voice in backbends
Be mindful of the volume of your voice when students are in healing backbends, camel pose and other similar postures. There is a way to add momentum and inspire your students to “go back, way back” without shouting. There are times to use volume to maintain the pace of class, backbends are not one of those times.
You are not your students’ therapist
If you’re a teacher and you’ve been practicing a while you may be pretty zen and whole. Good for you – this doesn’t make you a therapist. As we know, yoga can bring up things and your students may start to work through hardships in life. They may even talk about it to you after class. You can create a safe space for your students to approach you and then suggest something like speaking with a professional. Please put your ego aside and do not weigh in on how someone can best work through mourning the loss of a loved one, abuse, sexual assault and other issues. I have seen this happen at studios more times than I can count. Some teachers become very righteous the more they evolve; I don’t care how “enlightened” you are, please tread lightly.
Address students who behave inappropriately
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes there is one person in class who is very intense or inappropriate with how they look at other students. Maybe they stare, blatantly at a woman’s private parts while she is in a posture, bending over, or warming up before class. As a teacher you can help monitor such patterns and address them accordingly, outside of class.
If someone cries during class, let them be
Did you have an all-star student that broke down crying during class? Maybe they didn’t do half the postures. Please don’t ask them to explain themselves after class by asking well-intentioned questions like “You okay?” “Rough class today? What happened?” If the yoga works (which we know it does) that person will feel much better after savasana. Don’t make them explain themselves or remind them of what just transpired in class. Leave them be and let the yoga do it’s magic.
If you haven’t experienced some of the hardships your students are facing, these tips may seem rigid or extreme. They are not. Please be mindful about creating a loving and safe space for your students to practice.
For some people the 90 minutes they are in yoga is the only opportunity they have to feel safe – give them that gift.
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A teacher grabbed my feet to move them a centimetre or so in bridge pose. It was a bit disconcerting but I wasn’t overly bothered, until at the end of class he came over and said I should be careful about my feet, because he’d managed to cut his finger on my (really not horrendously overgrown) toenail.
#1 goes even more widely, in that fitness instructors in general should avoid trying to use any negative words because the mind only hears the last part of the phrase. For example if an instructor says, “you’re doing this so you won’t have weak hamstrings”, what the mind hears is: “you have weak hamstrings”. And the mind believes it. So instead we have to always say, “your hamstrings are strong and this is making them stronger!”. Big difference. Which is why the word “healing” is a better word to use instead of assumptions about what we might be healing from.
In yoga, crying in class is completely ok! However, when I am teaching at a studio owned by someone else, I have a legal responsibility to check in with anyone who still seems upset after class to make sure they were not suffering physical injury. Of course we have insurance for a situation in which we might be sued, but it is far better for all sides if we can find out early on that an injury occurred and talk with the client before we are unexpectedly served papers. Obviously we will try to be as sensitive as possible, but we do need to ask. I hope that makes sense!
I agree!!