Getting To The Essence: Kathleen Pringle's Teacher Training For Intro I

Kathleen Pringle, owner of Stillwater Yoga in Atlanta offered another Teacher Training for teachers who are aspiring to go up for the Level I Assessment in the Iyengar Yoga System. The lessons were many and I cannot bring justice to all of them here, but I want to convey a core lesson that I hope will be of value to my readers.

The practitioners who came to the training were from local areas around Georgia, Nashville, and as far as Israel (after a recent move to the states). We brought our nerves and our courage to demonstrate what we thought we knew and learn about what we didn't know. Kathleen brought her ever-growing wisdom of how to experience, teach, and train, to help us become the safest and most effective yoga guides for our students.

Training never stops in Iyengar Yoga. Kathleen's more than 30 years experience, innumerable conventions and workshops with more Senior Teachers, along with ongoing trips to Pune, India are proof of that. However, it is through this kind of rigorous training that the true purpose of each pose is discovered.

In our training, Kathleen encouraged us from the beginning to ask ourselves questions like, why does this pose exist or why do we teach this pose before that one? The undercurrent of the training flowed according to Kathleen's acute understanding of how human's learn and how Iyengar wants his teachers to teach. We learn first by looking.  Our sense of sight is one of the strongest of the five senses. Therefore, we were asked to take or observe a Level I and Level I-II class. Regardless of whether we were observing or taking the class, Kathleen asked us to identify specific things that we experienced from the class. What observable actions did the teacher demonstrate that were effective? How were those observable actions articulated? What were the main instructions for the pose?  What were the corrections?  Did we feel they were clear, understandable, and effective?

She followed this session by allowing us to demonstrate a pose using observable actions and simple instructive points. The exercise is another basic part of the Iyengar Method and it is extremely difficult, especially if you have worked on countless articulations of a single action in a pose in your own practice. Your head begins to spin with vrttis (fluctuations) of all the different things you could say, your heartbeat quickens, you feel as if you are going to pass out --- but you take a deep breath and practice Patanjali's Sutra 11:33 Vitarkabadhane Pratipaksabhavanam, which encourages the Sadhaka (student) to cultivate the opposite disposition.

In order to cultivate the opposite temperament which will resist the current chaos in the mind, body and/or spirit, Patanjali suggests using the guidance of the Niyamas, the five personal precepts which are Soucha, santosa, tapas, svadhyaya, Isvarapranidhanai:  Purity, contentment, burning desire, self study, and surrender. It takes practice but it is like exercising any other muscle. If we do it and keep doing it, our ability to do it grows stronger.

It's a process. I definitely have struggled from the stress involved with this process, because of an overwhelming fear of not getting it right (see previous blog).* However, if we calm ourselves down enough, we can decide what we feel are the primary actions of the pose. We can choose what we want to show and what we feel needs to be articulated with words.

It's amazing how much clarity comes from this exercise.  Simplifying what we want to say and show - not only makes it easier on the student, it makes it easier on you as the teacher.  You know what you are asking for, so you know what actions to look for in your students.  If we start running our mouths our students get confused and we loose track of what we are actually teaching.

This is an invaluable lesson not only in yoga but in life. As a writer, I have rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten in order to unclutter my mind enough to figure what I am trying to say. I have often used poetry as a tool, because it requires you to take out all the unnecessary words and refine the necessary words in order to succinctly convey whatever feeling or expression you're trying to get across. My work with the Iyengar Method is similar and it is not only transforming my own practice and teaching, it is slowly transforming how I write, how I speak, even how I learn.

There will always be better choices of observable actions and words.  It is our work to keep refining these choices through training and through observation of the effectiveness of our teaching with our students.  Did they see the action I wanted them to observe?  Did they understand what actions I said I wanted them to do? How effective were my choices in creating a pose in my students that will give them the most benefits from that pose?  Was I able to put them in a place where they could learn and experience?  Or did I confuse and frustrate them, so the benefits of the pose were lost completely?

As teachers, we strive to thoroughly understand the pose we are teaching.  We want to know how to keep students safe in the pose and what modifications might need to be made in order for the student to maintain the basic actions of the pose. We work on our own practice to be able to show the final stage of the pose and how to teach it step-by-step, so our students can experience their progress. We examine the directional flow of the pose and how best to develop actions that will maintain that directional flow.  We also examine how wrong actions could be more injurous based on that directional flow.

When learning from more experienced teachers, Kathleen encourages us to Trust, Verify, and Observe what we learn. We trust that the teachers we are learning from have more experience with the pose than we do. We verify what we learn from them by experimenting on ourselves and we observe our experience in order to be able to share what we've learned with our students (it's also nice to give public credit for that learning to those wonderful teachers who were willing to share what they know).

We want to examine poses from bottom to top. What affects the proper alignment of the pose.  How can we help our students get into proper alignment, so they can benefit the most from each pose?  We have to understand the essence of each pose we are teaching. When we can get to the essence for ourselves, we are better equipped to help our students build a stronger, more stable foundation they can build on.

Namaste.


I would like to thank Nancy Mau & Anna Leo for letting us infiltrate your class with our pens and notebooks. Nancy, we all appreciated your time and advise during our demos and demonstrated practice. I also want to thank my cool training mates who taught me more than they know.  I hope to keep in touch, so we can continue sharing and learning. And of course, a very special thanks to Kathleen for her ongoing insight and inspiration.

If you are interested in the next Teacher Training or in the upcoming Workshop with Manouso Manos please visit Stillyoga.com for more information.




* I definitely struggle with perfectionism and performance anxiety.  In my efforts to get to the essence of my teaching and practice I am also getting to the essence of my own being. As I slowly delve into this aspect of myself I'm beginning to understand a lot of it comes from growing up with perfectionist for parents, and also being under a microscope for over twenty years where at various points in my youth I was put on a scale and weighed daily, had my neck, feet, and hips examined --even x-rayed to determine whether I was Grade A ballerina material (needless to say, I wasn't), which forced me to feel shame for not having all the right physical attributes for the art I loved. These were things I could do nothing about. My neck was not going to grow longer.  My left hip bone was not going to reform itself correctly.  My arches were not going to get higher. - etc.  Auditioning for companies or roles in a performance held similar shame when it appeared as if they would pick less technically skilled dancers mainly because they fit the body type.  Perfectionism was a way to control a situation I had no control over.  We hide behind many masks thinking it will protect us somehow. I'm grateful for the opportunity to recognize some of them and perhaps even get to take a few off for good, thanks to Iyengar Yoga and meditation.