Teaching Online: The Weird
Hi again! It’s been tough to return here to le Blog to wrap up this final installment of reflections on virtual yoga teaching. For one thing, it now feels like I’ve been teaching virtually forever. Surely I began this series at least 3.8 years ago now, right?
Anyway, maybe we’re all used to Zoom yoga by now, but I think it’s helpful to remember that it is, in fact, very weird. Here are the ways it’s weird for me.
The Weird
We are practicing yoga in each other’s homes. It sounds almost not worth mentioning, because surely we are all accustomed to seeing directly into other people’s homes by now, right? But… do you remember a time when you weren’t invited into the home of the person who used to set up their mat next to you? Do you remember when you had no idea how your colleagues and acquaintances actually lived? Not only has Zoom stolen our collective innocence in that regard, it has made it shockingly easy to pass judgment on everyone’s homes. “What’s that sculpture behind you?” “Your house is so tidy and beautifully decorated!” “Where are you and why is there no furniture?” I have made variations on these utterances myself and felt immediately embarrassed afterward. After all, no one has asked me to comment on my background: blackout curtains and a heavy wooden cabinet on which sits my son’s stuffed animal lineup. I wonder why…
I do my sequence alongside my students. All my teachers are doing this, since we can’t move around the room like we used to. But just because we’re all doing it doesn’t make it not-weird.
This is actually like a taproot weird thing, in that it creates three other weird things:
I now have days in my schedule that include 2.5-3 hours of yoga. I haven’t experienced that since teacher training.
I can get intuitive hits over Zoom. Without an entire room of people to manage, I can feel my own body much more easily and in my own quiet, I can tell when I’m picking up someone else’s stuff.
Practicing the poses with my class means I’m having my own physical, mental, and emotional experience, which feels both genuine and a little selfish. For the most part, I’m pretty focused on cueing and keeping the pace of the class steady, and these things mostly crowd out my personal experiences with the asanas. But I can’t help but feel things as I’m doing the poses; that is what they are designed to do. I am proud to model that for my students but it feels harder to hold space for them.
My jokes are funnier over Zoom. This is not so much weird as it is a statement of fact. Everyone is on mute, so I don’t hear the laughter, but I feel the awkwardness of releasing a joke into dead space and it’s fantastic.
So that’s it, people. As accustomed to Zoom yoga as we might get over the next several months (sigh…), I think it’s important to remember and lift up the ways in which it is completely weird. And bad. But also good.
Join me! What works and doesn’t work about online yoga for you? Drop me a comment or a line.