In Part 1 of this article Nicole discussed how to handle three “prenatal situations” that you might encounter in your teaching: (1) a new, pregnant student drops into your general yoga class, (2) a pregnant student and her pregnant friends ask you to teach a prenatal yoga class, and (3) an advanced student of yours becomes pregnant. We’ll pick up … Read More
Read Part 2. It’s in the news: prenatal yoga is a great choice for mothers-to-be. Researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center, and Gunasheela Surgical and Maternity Hospital in Bangalore, India collaborated on a research project (published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, April 2005) that showed that practicing prenatal yoga helped to improve birth weight, reduce … Read More
Continued from Teaching the Art of Discovery Part 2 As we go deeper into this series, I now want to offer some broader thoughts about how to refresh your approach to teaching, make your classes more magnetic and rewarding for your students, and increase your own satisfaction and magnetism. In recent years, I’ve seen that some teachers let Ananda Yoga … Read More
Continued from Teaching the Art of Discovery Part 1 . Continuing with the topic of how to keep your classes fresh and interesting—to nurture your students’ spirit of discovery rather than merely teaching a constant stream of new poses—I’ll now focus on strategies for teaching more-advanced asanas. (In the next part of this series, I’m going to suggest a change … Read More
Once I received a phone call from a student who had taken my “Yoga for Seniors” class. She had been teaching Senior Yoga for about two weeks and had run out of new postures to teach. She was calling to ask me what she should teach next. It was interesting to me that after only two weeks she was looking … Read More
In “When Does Flexible Start to Mean Harmful?“, Lorraine Kreahling asks, “Does too much stretching cause injuries?” Ten to twenty years ago, when I was teaching yoga in San Francisco, one rarely heard of people being injured from practicing yoga. During this time I worked both as a chiropractic assistant and in sports medicine research. To the extent that we … Read More
Have you ever been suspicious of the contraindication, “Don’t do an inversion if you have a cardiovascular problem”? After all, how dangerous can Matsyasana or Padahastasana — or Balasana, for goodness’ sake — really be? This is a safe and conservative guideline for new teachers, but the more we learn about anatomy and physiology, the more we see when this … Read More
