Mary: The way that I think of yoga instruction in general is that it’s all about helping people bust myths and decode. Decode the practices, especially asana, because structural yoga therapeutics is my particular passion and wheelhouse. It’s all about decoding the images and ideas that we receive enthusiastic and perpetual reinforcement around so that we are not practising from sources of information outside of ourselves, but rather practising from our inner space and wisdom.
So we are practising even though yoga, of course, is you know…sort of a multi-directional superhighway of self-study. We tend to practice things top-down/brain-down, and I like to focus body-up because our physicality is such a ready tool that we can avail ourselves of to figure out how we’re feeling and what we’re doing right here right now.
So that informs every decision that I make - certainly on the mat and hopefully off the mat as well - and certainly guides my teaching. And it’s why I talk a lot about structure and function. The unity of form and function (if you will) in the case of asana, anatomy, and kinesiology, because I want us to find our pathways into movement patterns and postural shapes that jive with us.
Lisa: I was at a festival last year, and I went around and I was sort of gob-smacked at the sort of asana was happening at this festival. Big groups - with the teacher at the front doing highly charismatic advanced asana, demonstrating at the same time as they were teaching - with no assistants. And really importantly for me, no permission. No sense of “well you have self-sovereignty” and if you can sense and feel yourself accurate accurately, and if we can teach you to sense and feel yourself accurately, then the inner pathways that Mary is talking about happen as a natural evolution of the practice.
And of course we need the structure. I’m really also clear on that and it’s lovely to hear you say it as well Mary. We do need the structure and then I think we need to toggle between the structural piece and continuing to give students agency within the structure (in the ability to sense and feel more accurately). Because even if they do have an every day practice, they spend the majority of their days off the mat. And so this ability to learn and sense and feel then becomes something that happens when they walk the dog, or do the dishes, or pick up something heavy, or drive their cars, or whatever they’re doing.
