12 Things Students Said to Me That Made Me a Better Yoga Teacher

Students talk during yoga classes through questions, skepticism, complaints, and concerns. Early teaching experience can leave instructors unprepared for how to respond in the moment. Accepting student contributions and criticism helps teaching evolve beyond formal training. Specific feedback includes difficulty hearing cues, prompting instructors to speak more clearly and practice diaphragmatic breathing. Students also ask what to do if they cannot perform poses, leading to offering options and accommodations. Career and behavior disclosures, such as a student checking a phone for medical reasons, challenge assumptions about phone use and encourage more thoughtful, individualized responses.

"When I started teaching yoga almost 20 years ago, I don't think I was prepared for students to talk. In the classes I'd taken, the teachers were the only ones to speak, and my yoga teacher training focused more on what we'd say-not what we would hear and how to listen. However, my students did talk. They had questions, they were skeptical or grouchy about what I was asking them to do, and some of them even had complaints."

"Caught off guard, I didn't always know what to say in response, and I didn't always handle their opinions as gracefully as I would have liked in the moment. But their contributions and even their criticisms, once I was secure enough to accept them, has helped evolve my teaching more than any training, book, or podcast. These are the things that students shared with me that, over time, transformed how I taught."

"So many students told me that I talked too quietly for them to hear cues when I started teaching. Since the music didn't help, I shut it off and worked on speaking up. Projecting in large rooms takes practice, energy, and some serious diaphragmatic breathing. (I also had to learn to trust that upping my volume didn't mean aggression, but consideration.) Now they can hear me...and I'm a better breather for it."

"A student revealed her career to me after a restorative class in which she'd checked her phone. This certainly caused me to put away any preconceptions I had around using phones in class. But I was mostly troubled by th"

Read at Yoga Journal