Category: Yoga Teaching

Four tips for yoga teachers on supporting emotional yoga students.

Yoga is a practice where we can invite students to arrive authentically in their bodies, minds, and feelings. For some practitioners, there aren’t many safe spaces to connect to their feelings. When they arrive on the mat and begin to experience their sensations – maybe for the first time in years – yoga students can become emotional as unexpressed feelings rise to the surface. For me, many times the first few moments I arrive on my mat will bring me to tears, as I become more present to whatever is going on. Even if I’m not particularly sad, sometimes simply being present is poignant enough to cause me to cry. We don’t need to be happy to practice yoga.

Our issues are in our tissues.

Bernie Clark

Most often, feelings will arise when students are moving into a quieter space and are softening to what is arising. Through any feeling may be disconcerting, the most obvious emotional expression is sadness and tears. Here are some tips to create a safe space for supporting emotional yoga students.

1. Acknowledge The Process

If students are not used to feeling emotions (or if they’ve been conditioned to suppress them publicly), they may feel ashamed and embarrassed by their feelings. What an enormous kindness to create a space where feeling their emotions is normal, and in fact, healthy! Create an inclusive space by acknowledging the process to the whole class. For example, you may say, “When we do hip openers, it can be common for strong feelings to come up as we start to unwind deep, habitual patterns of tension in the body” or “It’s normal to start to sense feelings and sensations; give yourself space to let anything that comes up to arise, stay with your breath, and notice that the feelings will shift and change.” Simply acknowledging that feelings may arise will help create space where students can feel that they are “normal.”

2. Acknowledge Your Students

This one requires a little finesse. Often, emotional yoga students will try to hide the fact that they feel emotional (ie: crying) in class because they feel embarrassed. While I will never intentionally single anyone out or draw unwanted attention to them, at the same time there are ways to sensitively acknowledge students who may be having lots of feelings.

Simply placing a tissue box near a student is a way of saying, “It’s okay, I see you, and it’s okay to need a kleenex.”

If you do hands on assists, then giving students a stabilizing press when they’re in child’s pose can be a way of making non-verbal contact.

3. Lots Of Emotions

If a student is having an emotional moment, it may not feel safe to lie with their front body exposed in savasana or to be in motion in asana. If I notice a student is struggling, I will invite that student to come into child’s pose or a prone position where they can feel “hidden” and have some privacy. You can address the class generally, “hey everyone, child’s pose is an option here!” (giving your student a graceful way to take the pose without anyone really the wiser), or you could suggest the option to the student privately in a low tone of voice.

4. Manage Your Class

If a student is visibly or audibly upset, other members of the class will become distracted and be concerned about them. If a student is obviously struggling, you cannot ignore it. At that point, you have to consider protecting the emotional safety of the whole group. Frankly, this level of emotionality is very rare in a public class. However, if a yoga student is obviously emotional, I ask the student to come into child’s pose and focus on their breath. In this situation, I am more interested in using yoga tools to calm the student down than processing feelings. In my experience, coming into child’s pose is usually enough to support students to transition out of a more intense experience.

If this does not resolve the situation, then put the rest of the class into a resting pose, and find out what is necessary to support the student. I treat this kind of situation in the same way I would treat a student who injured themselves physically in class. It must be addressed before the rest of the group will feel easeful about moving forward. If you have desk staff, you may consider asking the student if they wish to take some privacy outside of the class, and leave them in someone’s care.

The most common displays of emotion that come up are tears and sadness. Displays of anger are never appropriate in a group class setting. If a student is behaving in a manner that threatens the emotional or physical safety of another student, then the student must change their behavior, leave the class, or the class must be stopped.

5. Know Your Limits

We are yoga teachers; not therapists or counsellors. While it is within the scope of our practice to create a safe and supportive space for students to experience their feelings, it is not our purview to diagnose, treat, or manage extreme emotional distress. If you have a student who needs additional support, consider referring them to a professional with those skills.

First of all, I rarely teach shoulderstand in a public class. Rarely. Let’s say, once a year. Maybe.

Here’s why: in most public class settings, I don’t have enough time or props to set everyone up safely. And by safely, I mean so that the students have enough support to protect their neck and access the proper actions of the pose. Two things get in the way:

1. our necks don’t bend 90 degrees
2. our upper backs “fall out” (because our necks don’t bend 90 degrees) and don’t have enough leverage to lift the body up

Take a look: in this photo you can see me doing shoulderstand. Let’s talk about both problems.

The Neck

Don’t be fooled by that measly little blanket in this photo; that’s not a real prop, that’s a piece of propaganda I threw down because I was doing a photoshoot and didn’t have proper supplies. I probably need about three more blankets to support my shoulders properly so that my neck can be a less-than-Exorcist angle.

The neck should not bend at 90 degrees. Full stop. It’s crappy on your ligaments and your blood vessels. And there’s no benefit to doing such an extreme angle (you can practice jalandhara bandha in bridge pose and meditation, I promise).

So just don’t do it. And even if you can do it, don’t make your average Joe student do it.

The Upper Back

The weight in shoulderstand should be on your shoulders – not your neck. When the shoulders aren’t propped, the upper back will round (like we need more of that!) and it’s hard to recruit the thoracic to move in and up to lift the weight of the body. As a result, you start using your hands and arms to hold everything in place like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This ain’t great, folks.

Even in this pose with me trying my darnedest, you can clearly see that my upper back can’t get up into my body to lift the spine. The plumb line is not happening. I also need to bring my tail in more and my toes away from my nose. But without the proper support of my upper back, it’s hard for me to find lift. Now, I can (sort of) pull this off from years of doing shoulder stand without props in Ashtanga. But for your average student in a public yoga class? In every class of thirty students, you’ll have probably three who are fine popping up there. Everyone else will struggle.

How To Teach It

So, should we toss shoulderstand out the window? No! Shoulderstand is the Queen of the asanas! It’s a great pose, and you can still teach the essence of it in class safely. Here’s how.

1. Teach modifications and variations instead

Rather than teach the full pose (body vertical), teach a modification. For a group class, it’s safer and lot faster. In this age of hour long yoga classes, you probably don’t have time to prop everyone up for their individual structure.

When I’m approaching a challenging pose and trying to think of modifications, I always think, “what’s the purpose of this pose?” When you identify the purpose of the pose, you can create appropriate modifications. For shoulderstand, we are looking for a sustainable inversion. Ideally, an inversion that recruits the upper back and unites the whole body in going up.

My favorite (and safe!) modification is putting the hips on blocks. Blocks are available in almost every yoga class. Voila! Sustainable inversion. Because the body isn’t at a 90 degree angle, the pressure is taken off the neck. This pose is easy to get into (have students start from bridge, then slide blocks under) and to exit.

Caveat: teach the actions of the pose, rather than teach this as a restorative pose. Rather than letting students collapse their upper backs towards the floor, have them incorporate the actions of sarvangasana by actively lifting their chest up (like bridge). They should also squeeze their legs together and stretch up through their inner feet. Teaching this pose as an active modification helps prepare your students for the real pose by teaching them the necessary work in this (more more accessible and safe) position.

Here’s another option: half shoulder stand. I don’t like this one as much because there is no graceful entrance (students throw their legs over their heads) and you can lose the action of the upper back. (Tasha is doing a pretty darn good job, but most of your students will let their upper backs fall to the floor.) In this shape, the weight of the lower body is anchored to the upper back rather than the shoulders, and it’s hard to find the action that you’ll need to do the full version of the pose. However, because the weight is on the upper back, the neck is not forced into full flexion.

And of course, there’s viparita karani.

While this pose is a wonderful sustainable inversion, I don’t love it as a shoulderstand substitute because it does not invite any action into the body. It’s restorative rather than active.

2. Use props

If you’re going to teach the full meal deal, then you’re going to to have to use props. The majority of your students will simply not have access to the flexion in their necks that is necessary (and you don’t really want to encourage that kind of flexion, anyway). See this video on why and how to prop.

If you haven’t taught a propped shoulderstand before, let me recommend that you go and take a series of Iyengar classes. Reading the suggestions below will not be sufficient. These folks are the masters of shoulderstand and you should learn from them.

Shoulderstand is hard to prop because every student has a unique structure and will need different support. As a general rule, you need to props the shoulders enough so that there is a space under the neck for the natural lordotic curve of the cervical spine to remain intact (no flattening of the cervical spine) and the upper back to lift. You also need a thin blanket or washcloth under the back of the head so that the head doesn’t stick to the floor (like against a mat). If a student has tight shoulders, he or she will need more props.

As a general rule, start off your students with the following:

• at least (at least!) four thick blankets per student (folded neatly, all the edges on one side, here’s a great picture), or
• four foam blocks plus one blanket, or
• a bolster under the shoulders (usually high enough, but kind of squishy so you can’t get as much action with the arms to help lift the chest)

Have each student use a strap to help gather and hold their upper arms (just above the elbow) that is pre-measured to be shoulders’ distance apart. They will have to put this on once they’re partway up into the pose and take it off before they come out.

You must also consider a “landing strip,” that is, what is supporting the student’s back before they go up and when they come out? The landing strip should be roughly the same height as their shoulder support. If you have blankets, then usually a 4″ block or two will suffice. If you’re using a bolster, use another bolster place perpendicularly to the first. You don’t want your students to crash down to the floor.

I am a fan of doing this pose at the wall so that you use your legs to get up. Set your students up so that they are a torso’s distance from the wall, and then they do a bridge up the wall. See this video.

3. Teach slow

If you are committed to doing the full version of shoulderstand in a public yoga class, then take the time to do it right. You’ll need at least fifteen minutes. Demonstrate the set up, the entrance, the necessary actions, and the exit. Educate your students why they need to prop to protect their necks so they they aren’t so tempted to throw themselves up and into the pose in other classes.

See this video for a step-by-step on teaching shoulderstand.

Or, instead of all this individual propping, do the first modification (bridge with blocks) and have your students in a safe version of shoulderstand in less than twenty seconds.

Shoot me any questions or concerns in the comments.

Practice safe out there, y’all!