Kathy Cooper Yoga Mats via Pinterest
I’ve uncovered a new offence that I’m capable of. I’m calling it creation-envy. What occurs for me when I hear of a great idea or turn of phrase is that I find myself wishing I’d thought of it or said it first.
Occasionally, I’ll hear another yoga teacher say something in class that is so perfectly verbalised that I just have to ‘borrow’ it. I think that Jon Kabat-Zinn of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine speaks like an angel on his meditation recordings, and his words drop right into my heart, completely bypassing my head.
Today I came across an excerpt from a book called Teaching People, Not Poses: 12 Principles for Teaching Yoga With Integrity. The author, Jay Fields, sums up the way I aspire to teach so succinctly and well that I wished I’d written the book.
Interestingly, Jay says that other people than yoga teachers are finding her book useful. Well, why wouldn’t they? Yoga students would think words like these are reassuring:
Practice is not about being perfect. It’s about being yourself. It’s about getting past your lines of defense to find the soft, chewy, sweet center.
Almost as much as I love teaching and practising yoga, I love inspiring students to do home practice.
My spirit soars when I hear that someone has become turned on enough to buy a yoga mat, remembered the postures they’ve learned in class, and even begun to bend the practices so that they make a good fit for their individual lifestyle.
Some people are discouraged from doing home practice because they feel they don’t know enough. But even knowing a little and applying it is helpful because the truth is that there will be never be an end to learning more about yoga.
If you don’t have a deep groove of yoga practice established as yet, just be kind to yourself, and keep coming back to your mat when you can.
It helps to remember the magic moments that yoga practice creates, whether you’re in classes or at home. When you tap into these experiences, you become more and more enrolled in doing practice – even when you’ve been doing it for years.
If you are a somewhat diffident practitioner or a beginner, we’ve created the YogaAnywhere practice sets to provide a basic, but structured guide on how to do 10 or 20 initial poses, plus suggestions and encouragement along the way. They were created to inspire people to get started – and to keep going. You’ll never know where you’ll end up 
http://yogadork.com/news/for-teachers/teaching-people-not-poses-by-jay-fields/
A Sutra a Day: III-18 – More Unpacking Patanjali
It’s so very interesting to me – the way what I read or see or hear is open to wide interpretation when compared to others’ understanding, even when we’ve been exposed to the same phenomena. I guess part of what yoga offers us is a system that exposes the filters we have over what we consider our reliable organs of perception.
This is to be expected when we consider the social conditioning and heredity that varies so much among the 7 billion people on the planet. It causes us to think, feel, and look very differently to one another.
One area where I wasn’t expecting such variance was in the study of Patanjali’s Sutra, but differences there be, even where the words being interpreted are the same.
Here’s some examples from today’s Sutra III-18:
Of all the Patanjali translator/commentators in the world, some will carry more weight than others, I know. But the above writers have pretty good credentials, I think you would agree. And still, even though some of them are talking about reincarnation, others refer to ‘conditioning’ or ‘the past’. Why aren’t they on the same page?
I do like the variety of these writers, though, particularly in the way it shows up early on in Sutra I-2:
I say, vive la difference, especially if we don’t have to fight about it
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Posted in Philosophy, writing, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Tagged B.K.S. Iyengar, Chip Hartranft, commentators, georg feuerstein, paramahamsa, t k v desikachar