This entry was posted on Sep 29, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
As yoga lecturers, we face totally different learner sorts in each class we educate. Some individuals are visible learners. Demonstrating poses clicks in for this group. Others reply to handbook changes. (There’s additionally a considerable quantity of people that choose to not be manually adjusted, particularly with out permission. However that’s one other submit.) Nonetheless others are verbal learners. For that group, we use yoga cues.
Final yr, I posted a weblog on how one can simplify your cues to present college students some quiet time as properly to permit them to tune into the current expertise of every asana. In the present day I’d wish to tune in a bit extra to language.
Why Change Up Your Yoga Cues?
I’ve been blessed with many long-term yoga college students. Lately, a pupil who’s been attending my lessons for 30 years instructed me that I stated one thing within the class that fully reworked her observe. I used to be shocked—and happy. The cue was one thing I’ve stated numerous occasions earlier than. (Do you ever get uninterested in listening to your self give the identical yoga cues? I do!) Anyway, on this current case, I modified the wording a bit, and in that second, my pupil understood one thing she hadn’t gotten earlier than.
Our college students differ not solely of their responses to visible and verbal studying. Additionally they differ of their response to totally different phrases. Altering your language simply would possibly give even your most stalwart college students a brand new means of experiencing their observe.
As a author, I’m continually striving to make use of phrases which can be extra descriptive and fewer generic—with out turning into overly flowery. That is more durable to do on the fly, after I’m educating a category. Nevertheless it’s doable. Listed here are just a few methods to discover increasing your yoga vocabulary.
A Few Options
- One of the simplest ways to reword your yoga cues is to replicate on what you’re about to say forward of time. You would possibly be capable of do that on the fly, particularly in case you educate a slower-paced, non-vinyasa-type class. Earlier than you end up about to talk your tried-and-true yoga cue, cease your self for a second. Is there one other solution to convey what you’re about to say? Perhaps the cue you’ve all the time used actually is the easiest way to get your level throughout. However it may’t harm to attempt one other wording.
- If it’s simpler, you possibly can discover altering up your cues whenever you’re not educating. Make a listing of your most typical yoga cues. Probably, your most popular wording will come to thoughts first. Write it down. Then take into consideration the way you would possibly phrase it otherwise.
- It may be actually instructive to report just a few lessons. Then hearken to the way you talk your yoga cues. Are you able to give you inventive methods to convey the ideas you need to share, with out shedding readability?
I discover developing with inventive wording to be a good way to juice up my educating. It not solely helps me attain extra college students, nevertheless it additionally retains my very own educating contemporary. Instructing yoga is an ever-changing course of. Altering up your yoga cues may help you evolve as a instructor.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced educating in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Follow and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third guide is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards.