Remember when you were in grade school and every so often you got to stay home because it was a “staff development” day?
Just like school teachers, yoga teachers get to have “staff development” days, too. Termed “Continuing Education Units” or “CEU’s”, these hours for yoga teachers are required in order to keep the teaching cert. For a 200-hour Certification for example, you get to complete 30 hours of CEUs over two years.
Since receiving my 200-hour cert, I’ve been teaching quite a lot of hours, but have tallied far too few CEUs. I suspect this is the case for many teachers. Your teaching hours far outweigh your hours as a student attending classes, while simultaneously, your income takes a pretty serious dip. An expensive weekend workshop seems out of the question.
I bit the bullet (a very nicely priced bullet) last weekend and returned to Tsada Yoga in Dallas (the studio I still consider my “Yoga Home”) for four classes with Kelly Haas. Kelly has been teaching workshops at Tsada a couple of times a year for going on five years now. This was my first experience as a student with Kelly and I want to share some of the amazing things I learned and re-learned over the weekend.
First things first: Kelly teaches from the Anusara Yoga tradition which emphasizes healthy, safe alignment and with that alignment a focus on balance and movement from the heart. Kelly welcomed us with an infectious smile and laughing and an invitation to think about our practice in terms of the four elements – the lower body as “earthy”, the upper body as “sky”, “movement,” or an “airy lightness” and of bringing those elements into balance in every pose. In the first ten minutes I learned a new Sanskrit word: mudya or, “center line” and when we drew our palms together to open or close our practice it was always “to the center line” of our hearts. She reminded us to think of the line that separates yin from yang, earth from sky, upper body/lower body, work and rest, soft and hard, and what it symbolizes: again, that place of balance, the place between two forces where peace and calm reside.
That first evening we worked on “Opening the Lotus Flower of the Hips” and focused on the lower body with lunges, warrior twos, and pigeon pose with strong assists. Kelly reinforced the instruction I see more and more often to allow the natural curve of the lower back to remain soft, not to sharply tuck the pelvis under because that movement hardens the fronts of the hips and the groins. In order for the hips to broaden, to stretch the groins need to remain soft, pliable. The leg muscles do the work, not the groin muscles.
The second day worked the upper body with a lot of emphasis on lengthening the side body. How did Kelly instruct us to do this? “Lift your shoulders up towards your ears.” Really?! Don’t I always and everyday instruct my students to lower their shoulders away from their ears?! Yes, I do. And softening the shoulders away from the ears has the effect of lengthening the spine up through the neck and reducing as much tension as possible in the trapezius muscles on the tops of the shoulders. But following the instruction to lift our shoulders was the instruction to lengthen through the side ribs. That really worked. Then, Kelly instructed us to take our shoulder bones back and press the shoulder blades in toward our spines, engaging the infraspinatus muscles between the spine and the scapulae. We applied this movement to downward facing dog (adho mukha svanasana), mountain pose (tadasana), high plank to chattaranga dandasana, crescent lunge (ajanyasana) and frankly, every other pose for the rest of the weekend.
Another important alignment principle affecting me personally recently is the placement and flexion happening in the hand and forearm muscles. Teaching Sun Salutations (surya namaskar) involves a lot of weight on the hands, wrists and forearms. When we’re moving quickly through a sequence it’s often easy to sacrifice alignment for consistency and a consistent pace in the flow without our even realizing it (until our wrist aches or we have to ice the shoulder a few days later).
Such was the case with my right wrist and shoulder at the beginning of the workshop weekend. By Sunday I felt healed. Strong muscles working in the hands (palms and fingers) and the forearms (the soft-skinned underside of the forearm, not the top) take pressure off the wrist joint.
The same principle applies in the hip joint, where Kelly reminded us again and again to soften our groins and make the leg muscles work more. I went deeper in my standing poses guided by this fundamental re-alignment.
Kelly’s workshop really took me back to my “yoga home,” in more ways than one. From my early days practicing Iyengar Yoga I recall being firmly grounded in a strong emphasis on alignment, and breaking down a pose into its minute, constituent parts so that in every pose I felt the work. From the first pose of Kelly’s workshop, I felt at once like a brand new student, and like I was deepening what I know with new tools and new ways of looking at yoga poses. It was the infusion of yoga heart and soul I needed!