Your ability and comfort are different from my experience with yoga. I know better than to try to teach you the yoga I do for myself. I teach customized yoga for each student. But I also “eat my own dog food.” The poses listed here are not my personal yoga. But the poses here I do a lot, some daily. I am the test kitchen, and teaching is the field work.
These poses are doable, teachable, and work. That does not mean they cannot injure you. If you do them badly or overdo it, them can injure like anything.
I write about the poses I can recommend with words. But not for you to learn all of them from my descriptions. Poses are like sports skills: it takes more than words and examples to teach them.1
I teach much more than this list. I write here about what I think I can usefully write about.
Poses work by how we refine them, and we cannot see most of this. I teach you what to notice and a feel for yourself. You learn a pose by stages, like we learn most things. So I coach you step by step.
Do not push. Trying harder fails, often hurts, and can injure you.
If you do a pose hard 5 times right now, you will hurt tomorrow or sooner. And you will not do it again for a week, or longer.
If you do a pose 2 times smoothly with stability and comfort today, make it feel good, and again tomorrow, and again, it works. And you can keep doing it and learning from it.
Learning yoga is a skills drill. Your ability to learn will tire out before your muscles. I’ll give you short routines you enjoy that do good. If you don’t enjoy, stop, and tell me.
Practice is yoga. So we make practice enjoyable and brief, so you enjoy it and do it.
I teach you poses you can do with stability and comfort and focus. Without these a pose does not do good.
- “[…] human learning is not simply about the explicit processing, encoding, and retrieval of verbal instruction but as much or more about implicit or nonverbal learning-by-doing in varied practice tasks where interactive feedback is available.” [my emphasis] Koedinger, K. R., Carvalho, P. F., Liu, R., & McLaughlin, E. A. (2023). An astonishing regularity in student learning rate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(13), e2221311120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221311120 ↩︎
Yoga Tutor 