What’s with the online classes?
“Do you teach only online?” There is a barely veiled judgement behind the comment, which I get every time I introduce another yoga teacher to my website and work. “No, no,” I quickly reassure them. “I also teach in-studio, it’s just that I travel a lot.”
The truth is, I teach mostly online. I have taught from hotel rooms, rented spaces, and borrowed porches on several continents across time zone divides that make me dizzy. I regularly teach from my living rooms in Brooklyn, Brundby and now Berlin (because apparently I really like B’s). And then, intermittently, I teach in studios across New York, on beaches up and down the US east coast, and in gyms wherever I get to and whenever folks ask me to.
I just teach, and I love it.
Even so, I feel deeply defensive about the online-forward part of my practice. Because there is an unspoken hierarchy of teaching vehicles in the yoga-world. And online is at the very bottom, even if it is livestream. And though I think that’s wrong, I also carry that judgement within me.
I qualified as a yoga teacher during the pandemic, both for my initial 200-hour qualification, as well as for the 300-hour advanced studies. Most of the qualifying hours I taught in between the two were online too. As a consequence, there is a comfort to this medium for me, which fits perfectly with my pandemic-enhanced introvertedness.
But there is something else about it too. Something about convenience, connectedness, and immediacy. Something about a different partnership between student and teacher: when we are both alone in our living rooms, I must trust that you listen to your body, and you must trust that I give clear enough instructions that you can.
And it is this self-discovery part of yoga that I personally find easier to dig into with home practice. When I practice at home, yoga is literally part of my life, and not just something I do when I put on yoga pants and go to the studio. Speaking of which, yoga at home means wearing whatever I want. It is easier to accept failing at home: however much I try, when I practice at a studio, I feel more self-conscious about my tight hamstrings and wonky knees, as if they were a sign of personal failure and not just how my body happens to be.
Don’t get me wrong: I love practicing (and teaching) at a studio, where we get to enter a space that is saturated with calmness, breathing in unison with others who equally came to connect with themselves. I just don’t think it is automatically superior to practicing at home with livestream support.
Yoga is so many different things to so many people. That’s one of my favorite things about it. I teach yoga for a community of students who enjoy my (in the words of my students) goofy, enthusiastic, sometimes challenging, always empowering style of teaching. It just happens to be mostly online.
