Published May 7, 2026 at 12:49 pm
When I started teaching yoga over 30 years ago, I tended to share an incredibly detailed explanation of each pose during class. Sometimes, I went beyond the scheduled finish time and students had to remind me that their lives were busy and they needed to leave! Eventually, I realized that while juggling such busy lives, students can only absorb so much information at a time. As an educator, one of the most important things I can do to help students is to speed up the knowledge sharing process.
By overwhelming them with too much information at once, I was not making this practice easy for the students, no matter my good intentions. What I found is that in order to create effective and accessible yoga classes, I needed to ask myself some basic (and sometimes surprising) questions. The answers included not only the information I shared, but also my sequences and how I showed up as a teacher.
5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself While Planning Your Yoga Classes
One of the biggest challenges – and responsibilities – teachers face is knowing what to share, how much to share, and in what order to share it. The following considerations can help you determine what will already support the students in front of you as well as your development as a teacher. For each question, you’ll find some additional prompts and more that may help you focus on the specific ways that question appears in your teaching.
1. Who do I teach?
Is the sequence appropriate for the students I teach?
Can I abandon my original plan to support those in the field and what they need today?
One sign of an experienced yoga teacher is the ability to think quickly and change the class plan according to how the students respond. This skill can take time to develop. It also requires a solid understanding of the basic foundations of yoga before you can feel confident enough to improvise. It is similar to learning how to improve when playing a musical instrument. We first need to build basic skills before deviating from the plan, otherwise it tends to be a little inconsistent. Be patient with yourself as you learn.
Being flexible and adaptable also means letting go of teaching everything you may have planned to share and unleashing your perfectionist tendencies. You can teach by example when you “go with the flow” and demonstrate your ability to adapt and be creative. This might mean responding to a request to do hip-opening exercises or answering questions about how to release tight shoulders. It may also mean slowing down the class and providing individual pointers rather than rushing through the planned sequence.
2. Am I trying to “fix” students?
Do I see my students as deficient in some way?
Do I suppose it’s my job to fix it or change it?
What would the classroom look like if you trusted the students?
How can I give them the ability to run their own business?
One way that ableism, ageism, and other harmful behaviors based on stereotypes seeps into yoga classes is through the idea that as teachers, Our mission is to “heal” our students. Even for yoga professionals, this is a common misunderstanding of how yoga works.
Our responsibility is to share access to practices and tools that students can rely on to work on their own development. But each student’s journey is unique. Our role is to create a supportive space for them to do this work. This includes not overwhelming them with information or keeping it after class to give them more information that we might think they “need.”
3. Am I helping students or making them depend on me?
Is my goal to teach my students or to have them depend on me?
What would my classes look like if my goal was to empower students?
How can I help them build their personal practice?
Instead of focusing on keeping students coming back to the classroom week after week, I like to focus on my role as a teacher. For example, many of us struggle with the idea that we need to introduce new sequences every week in order to maintain students’ interest. I have found that repeating similar sequences week after week provides students with an opportunity to learn some basic skills that they can bring home and work on in their own practice. I often use the 80/20 principle, which means I introduce at least eighty percent of the same poses and practices each week, and about twenty percent new or different.
Although capitalism teaches us that we need our students back in our classrooms week after week, the yoga tradition works differently. It reminds us that our role as interim bearer of this ancient tradition requires that we freely pass on what we have learned so that we can inspire the next generation of practitioners to learn from yoga and make it their own. Of course we can charge a fee for the class. But we have to remember that our primary focus is to help students build their own practices by educating them about the completeness of yoga so they can put it into practice, not to ensure our classrooms are overcrowded.
4. Do I teach yoga or asanas?
Am I committed to the fullness of yoga as reflected in the path of the eight limbs?
Can I find ways to share all aspects of yoga?
Asanas, or poses, are what most people come to yoga to try. But if we teach only physical practice, we cheat students out of an extended practice that includes the moral teachings of yoga, pranayama, and meditation.
These more subtle aspects of yoga may actually be more powerful than asana. They provide students with tools to work with their nervous system, address stress, and create moments of peace in their lives.
Even when we feel insecure about teaching the non-physical aspects of yoga, we can share ideas with students that will shape their understanding of the practice. The teacher does not need to know everything in order to convey useful information. Honest sharing of aspects of what worked in your journey, without making the class revolve around you, can be more authentic and meaningful to your students.
One way to deal with this is to take them with you as you continue to learn. For example, instead of using a theme for each chapter, you can commit to focusing on one aspect of yoga philosophy in your own practice. Sharing honestly by explaining, “I am working on ahimsa, nonviolence, this week by paying attention to my self-talk,” is much more powerful than telling students, “Practice ahimsa.”
5. Am I over-focusing on my yoga experience?
Can I let go of my own experience enough to realize that my students’ journeys are different from my own?
Can I recognize that it may grow from different practices?
Can I create a space for them to experience the same practices very differently than I do?
A key component of accessible, trauma-informed yoga is reminding students of their inherent agency. This means that they have choice and power in what they do and how they do it. This is especially important for people facing personal challenges or societal oppression.
The simplest way to remind our students of their abilities is by allowing them to have their own experience during training, and creating a space for them to explore this deeply. For example, how do you feel when a student deliberately ignores your instructions, chooses not to do a particular pose, and rests in Savasana? Can you get over your desire to keep everyone moving together and let this student have his or her own practice?
More important than the content of our classes is the way we teach them. This includes embodying the teachings of yoga by showing respect and kindness to our students through what we share with them. It is also essential that we show the same respect and patience to ourselves in recognition that we too are students and are always learning, no matter how long we have been teaching.
Learn more about designing effective yoga sequences with Jivana Hyman at Free workshop series.
