A few months ago I decided to leave my job and spend some time in Latin America learning Spanish, picking up some new skills, and figuring out what I wanted to do next. So when I found a 60 day yoga teacher training course in a really remote location in Nicaragua, I signed up almost straight away.

60 days for a 200hr yoga yoga teacher training course, I thought, would be a nice, easy, long getaway. I’d spend hours each day doing yoga and getting super flexible. I’d probably have heaps of free time in between to devote to reading, sleeping, and daydreaming. And if I found the motivation, in between all of that, to be responsible, I’d see if anyone was interested in getting in some public speaking practice.

It’s almost funny, thinking back on that now, to realize just how wrong I was. The classes and the entire experience outside of that were nothing like I’d expected. But to (very loosely) paraphrase the Rolling Stones, you don’t always get what you want, but you might just get what you need.

It’s hard for me to convey exactly what the whole experience was like. We were in the jungle, our teacher sometimes felt more like a character out of a storybook rather than a real person, and there were so many moments when I thought ‘this is not something I’d ever imagined myself doing.’ I’ll write more about all of this in my next blog post, but let me start by telling you a bit about the course.

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Learning how to teach

I’d expected our very first day of class to be nice and cruisy. I wandered in to the yoga platform a little before 7am, when the class was meant to start, set up my mat, and sat comfortably down, breathing in the sounds of the birds and the river and feeling so at peace. A peace which was broken very shortly by the arrival of our teacher and her pronouncement that we were going to start the day by taking turns teaching a yoga flow.

Teaching? I thought. I don’t know how! I’m not even fully awake yet. This was not my idea of relaxing. But there was no way to get out of it. So, with my heart in my stomach, I got up and did my best – which was not very good, given that I had no prior experience and no time to prepare.

Xian, our teacher, filmed each class so we could watch the videos and give ourselves our own feedback later on. We’d also get feedback from each other and from Xian. Xian’s feedback was thorough to the point of nitpicking – pointing out every single word that could have been better, assessing our tone, poise, posture, speed, eye contact, hand gestures, explanations, and a dozen other things.

Teaching, Xian explained, was an art. You needed to be a good public speaker. You needed to be captivating and interesting enough to hold your students’ attention. You needed to be clear and concise enough that they could understand everything. You needed to walk with poise, have good posture, speak clearly and loudly, use hand gestures, be able to deal with interruptions and special requests, and answer all your students’ questions.

Over the next two months, we worked on all of these things by teaching a class every single day (except for Monday, which was our day off).

Each morning we’d teach a class based on whatever we’d learned the day before. That afternoon, Xian would teach us something new. The evening would be spent studying and practicing what we’d just learned so we could teach it the next morning.

So much for an easy, relaxed getaway. 

And yet, this was perfect. I’ve hated public speaking for most of my life. And I used to be terrible at it until a few years ago when, for a little while, I made a concerted effort to improve. I’d joined Toastmasters, spoke at a few Meetups and other events, and taught a few classes. But once I’d moved past the point of being absolutely atrocious and had established myself firmly within mediocre territory, I’d fallen off the bandwagon. I so badly wanted to keep improving, but I was just too busy and couldn’t do it justice.

But now, unexpectedly, I found myself in a position to do just that – with far more scrutiny and intensity than I’d ever imagined.

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Every body is different

But you’re just teaching a yoga class, you might think. It’s not really public speaking, is it? Or maybe you don’t think that, but that is what my parents asked me when I told them about it.

The thing was, apart from the first two days, we didn’t actually teach any more yoga classes until almost the second month in. Instead, we taught 40 minute workshops on specific poses and physiology, and lectures on philosophy.

One of the things that surprised me was how a lot of yoga poses can be really bad for your body. For example, not everyone has the back or shoulder flexibility to do big backbends in a nice, elongated way. So when they do a backbend, most of that movement comes from their lower back, compressing the lumbar spine and wearing down the vertebrae there (and the disks in between them). Repeatedly doing this can cause a lot of spinal issues, including, in extreme cases, slipped disks.

If you’re doing a crescent lunge and your hips aren’t even, you end up with your spine curved to one side, and you then do a backbend on top of that. This is really bad for your SI joint, which connects your spine to your hips. That joint doesn’t have a lot of flexibility, and these kinds of movements can wear it down – which is bad because what that joint does have a lot of is nerve endings, so this causes lots of pain.

We learned a lot about spinal health, the most efficient way to stretch a muscle, how to tell the difference between tension and a stretch, or tension and compression, how to adjust poses for different bodies and skill levels, and how to figure out why someone is experiencing pain in a pose, and what changes or movements might alleviate it.

One of the most important lessons was that bodies all differ based on tension, compression, proportion and orientation, and that means that yoga poses should have lots of variations because otherwise some people just won’t be able to do them safely or effectively.

Let me explain that in more detail. Compression refers to when the bones in your body limit your range of movement. So for example, my arms can go really far up and back behind my head, which means I find it easy to have my arms straight and shoulder width apart in down dog.

But there’s a bone called the acromion that can take a few different shapes, and in some people, that bone stops them from lifting their arms up even fully vertically over their heads. No amount of stretching will change this – there’s just a bone in the way. For them, they might need to have their elbows bent in down dog, or to spread their arms out wider, so that their humerus can get around the acromion.

Other times, your range of motion may be limited by tension. This means that your muscles are too tight, and this can be overcome by stretching. You can’t stretch a tensed muscle efficiently, so you need to relax that muscle first, and then start stretching. Breathe into it and deepen the stretch gradually. Even when you feel it immediately, your muscles don’t really start stretching out until after about 20s, so you need to hold the stretch for a while. Then come out gently, so that you’re not shocking the muscle you’ve just stretched by bringing tension into it immediately after.

People’s bodies also differ in orientation and proportion. Some people have longer arms in relation to their torsos, for example, or their elbows are more turned out. So when they’re doing a pose, their arms may need to be placed in a slightly different position in order to provide their body with support and to be safely weight bearing.

What this all means is that the idea of a ‘perfect’ yoga pose can be problematic because it doesn’t account for these differences and encourages people to aim for something that their bodies might just not be able to do. Modifications and variations are important to let everyone get a good stretch and do poses safely.

Some of my other favorite topics included learning how to sit and stand in the right way, with good posture. My shoulders usually ache when I sit cross legged for longer than about a minute, and my back would hurt if I had to stand for long periods of time. I was so pleasantly surprised, after changing my posture, to find my back pain go away. I still don’t like sitting or standing for long periods of time, but now it’s just because I get tired, not because I’m in pain.

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Teaching is hard

Learning was the easy part. Teaching was much harder. Xian would tell the class to act dumb and to do silly things, which meant that in addition to remembering a ton of new information, being able to explain it all in detail, and then demonstrating it on our own and other peoples’ bodies, we also had to deal with correcting people who wilfully misinterpreted our instructions, and having Xian interrupt any time we made a mistake.

It was a lot. And sometimes it would get really frustrating. Xian’s English was a bit rough (she’s from Germany, but has spent a lot of time in America, England, and Thailand before settling in Nicaragua) so I’d get particularly prickly when she’d pick on my choice of words for reasons that I didn’t agree with, or that were actually gramatically incorrect – for example, she thought the word ‘twist’ had negative connotations, or that the word ‘through’ specifically suggested a latitudinal direction, and she’d say ‘vertebras’ instead of ‘vertebrae’.

She was also super inconsistent, so she’d pick on us for saying something a certain way, but then she’d say it the exact same way when she was teaching. In a way though, this was also good practice – learning to teach and present without getting fazed by interruptions, even when those interruptions made me feel frustrated and annoyed.

Watching and listening to myself on video every day also helped. I found this so harrowing at the start because I hate hearing my voice, and I’d dwell on every little mistake I made. But I got desensitized to the sound of my voice after a while, and then really tried to focus on how I was improving. Each class, I’d pick one area of improvement to focus on, and then I’d watch my video back to see how I’d done.

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Getting spiritual

All yoga teaching courses have a large spiritual component. I had mixed feelings about this.

I wasn’t interested in ‘yogic philosophy’ because it’s just an oversimplified and misinterpreted version of Hindu religious philosophy. I think it’s so disrespectful to spend a short time learning about someone else’s religion and then teaching about it as if you’re an expert. Besides which, my values don’t always align with Hindu philosophy, and I don’t want to teach something that I don’t actually believe in.

But Xian didn’t teach it in a dogmatic or prescriptive way. Nobody, she pointed out, likes a preacher. So instead of just reciting someone else’s ideas, she encouraged us to really engage with all the philosophical concepts we covered, and then to talk about what resonated with us, and why, and to do it by telling stories. Nobody likes getting preached to, but everyone likes a story.

It was wonderful. I spent so long thinking about ahimsa, cultivating contentment, the Bhagavad Gita, and numerous other concepts that really forced me to consider what I valued and why. I’d also work in ideas like Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, moral relativism, and Kantian philosophy.

One of the things that really stuck with me was ahimsa, which is about non-violence and non-harming in action, thought, and word, towards oneself and others. I grew up Catholic, and Catholicism is very focused on doing things for other people while depriving and (metaphorically) flagellating yourself.

But ahimsa suggests that it’s just as important to be kind to yourself. If you’re stressed and sad and struggling, the people you love notice and are bothered by it and those emotions can also affect them. But if you’re content and peaceful and have your shit together, you have a positive emotional influence on those around you, and you’re more capable of helping others.

There were still some things that I thought were complete bs. Xian was really into energy healing, for example. But I liked that when she taught us about these things, she’d tell us that ‘You don’t have to believe in this. It’s okay if you think this is just hippie bs, but give it a go anyway’ or ‘This is what I believe, you don’t have to agree with it’ or ‘It doesn’t really matter if it’s real or imagined or placebo, as long as it helps you.’

I am not into hippie new age stuff, and I often write off and avoid people who are. This is in large part because of past experiences – I’ve met and disliked numerous people who are anti-vaxxers, really into yoni eggs, or who think modern medicine is evil but are happy to use ancient chinese medicines even if they contain the body parts of illegaly poached endangered animals. And mostly those people have been super pushy about their ideas and really arrogant – and I’ve been rude and dismissive right back.

But seeing how Xian talked about these things helped me realize that I could talk to people with opposing beliefs in the same way. Telling someone that they don’t have to believe in something but to try it anyway makes it feel safe for them to give it a go. They can listen to what you’re saying without feeling attacked, even if they believe in something different.

And some of it was just pragmatic. Xian taught a class on coincidences and how the universe always provides, and the key gist of it was that everything happens for a reason. I don’t have to believe in the universe having some grand plan, but if I assume that everything happens for a good reason then I’m going to look for a lesson in everything that happens to me. I’m automatically going to have a more positive outlook on life, and I’m going to see the positive side even of bad/hard/challenging things. I’ve been putting this into practice, and it’s made such a huge difference.

The other things that I was a surprise fan of were pranayama (which basically means breathing exercises) and meditations.

The Buddhists have this idea that the mind is a bit like a monkey. If you tell a monkey to sit down in one place and be quiet, it’s not going to listen. It’ll jump around and make a mess and cause havoc. But if you give it something to play with, it’ll sit down and focus on that one thing. The mind’s the same – it’s often hard to quieten and clear your mind if you’re trying to think of nothing. Pranayama gives you something to focus on, and since they’re just breathing exercises, it really brings you into your body and gets you out of your head.

This was good because I usually suck at meditating – my mind is like a particularly hyperactive monkey. Doing some pranayama first made it way easier to meditate.

And wow, the meditations. Sometimes we’d do meditations that were just about coming into your body and out of your mind, but other times we’d do meditations that focused on certain ideas. You don’t usually get people telling you to close your eyes and spend some time just thinking about an idea and all of its repercussions. I’d always feel like I was having an epiphany.

Here’s a line from a meditation I did. “Imagine everyone you ever met took to heart – and remembered – every single thing you said to them… for the rest of their lives. How much more careful would you be with your words?” I looooved putting these together, and I loved doing them.

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There’s a lot more to teaching yoga than just yoga

We did also put together actual yoga classes. I liked having themes to my classes – yoga for climbers, a hip opening class, a balance and strengthening class, etc.

We worked a lot on corrections and adjustments, so that we’d have to walk around and fix people’s postures and help them deepen into each stretch at the same time as instructing.

My favorite bit was always shivasana, when I’d go around giving everyone a little head massage – I loved how much people enjoyed this, and that it almost always made everyone smile. It was kind of meditative for me too – I didn’t have to think about speaking, and could just focus on my hands.

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When I left, it struck me just how much I’d learned, and changed, and thought about. No, I hadn’t turned into a super flexible person. In fact, I’d probably gotten less flexible and less strong because I was so busy all through the course that I did way less physical activity than I usually do.

But I felt so much more confident and self assured. I was more content, and thoughtful, and peaceful. And if you give me a day to prepare, I can give you a decent 40 minute speech on almost any topic. I can also help you figure out why it hurts to do a yoga pose and how you can do it in a way that doesn’t cause you pain. So on the whole, I was pretty pleased with how things turned out.

There’s so much more I want to share about my 2 months in Nicaragua. Outside of class we were eating vegan, ayurvedic food, were mostly disconnected from the outside world, didn’t have any mirrors, and lived in the jungle surrounded by snakes, scorpions, spiders, and so much other wildlife. It was different and challenging and wonderful in so many ways, and I was so far out of my comfort zone.

But I’ll write more about that in my next post. If you want to read more about the course, or do it yourself, you can check it out on Bookyogaretreats.com.