Day #13 - Teach with Conviction

There has been a great deal of talk about what makes a good teacher this week in the context of the seniors/assessors meeting.

It has been made loud and clear that just because you can do good postures it does not mean you are a good teacher.

Rather, be a good student and you will make a good teacher.

Prashant spoke about studentship and how this is lost when we become a teacher.

When we get certified we say ‘now I am a teacher’ and we can abandon our studentship.

We need to teach with conviction, it is a quality of any teacher, but not at the expense of our studentship.

Prashant gave a beautiful analogy that our studentship needs to be taken care of like a baby. He said “protect your studentship which is forever an infant”

I am jealous of the students who are here for the month that are not teachers. They can just do the yoga and enjoy it without their teacher’s hat getting in the way, without spending hours writing notes adding to the database of information that a teacher develops.

I often say I am a student first and foremost and this is not rhetoric, this is my experience.

I have been taught this by my senior teacher. When I was in class in one of the first years of teacher training she pulled me up and said, be a good student, you are a role model for the other students.

She said this because she saw me in her class with my teacher’s brain on, she was teaching something and I was doing something she had taught yesterday.

It’s like we have to empty ourselves after every class and be ready to move on to the next thing.

I am not suggesting we dispose of what we have learned, but not grip and attach ourselves to it like it is gospel.

And of course, this habit needs to start in our own practice. To each day start fresh and explore and enquire in our practice and never say ‘I know’.

I feel inspired to come to everything in life with this attitude.

Imagine every time my children want to tell me something (and often we know along the lines of what they are going to say) imagine being completely open to what they are going to say, no presumption, no assumed knowledge, and as a result, no premeditated answers or judgments and as a result, we wouldn’t have the same reactions and the whole interaction would be full of potential.

If we can practice this on the mat then let’s hope it will come to us off the mat too.