“It’s your job as the teacher to answer questions!” she said a little peevishly, apparently since I hadn’t given her the kind of answer she was looking for.

Actually, I don’t see it that way. I believe that my job as teacher is to transmit the inner experience of the yoga poses, and of the practice as a whole, to my students. This might, or might not at any given moment, include giving discursive verbal answers to students’ questions.

We live in a very disembodied “talking-heads” media culture these days, and so I think we’ve largely come to expect learning to happen by some authority answering questions through the mouth-to-ear channel. But not every understanding can be transmitted that way, and our culturally sanctioned and reinforced expectation that it can be often leads us astray.

There’s a big difference between knowing how and being able. 

If there is any discipline that means to reinforce this most fundamental of truths, it is yoga.  In yoga, the answers to many---if not all---of the student’s questions are to be found within the poses themselves. And not within the teacher’s poses either, but within the student’s poses: it is only within the student’s own poses, within the body-mind of the one who seeks to know that the “answers” will reveal themselves.

The teacher provides the means---knowledgeable instruction, intelligent sequencing, judicious timing, repetition---but the answers lie hidden inside the student’s body. In yoga, the rush of information that can come from adjusting your big toe in ardha chandrasana is worth ten thousand words. Just talking about how the big toe moves won’t do it. Just making a mental list of the various ways the big toe might move won’t do it. Planning to use the information next time won’t do it. Only performing the action now will do it, only acting in the present moment will bring the information alive.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what children and yogis take for granted: that the body is full of surprises, that it is mightily cryptic, and that it is worth paying attention to. Learning to listen to the body’s answers takes patience. And few of us, students and teachers alike, really have enough patience to wholly decipher all that the body might want to tell us. None of us have an easy time being quiet.

This is not to suggest that there is nothing to say about the poses, or that just repeating the poses over and over again is any way to learn yoga. Sheer dumb repetition without some fresh input or insight won’t get you very far (unless you call going round and round in circles getting somewhere). But it is all too easy to get sidetracked into language. Words can be useful in a yoga class, but only if they lead the student to try on and discover for themselves how certain small physical movements can open doorways to more sophisticated, subtle, experientially-based kinds of knowing that can be physical, emotional, intellectual and maybe even spiritual, all the while and not incidentally learning the merits of patient, quiet listening.

And maybe it is just this, learning to trust that the body’s liberated inner intelligence surpasses anything that can be asked or answered in words, maybe it is this that constitutes yoga’s greatest teaching for us.

Posted 08/06/09