Sage Rountree - Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses: A Practical Workbook for Integrating Themes, Ideas, and Inspiration into Your Class

Copyright 2019 by Sage Rountree and Alexandra DeSiato. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

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North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

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Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses: A Practical Workbook for Integrating Themes, Ideas, and Inspiration into Your Class is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rountree, Sage Hamilton, author. | Desiato, Alexandra, 1979- author.Title: Teaching yoga beyond the poses : a practical workbook for integrating themes, ideas, and inspiration into your class / Sage Rountree and Alexandra DeSiato.Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, [2019]Identifiers: LCCN 2018048512 | ISBN 9781623173227 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Hatha yoga--Study and teaching. | BISAC: HEALTH & FITNESS / Yoga. | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Meditation. | SELF-HELP / Motivational & Inspirational.Classification: LCC RA781.7 .R72 2019 | DDC 613.7/046076--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048512

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By Cyndi Lee

Years ago, when I was teaching a workshop called Yoga Body Buddha Mind in North Carolina, I met Sage Rountree. She was in the front row, which told me that even though her yoga asana practice was full of strength, clarity, and confidence, she wanted to learn more about the invisible parts of this vast thing called yoga. She wasnt just an athletic practitioner, she was a real yogini. After class, she introduced herself to me and gave me a copy of her book, The Athletes Guide to Yoga. From the start, she has had something valuable to say to yogis of all kinds.

Rountrees career as a yoga teacher and author mirrors the path of many hatha yoga teachers: before we go inside, we start with the outsidewhat we can see and feel. We start with the body. Hatha can be translated as sun and moon, and yoga can be translated as relationship or integration. Hatha yoga shows us that when we integrate two oppositional energies in equal measure we come into a sense of wholeness. Hatha yoga offers us this path through the body, but as we practice with our bodies, we also pay attention to what comes up in our mind and hearts. When our yoga experience becomes so profound that it begins to infuse our life with fresh meaning, we often get inspired to share this goodness with others. We become yoga teachers.

Unfortunately, many graduates of teacher-training programs find themselves taking their place in front of the first yoga class they teach and realizing, in a panic, I dont know what to say about yoga! Telling people where to put their arms and legs and how to organize the body is just the first half of teaching. As with our own yoga practice, in teaching we also start with the body. We learn to use clear instructional language such as reach, flow, engage, let go, flex, point, lengthen, press down, and lift up.

To evolve from being a yoga instructor to becoming a yoga teacher, one must also include the part about how we notice our thoughts and emotions as we move our bodies. Yoga is not just about doing, its about experiencing. Teachers want to find ways to verbally articulate these insights that have arisen in their practice. Even more they want to be able to offer practice experiences to their students in which the words and the movementsthe two apparent opposites that together create the whole meaningful experienceare integrated.

Rountree knows this from the arc of her own teaching experience as well as leading numerous teacher trainings. How fortunate for us that she has teamed up with another smart and seasoned yoga teacher, Alexandra DeSiato. These two women have been in the seat of the teacher long enough to know how difficult this second stage of teaching can be. They know that it is natural to feel shy and underconfident, and they also know how to shepherd you through this process. Whether working with athletes who have no time for woo-woo or sharing insights with women going through the very real experience of pregnancy, they have had real opportunities to learn how to speak their truth simply. Then, they trust the practice of yoga to do the rest.

I bet when you take a class from Rountree or DeSiato, they make this look easy. But after forty years of teaching yoga, I can tell you that although it gets easier, its never easy! Rountree and DeSiato are not just good teachers because they are special (which they are) or because they have years of experience (which they do) but because they have deeply engaged in the yogic practice of svadyaya, self-study. In the context of yoga, self-study has a dual meaning. One is taking it upon yourself to deepen your yoga education through reading texts, taking classes, and attending lectures, and the other is learning how to study yourself. This might sound egocentric, but its really the opposite.

The yogic tradition of self-study invites us to observe our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as a path to freedom from our usual self-centeredness. Its such a relief to understand that whatever thoughts arise will also pass, and this realization helps us recognize that our true center is one of goodness. Svadyaya helps us clean out our own closet, so to speak, so we can be more available to our friends and families, and of course, to our students.

Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses invites you to take a deep dive into svadyayato bravely look at what comes up in your own yoga practice and then contemplate it and write about it. Rountree and DeSiato guide you in exploring the universality of your personal insights by searching out others poetic, musical, and spoken expressions of this same common experience. They remind you to honor your lineage by recalling the teachers who came before you and recognizing how the wisdom they shared now lives in you.

One of the many things I really like about Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses is that reading this book is like taking a yoga class. Just as a yoga class deconstructs, explores, and then reconstructs the poses into a whole sequence that is then better understood, this book leads the yoga teacher step-by-step through confusion and obstacles to reach clarity and inspiration. The reader/yoga teacher is given numerous paths toward finding their personal language and a variety of methods for integrating that with instructional language, to finally be able to teach a multilayered, fully dimensional yoga class.