Mark Stephens - Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques

Teaching Yoga is an urgently needed manual that will be a valuable tool in the arsenal of aspiring yoga teachers to add perspective and to hone their skills. It provides a wealth of foundational information, advice, tips, guidance, and grist for the mill.

Ganga White, founder, White Lotus Yoga Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, and author of Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

Teaching Yoga is friendly, well-thought-out, helpful, clear, and tremendously thorough. Many people will benefit from this gift, it being exactly what is needed to help a growing teacher teach at his or her best. Im glad it is finally in print and it is coming out just in time for my next teacher training!

Erich Schiffmann, author of Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness

Mark Stephens is making a real offering to yoga teachers, providing practical tools and inspiration for the path that embraces all forms of embodied yoga. There are hard-to-find gems that make this a great resource, from the section on the mythological meaning behind the asanas to teaching cues for the core asanas and sequencing tools from vinyasa krama. Enjoy this great resource and dive deeply into your own transformational process of teaching yoga.

Shiva Rea, leading instructor of Transformational Prana Flow Yoga and Yoga Trance Dance

Yoga luminary Mark Stephens has written a book that embodies Hatha yoga itself, offering a highly informative guide for all yoga teachers. Teaching Yoga answers our questions and addresses our controversies. This comprehensive and scholarly guide is now required reading for our teaching staff.

Mary Lynn Fitton, founder and director of programs, The Art of Yoga Project

Dedicated yoga students and their teachers will find Mark Stephenss comprehensive book an essential and timeless resource. Filled with profound insights presented with clarity and intelligence, Teaching Yoga is a wonderful resource that beautifully models the practice of yoga itself; it unites many diverse threads of truth into a cohesive, vibrant whole. It has quickly become an indispensable part of my teaching library.

Daniel Stewart, cofounder and director, Rising Lotus Yoga, Los Angeles, California

Fifteen years after starting a successful movement to bring yoga into inner city schools, prisons, treatment centers, and veterans facilities, Mark Stephens is back with a treasure trove of wisdom and insight drawn from years of training teachers for success in those settings as well as more traditional yoga spaces such as studios, retreats, and conferences. Teaching Yoga is destined to be a classic that every yoga teacher and student will consult for years to come.

James Wvinner, yogi and cofounder of Yoga, Tribe, and Culture

eISBN: 978-1-58394-472-1

Copyright 2010 by Mark Stephens. 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.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Front and back cover photographs James Wvinner
Cover design Ayelet Maida, A/M Studios

Teaching Yoga: Essential Foundations and Techniques is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stephens, Mark, 1958
Teaching yoga : essential foundations and techniques / Mark Stephens.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. YogaStudy and teaching. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Yoga. 2. Teachingmethods. QT 18 S829t 2009]
RA781.7.S7277 2009
613.704607dc22
2009041082

v3.1_r1

To the best teacher
youll ever have
the one singing and dancing
in your heart.

This book would not have been conceivable without the students Ive been honored to teach over the past fifteen years in yoga studios, shelters, prisons, treatment centers, and public schools, along with hundreds of participants in my teacher-training courses over the years. Together they remain my most influential source of inspiration and insight as a yoga teacher and teacher trainer, giving concrete expression and meaning to the more formal yoga teacher training and instruction I received at Yoga Works in the early to mid-1990s.

The formative voices of my first teachersErich Schiffmann, Chuck Miller, Steve Ross, Lisa Walford, and Maty Ezratystill echo in my approach to the practice. In-depth apprenticeships with Jasmine Lieb and Shiva Rea gave me the opportunity to hone my ability to see and relate to students in a more meaningful way, amplified by assisting Shiva on several yoga retreats from 1995 to 1997. In-depth workshops over the years with Ramanand Patel, Richard Freeman, Dona Holleman, Kofi Busia, Patricia Walden, Rodney Yee, Tias Little, John Schumacher, Tim Miller, John Friend, and Judith Lasater influenced my approach to teaching in often quite different ways.

Conversations with several friends and colleagues helped me to refine my presentation of every topic covered here. Sally Kempton, Joel Kramer, Diana Alstad, Shiva Rea, Kofi Busia, Mariel Hemingway, James Bailey, Ganga White, James Wvinner, Jennifer Stanley, Ralph Quinn, and Sarah Powers led me to refine the text in ways they might not recognize but that are nonetheless expressed in these pages. Scores of participants in my Yoga Teacher Training and In-Depth Studies Program in Santa Cruz, California, read and shared in discussions of early drafts of every chapter; Jody Greene, Lynda Lewitt, Karen Parrish, Jim Frandeen, and Jenna Jeantet offered thorough readings and critiques.

My research assistant, yoga teacher Cindy Cheung, was helpful in finding and organizing a variety of resources; she also read and critiqued each chapter. Melinda Stephens-Bukey read and critiqued several early drafts and assisted with the appendices. Laurie Gibson read and edited the initial draft of the manuscript, offering questions and suggestions conceivable only by a thoughtful professional editor from outside the yoga community. Many other friends, students, and fellow teachers read portions of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions.

Bryce Florian, Maya Gil-Cantu, Jody Greene, Debbie Jordan, JuJu Kim, Jeanette Lehouillier, Joanna Saxby, Jennifer Stanley, and Dana Wingfield graciously modeled the asanas shown in , all which he originally drew for Ray Long, MDs Bandha Yoga series of yoga anatomy books.

The folks at North Atlantic Books were delightful to work with, starting with copublisher Lindy Hough pulling the needle of my original manuscript from a haystack of book proposals and embracing my vision of the book. My wonderful project editor at North Atlantic, Jessica Sevey, expertly guided me through all the phases of translating a draft manuscript into a complete book, providing a wide array of insights on every element of the book. Christopher Church masterfully edited the entire manuscript, bringing much greater clarity and consistency to the overall narrative. Ayelet Maidas beautiful design speaks for itself.