As a yoga & asana teacher, I see the tremendous need for high-quality asana teachers who aren’t just good with yoga sequencing but can actually contextualize and lay a rock-solid foundation for yoga. This has been my primary motivator throughout my career to showcase the best of yoga to my students no matter what stage they’re in.
I define a good yoga teacher as one who aims to transform a beginner student into a lifelong practitioner of yoga, and perhaps, even a lifelong yoga student. It’s one thing to “influence” people with your yoga, but it’s a completely different thing to create a real impact as a yoga teacher. It’s what makes it necessary, and even our responsibility, that our asana classes are really high quality, thorough, and relatable.
Beginners, specifically, will need to start with asana. Niching down too quickly in your yoga journey might cause setbacks in the long run because yoga is meant to be done, learned, and lived in a certain sequential order. Unfortunately, this is a problem we face in the modern yoga landscape. Teachers would often skip the first steps and jump to what they deemed best would sell to their students based on the popularity index, discounting their student’s best interest.
And while there are many aspects to teaching beginners—which we’ll explore in-depth in the Teaching Yoga to Beginners course—in today’s episode, I want to focus on discussing the yoga sequencing principles for beginners. Yoga sequencing principles largely being asana-oriented.
I’m giving you three, out of nine, proven yoga sequencing principles that I have used for beginner’s asana classes for a decade successfully.
