Learning What I Don't Know: Reflections on Teaching My Friend Yoga

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“The recognition of confusion is itself a form of clarity.” 

T.K.V. Desikachar

I recently started teaching a friend yoga. I hadn't planned on this, but my friend, whom I'll call Kent, a pseudonym I'm using to protect his privacy, had heard me talk about yoga and what it meant to me and asked whether I'd consider teaching him some of what I'd learned along the path. 

I wanted to be of service to Kent, though my first thought was that it would benefit him more to take classes from my own teachers, who were much more seasoned instructors than I. But he knew from our conversations that I was a longtime yoga practitioner and had years back completed a teacher education program in yoga (though I had decided not to teach yoga, except informally, to friends or family members). Kent seemed to trust that I had something to offer him beyond what he had picked up from the few yoga classes he had taken in a gym. 

I knew that Kent was very fit, worked out regularly, and loved cycling and skiing. Whatever guidance I might offer, it seemed to me, should build on his strengths. Kent wanted to learn yoga to enhance his overall well-being, not as a way to remedy a problem. 

We’ve had six or seven sessions together. In each one, Kent has shown a genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. This has amplified my own curiosity and enthusiasm.

A few days ago, Kent and I had a session focusing on breath awareness. In my experience, yoga places more emphasis on the breath (as well as on the spine) than any other movement tradition. But I hadn’t yet explicitly integrated breath awareness into our lessons. It seemed time to do so.

One of the surprises for me in our 90-minute session, and also when planning for the session, was that I fairly quickly bumped into my own confusions and uncertainties about ideas and practices that I thought I knew well. This was humbling. But it also stirred me to learn more.

This essay is intended to shed light on my “recognition of confusion” and what I’ve learned in response. It’s written mainly for yoga teachers who might be interested in a beginning teacher’s experience of surprise and discovery. I’m hoping that other yoga practitioners also might be able to relate to the learning described in the essay.

Matching Breath to Movement 

When I was guiding Kent in Cat-Cow, a pose intended to gently lubricate the spine, I abruptly realized I was uncertain about the relationship between breathing and spinal movement. I knew what felt natural to me, which was to inhale when moving into Cow and to exhale when moving into Cat. 

Cow pose (left) and Cat (right)

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But when I started to give Kent instructions about breathing in relation to the flow between spinal extension (Cow) and flexion (Cat), I stumbled on my words. I sensed that what I started to tell Kent reflected my habit of breathing in the pose but not necessarily the pattern that would work best for him. 

I ended up asking Kent to breathe in a way that felt natural to him, which was, at least during our lesson, to exhale on Cow and inhale on Cat.  

I think my ego took a hit at my uncertainty, early in the lesson, about something so basic to this common pose as the coordination of breath and movement. 

Later that day, I visited my Kindle library to see if I could find a book that might help me to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between spinal movements and the cycle of inhales and exhales. I found a great resource in Yoga Anatomy by Leslie Kaminoff and Amy Matthews. What I discovered was a discussion of breathing and the spine in Cat-Cow that directly related to my own experience trying to teach it. 

Before zeroing in on Cat-Cow, the authors pointed out a fundamental process in breathing: When we inhale, our sternum (breast bone) moves away from our spine and our thoracic (mid-back) spine moves away from our sternum. “In other words, inhaling involves a slight flexion of our spine to increase thoracic volume. The opposite occurs with the exhalation, when our thoracic volume decreases and our spine reduces its primary curve toward extension” (p. 114).

Now, here’s the connection to Cat-Cow:

“This observation leads to a challenging inquiry for yoga practitioners and teachers who have been trained to always cue inhaling on spinal extension and exhaling on spinal flexion. Returning to the example of cat–cow (cakravakasana…), we can see that these cues have no anatomical basis and are merely a result of giving preference to the breath dynamics of the front of our body over the back. Everything in our body, including our breath, is three dimensional. While it is true that the opening of the front of our body is part of an inhalation…, adding spinal extension to that movement actually closes the back of our body. Conversely, performing spinal flexion on an exhalation produces a closing, condensing action in the front of our body, but it also opens the back of our body….Many beginning students, if not directed away from this in favor of the ‘correct’ pattern, will naturally prefer it, perhaps because they are relating their inhaling action to the region where 60 percent of lung capacity resides—the back—or connecting their exhaling action to what their thoracic spine prefers—extension.”

I didn’t know that 60 percent of lung capacity resides in the back. Nor did I know that many beginning students spontaneously inhaled into their back bodies in Cow (and presumably in other back-bending poses). But it made sense to me why Kent would inhale as his back rounded. And I certainly didn’t want to impose on him a breathing pattern that had become routine for me but was not inherently more beneficial than one he tended toward. 

As I reflected on my discoveries in Yoga Anatomy, I was reminded of a yoga program I participated in about two and a half years ago on the mystery of the back body. I had written an essay on my experience in the program, but what I wrote about placing my attention on the breath flowing behind my heart did not seem to come up for me when I was instructing Kent in Cat-Cow. In one part of the essay, I wrote the following about inhaling into my back body in Cobra pose, a classic back bending posture: “I’m not just breathing into my back body and escorting the energy up through my back ribs, behind my heart, and onto the wings of my shoulder blades. I’m holding the space that my inhalation creates and feeling my exhalation filling that space with quieting ripples.” 

What rereading the essay brought home to me was that learning from and writing about an experience didn’t mean that I would be able to call up and apply that learning in a new context and at a much later time, especially when the new context involved another person’s experience and not my own. Developing my capacity to bring to bear what I knew about yoga in a personalized, timely, and responsive way in service of another was going to require, I could tell, a substantial commitment and a steady openness, including an openness to what I had yet to learn. 

Uncovering the Meaning of Pranayama

In the course of our breath explorations, I referred to pranayama, the branch of yoga that was devoted to the breath. Kent wanted to know what the word pranayama meant. I was about to give an answer when I realized that I wasn’t sure. I knew that prana meant life force and was sometimes interpreted to mean the breath. And I knew that the yamas were part of yoga’s ancient ethical code, which I had studied in my teacher training program years ago. But the only yamas I could remember were non-harming, non-stealing, and non-possessiveness, and I couldn’t remember how prana, as breath, was joined together with a set of moral prohibitions. The full meaning of the term pranayama was unclear to me. 

I told Kent that my understanding of the term was that it concerned the study and practice of conscious breathing. But I admitted to Kent that my definition was imprecise.

Part of me felt that it didn’t matter all that much to pin down a sharper and more historically accurate definition of pranayama. I mentioned to Kent that we weren’t going to get into specific pranayama techniques in the present lesson, and he didn’t press me to elaborate further on the definition of the term. 

But I also felt that Kent deserved a better definition than the one I had provided. My confusion about the meaning of the word pranayama suggested to me that I was missing something potentially important about the concept.

So, while I was looking through Yoga Anatomy for insights into matching breath to movement, I also looked to see if the authors discussed the meaning of the term pranayama. Sure enough, they did. Here’s what I found:

“Compound Sanskrit terms are understood by dividing them into and translating their roots, a process that is open to much interpretation. Pranayama is a good example because it is commonly divided into two terms familiar to yoga students: prana (breath, life force) and yama (the act of restraining, curbing, checking). This interpretation leads to the common translation of pranayama as ‘breath control.’ However, there is a long second ‘a’ in pranayama, which renders the roots as prana and ayama (stretching, extending). Going further, it is not unreasonable to view the prefix ‘a’ as a negation or reversal of whatever follows, as in avidya (non-knowledge, ignorance) or ahimsa (non-harming), the first of Patañjali’s five yamas. Thus, unobstructing of prana as a definition and goal of pranayama is not far fetched and adds dimension to the practice.”

The reason this conception of pranayama struck me as deeply revealing is that it reflected a larger understanding of yoga as the freeing of inner obstructions to the union of mind, body, and spirit. In this view, we each are inherently whole beings, capable of experiencing an underlying harmony in the midst of all the comings and goings of our days and our ever-changing moods and circumstances. Yoga practitioners focus on the body and the breath not as acts of control but as ways of unblocking life energy that may be stuck, stagnant, or distorted. The impediments may stem from a tendency to unnecessarily hold our breath or tighten our muscles, become fixed in our gaze and overdriven in our striving, or simply to collapse into ourselves, letting the container that supports the flow of prana fall away. Defining pranayama as the freeing of prana appeared to me as a more hopeful and beneficial conceptualization than the view of pranayama as a restraint of the breath.

Mapping the Landscape of the Breath

When I began to plan the recent lesson on breath awareness, I first emailed Kent to find out what he already knew and had consciously experienced about the breath and what he was curious about and would like to learn. He replied promptly that he knew that if he took a few moments to concentrate on his breath and breathe deeply, it tended to clear his mind and relax his body. Kent also suggested that he would like to learn more about how paying attention to the breath could be helpful.

I wanted to reinforce Kent’s understanding of slow, deep breathing as an aid in fostering relaxation. But I also wanted to offer him experiences of other qualities of the breath that he might enjoy and value. 

When I sat down to think of different breath qualities to focus on, my mind became hazy, as if I couldn’t put my finger on what specifically I had sensed in salient breath experiences. It seemed to me that I was long on experiences but short on the concepts and words that would be useful in remembering, describing, and acting upon what I felt. Put differently, most of my breath awareness experiences were sensations I felt in the moment. I hadn’t developed my sensations into full-fledged concepts that I could consult as guides to planning and teaching.

So, I decided to spend time noticing my breathing in different situations and seeing if I could discern different qualities of my breath and write them down. What I ended up constructing was a kind of map of the landscape of my breath. 

The map had three dimensions. One was context: where I was, what I was doing, and how I was feeling. For example, I observed my breath while I was driving in heavy traffic, when I was sitting quietly at home reading, and when I was walking around our neighborhood pond.

The second dimension was intention: did I want to simply notice the breath or did I wish to escort or encourage it to travel in a certain direction or to a particular location, for example, to my eyes or jaw to soften and release tension. 

The third dimension was the most challenging for me to construct. It consisted of varied qualities that I might become aware of and bring attention to. I came up with seven qualities, which included those associated with relaxation but also encompassed additional sensory and movement features. I listed and gave examples of the qualities in writing and shared this with Kent as a potential resource:

Qualities of the Breath

• Tempo: slow…fast,  e.g., your breath might quicken and even race when you are anxious.

• Rhythm: smooth…choppy, e.g., your breath might feel calm and steady when you are relaxed.

• Depth: deep…shallow, e.g., if you let your breath be full, you might feel it all the way down to the floor of your pelvis.

• Sound:  soft…loud; smooth…obstructed; light…heavy; ordinary…mysterious, e.g., when your breath comes from the back of your throat, it may sound like a raspy but intriguing whisper.

• Texture & Temperature:  warm…cool; thin…thick; ticklish…ignorable, e.g., you might feel a tickling sensation as the breath brushes against your inner nostrils on an inhalation.

• Body-Breath Unity:  As you inhale, your body will naturally swell and expand, just as when you exhale, the body will recede and settle (for lovely writing on body-breath integration, you might consider the work of Donna Farhi).

• Special Spots & Spaces:  You might sense that there are places along the breath’s path that you want to linger on and savor, e.g., to bathe in the deep stillness of the pause between the exhalation and the inhalation or to feel a light, breezy uplift as the breath swirls at the tip of the nose.
  

Kent and I talked about these qualities in our session, noting that they were intended to suggest possible focal points when placing attention on the breath in particular contexts and with particular intentions. No assumption was made that either of us would notice more than a couple of the listed facets of the breath at any given time. But, taken together, the qualities might expand the palette, so to speak, for representing sensations of the breath and for creating meaning from them. 

Later in the lesson, after a guided meditation based on Donna Farhi’s writing on entering the stillness within the breath (Farhi, p. 195, paperback edition), Kent observed that in the inner quiet he could feel “a warm glow.” Perhaps this was a sign that he was experiencing additional possibilities in the breath beyond its calming and relaxing potential. 

The mapping of the landscape of the breath was a good example for me of the learning that I could realize in response to a recognition of what I didn’t know, or knew in only a vague way. Kent and I may be at different places on the yoga trail, but learning is a common bond.

I look forward to continuing service as Kent’s teacher and continuing learning right alongside him. 

Acknowledgments:  I want to thank “Kent” for the openness, vitality, and friendship he brings to our yoga sessions. I also want to thank Kasey Stewart, an exceptional yoga teacher and discerning editor, for her thoughtful suggestions about ways to enhance an earlier draft of this essay.