Every September, I make myself the same promise: this is the year I stay ahead of my class planning. I buy the good notebook. I block out Thursday afternoons. I picture every class outlined a week in advance, calm and unhurried.
As of this writing, that notebook holds four class plans and a grocery list. So you can see how the promise is going.
I am not telling you this to complain. I am telling you because it happens every single September, on a schedule you could set a calendar by, and because there is a two-thousand-year-old fix for it sitting in the very first word of the Yoga Sutras. That word is atha. It means now.
What Atha Actually Means
Patanjali opens the Yoga Sutras with three words: atha yoga anushasanam. In Yoga Off the Mat, the book I wrote with Alexandra DeSiato, we translate it this way: “Now, the study of yoga begins. The study of yoga is always about the now, the present.”
Commentators have spent centuries on that opening word, which is a lot of attention for two syllables. In Sanskrit, atha marks an auspicious beginning. If you grew up before streaming, you might remember the announcer’s voice that ran just before your favorite show: “AND NOW . . . the HBO original series . . .” As we write in the book, “for many of us, the sound of the TV set turning on and the familiar announcer’s voice calling out ‘and now . . .’ was a Pavlov’s bell, prompting us to get out of the kitchen, grab the popcorn, and sit down.” The sutras open with the same call. Your ears are meant to prick up. Here comes what you have been waiting for.
There is a second layer worth knowing, especially if you teach. As we note in the book, “Scholars concur that atha is a rhetorical phrase akin to saying, ‘Therefore, given the entire argument I have made to this point . . .’” The word assumes the student arriving at the teaching has already done some living. People come to yoga after they have tried other approaches, after some season of striving has worn them down a little, and the teaching meets them exactly there. The practice does not begin once you are ready, or once your schedule settles, or once you feel qualified to be in the room. It begins now.
That is the oldest advice in the tradition, and also the most repeated, because we need the repetition. Ram Dass compressed it to three words: be here now. We also cite a slightly less venerable sage in the book, Kung Fu Panda: “Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery. Today’s a gift. That’s why they call it the present.”
Why does the reminder need constant renewal? Because of what your mind does the moment nobody is supervising it. My favorite line from the book’s first chapter names this precisely: “Your mind is an excellent time traveler, and left without the yoke of ‘now,’ it will revisit the past, making changes and revisions to your memories, or dart ahead to contemplate the future, making assumptions or projecting anxieties.” The time-traveling mind does not just replay the past. It edits the footage. It does not just preview the future. It writes the anxious version. Atha, as we put it, “harkens it back to what’s happening in the immediate moment.”
Why Week Four Is When You Need It Most
Here is why I wanted to write about this now rather than in January. A month ago, fall had that first-day-of-school feeling: fresh schedules, full rooms, students back from summer and enthusiastic, class plans lined up like sharpened pencils. That opening surge is real, and I hope you enjoyed all of it. It is also, by definition, temporary.
By week four, the season has settled into its actual shape. The student who swore they would come three times a week is coming once. The Tuesday evening class that was packed on the first of the month has found its true size. Your own planning system, the one that felt so promising in August, has developed a few gaps, and the notebook has started collecting grocery lists. (If any of this sounds familiar, I wrote more about the psychology behind that early-season burst and the letdown that follows in The Discipline Paradox.) This is the moment when teachers start grading themselves against the syllabus they wrote a month ago, and we are harsh graders of our own work.
Atha offers different arithmetic. The practice does not begin on day one of the season and then leak away until January hands you another chance to start over. It begins now, in week four, with the schedule you actually have and the students who actually came. The class in front of you is never a diminished version of the class you planned. It is the class where the teaching happens. Six students with mats unrolled is a complete classroom.
The book’s first chapter ends with an action we called, simply, “Begin again.” I want you to hear it as a teacher of the fall season: wherever you are in your own growth right now, “every time you come back to the start, back to yourself, you’re practicing yoga.” Coming back is not remedial work. Coming back is the whole curriculum. In case that sounds like too much weight to hang on one Sanskrit word, here is the strongest claim we make in that chapter: “If you never make it any deeper into this book, or if you went to read the Yoga Sutras and never made it past the first word, that would still be enough.” One word, honestly practiced, carries the whole teaching inside it. (I wrote more broadly about how these ideas travel off the mat and into ordinary life in this piece on yoga philosophy in everyday life.)
Three Ways to Teach With Atha This Month
Build it into your opening. The first two minutes of class are when students are least in the room. They are still in traffic, in their inbox, in the conversation from lunch. Try language like: “Let the day you’ve had so far be over. Practice begins now, not once you touch your toes, not once you stop thinking about dinner. Now.” Then give them somewhere concrete to land: the breath, the points of contact between the body and the floor, a sound in the room, or the quality of light they notice, eyes open or closed. Anchors beat abstractions. One sentence of context about the word atha is teaching; five sentences can snowball into a lecture nobody signed up for.
Use it as a mid-class hinge. The heat cuts out, half the room arrives late, or the sequence you loved on paper is landing with blank faces. (Blank faces usually mean concentration, not boredom, but either way.) Say the word to yourself: atha. Begin again from here. That reset is invisible to your students, costs you nothing, and changes the temperature of the rest of class. The alternative, teaching the second half as an apology for the first half, is a class nobody enjoys, including you.
Give yourself a mid-season atha reset. Sometime this week, look at your fall schedule the way you would look at a syllabus at midterm: keep what is working, adjust the one thing that is not, and resist the urge to overhaul everything. If a class plan needs to repeat, let it repeat. Your students did not memorize week two. Beginning again does not require new material. It requires you, arriving.
Begin Again, Starting Now
If this is the kind of idea you want more of, in the studio and off the mat, Yoga Off the Mat walks through fifty-two more of them, one Sanskrit concept at a time, applied to ordinary life rather than only to the mat. And if you would rather hear the fuller version of this one, with the whole cold open about my notebook and a closer look at what week four actually asks of teachers, this week’s episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential covers it start to finish.
Practice begins now. It will begin again tomorrow, and that is not a flaw in the system. That is the system.
