The other night, I had an extremely vivid dream that I was back teaching Spinning. In the dream, every bike was different, and I spent most of my time helping students adjust seats, move handlebars, and get their feet clipped in. When I woke up, I immediately went to my computer to start making notes—because my subconscious was telling me something important about what yoga teaching actually is.
Teaching yoga is not like teaching other forms of movement. It’s not like teaching English literature. It’s not like working in radio. I’ve taught in all of these formats over the years, and while they each require good teaching skills, they demand very different things from the teacher.
Where Other Teaching Backgrounds Fall Short
In Spinning, you want your students’ eyes on you. You’re trying to distract them from the present moment for most of the class—until those few powerful moments when you drop them into the sensation of effort. You do this through a near-constant monologue, an artful playlist, and by being a magnetic figure at the front of the room.
Teaching yoga does none of these things. In yoga, we want our students’ attention turned inward. We don’t blast music to distract them—we create conditions for presence. We don’t monologue for sixty minutes—we issue invitations and let silence do its work. We’re not trying to be the magnetic center of the room. We’re trying to step back enough that our students can have their own experience.
When I taught English literature while earning my PhD at the University of North Carolina, I was trained to fill time with the sound of my voice. Tons of monologuing. Tons of discussion. If there was silence in the classroom, that felt like failure. My job was to be articulate and insightful and to be the engine of that room.
And then there’s radio. I spent six years in public radio, and the number one rule is no dead air. You fill every second. Your voice has to do all the work—informing, entertaining, connecting—because the audience can’t see you. Radio made me very good at filling silence with the sound of my voice.
So here I was, arriving at the yoga room with a PhD in English literature, six years of radio training, and a career teaching Spinning. Every single one of those backgrounds trained me to do the same thing: fill space, perform, hold attention, be the center. In yoga, we simply ask an open-ended question, issue an invitation toward movement or focus, and then let our students fill in the other half of that conversation.
The Surprising Skills That Transfer
There are real overlaps between these kinds of teaching and yoga—and they’re worth paying attention to.
Remember that Spinning dream where I spent most of my time helping students set up on those unique, different bikes? Your yoga students’ bodies are also unique and different. In Spinning, I would raise or lower seats and adjust handlebars. In yoga, we do the same kind of work with props—helping students find a comfortable seat, adjusting block height, suggesting a blanket under the knees. If the equipment doesn’t match the body, the student can’t settle. Helping students with their individual setup is a skill that transfers beautifully.
Another overlap is breath. I spent a surprising amount of time in both Spinning and yoga reminding people to breathe. In Spinning, I used breath as a tool to gauge intensity—nose breathing during warm-up, open-mouthed gasping at peak effort, easy breathing again during cool-down. In yoga, we bring constant attention to the breath, but for a different purpose—as an anchor to the present moment, as a way to help students drop into their experience rather than push through it.
And here’s one more overlap: students often show up wanting it to be all-out, all the time. In Spinning, it was “Turn up the resistance!” In yoga, it’s “More power, more heat, more flow.” The teacher’s job to balance that desire with what actually serves the student? That’s the same in both rooms.
What Student Behavior Actually Means
One of the most important distinctions between yoga and everything else I’ve taught is what student behavior actually signals.
In English class, if students fell asleep, that was a bad sign. It meant I’d lost them. In Spinning, if students grimaced, that was a good sign—they were in the work.
But in yoga? If someone looks like they’ve fallen asleep in savasana, that’s a beautiful sign. It means they’ve let go. They’ve dropped into something deeper than performance. And if someone is grimacing? That concerns me. Yoga isn’t about effort and intensity—it’s about depth of connection to breath, to sensation, to the present moment.
When I first took over that Spinning class, the previous teacher regularly ended what was already an extremely hard class on an all-out sprint. I wanted to make the class periodized—cyclical workouts with progressively building load. A lot of people dropped off. But the ones who stuck with me were my proper students. Many went on to become athletes, racing in triathlons or riding long-distance charity rides.
The moral? You can’t be the teacher you took over from. You’ve got to do things your way and trust that your people will find you.
How to Make the Shift
If you’ve come to yoga teaching from another background, here’s what I want you to think about.
First, identify the habits you’re still carrying. Are you talking too much in class? Are you cueing every single breath because silence makes you uncomfortable? These aren’t character flaws—they’re skills you developed for a context that rewarded them. Yoga asks for something different.
Second, practice the discomfort of silence. Start small—let five seconds of silence follow an instruction. Then ten. Notice what happens in the room when you stop filling it with your voice. In almost every other context I’d worked in, silence meant failure. In yoga, silence is where the real work happens.
Third, shift from performing to witnessing. Your job in the yoga room isn’t to be brilliant or entertaining. It’s to see your students, notice who’s struggling, observe who has settled into something deep and quiet, and adjust your teaching in real time based on what’s actually happening in front of you.
And fourth—hold on to the general skills and release the specific techniques. Presence, reading the room, caring deeply about your students’ experience, meeting individuals where they are—those are gold, no matter where you developed them. But the constant cueing, the performance energy, the drive toward intensity, the need to fill every second with your voice? Those you can let go of.
Over twenty-plus years of teaching, I’ve learned this: the less I perform, the more my students connect—not to me, but to themselves. And that’s the whole point.
Want to hear more? Listen to the full episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential: E75: Teaching Yoga Is Not Like Teaching Other Subjects.
