How to Teach & Extra Pranayama Practices
Our Final Pranayama session!
3 Goals for this Final Assignment:
1) First, take a moment to review the video and text below on “How to Teach Pranayama".
2) Then take time to watch the video which guides you through a series of simpler pranayamas that may be taught for as little as 1-2 minutes in a class setting, or longer depending on the needs of the class. These can be great introductory pranayama practices for newer practitioners, or when you don’t have time for a longer session with any one of our ‘big 5’. Note: These will not be required to teach in your final pranayama teaching experience.
3) Record Your Final Teaching Experience
Your Homework this week is to record and upload yourself teaching a Pranayama practice. The goal is to use this time to help us all reach deeper in our practice, but also to review each of the pranayamas in depth together one last time.
It’s ok to use your notes! Some of us may not have had a lot of time to practice this, or feel that pranayama is still very new. That’s ok! Use the text book entry to inform your teaching, and feel free to use those notes while you teach. For those that are more familiar with their pranayama practice, we encourage you to try to teach without notes, as this will allow you to really feel more inside while you teach. But if that proposition makes you too nervous to teach, then please use your notes.
The goal is to teach for 5-7 Minutes total. This includes all of the criteria listed in the next bullet point…
Your feedback will be based solely on the criteria below. Try to touch on each of these components while you teach. Each of these are discussed in detail in both the textbook entry below, as well as the video:
Introduce the Pranayama
Introduction: Name the Pranayama and say simply what it is
Overview: Give a very short overview of how to do it
Primary Technique
Teaching the Technique: This is the time you take to teach the pranayama breath by breath. Ideally this doesn’t last longer than a minute or two
Exit Strategy: This is the skillful methods by which you empower the student to do the pranayama on their own without your guidance.
Exploratory Phase
Exploration Cue: A cue that deepens the practitioners experience of the pranayama beyond the primary technique
Quiet time: This refers to giving the practitioner cues but also allowing them time to explore on their own.
Conclude the Pranayama
Absorption: This refers to the final cues given to help the student absorb the benefits of the pranayama, and to release the technique overall.
How to Teach Pranayama Video Tutorial
How To Teach Pranayama Textbook Entry
Pranayama is a subtle art:
Teaching pranayama is a subtle art similar to teaching meditation. It requires a sensitivity both to our inner state as well as the cues we give and the reception of those cues by our students. When teaching yoga postures, our body mechanics help to supplement the cues we give our class— but during pranayama there aren’t as many visual markers to help us out. In fact, if we try to ‘breathe big’ in order to give a visual example, we will probably be over-doing the pranayama itself, inspiring doership in the onlooking students. This means our words have to be precise and concise, and we must continually emphasize how to participate in pranayama with surrender, avoiding the pitfalls of doership and over-breathing. For this reason, the cues in this portion of the book are written first as a script, allowing you to see how these more subtle cues can be communicated. Each scripted cue, though, is accompanied by an explanation of that individual cue, so that as you become more familiar with the cues and the practice itself you can begin to say it in your own way, from the depth of your personal practice and the present.
Effort over time:
There are many differences between teaching asana and pranayama, but the biggest difference between the two really comes down to experience. Most students in a yoga teacher training have done Trikonasana, for example, a hundred or more times. But how many times have you performed the Full Yogic Breath, Puraka Rechaka or Nadhi Shodana in the ways described by Shambhavananda Yoga? Maybe 4 times? Maybe 10 times? And that’s ok and expected. That’s why we have the script and the explanation, to meet you where you’re at today, and to enable you to grow and cue more naturally as your practice grows.
Experience is the best teacher:
But no matter how efficient the text book is, there is simply no replacement for the time you take to incorporate these pranayama practices into your personal practice. Experience is truly the best teacher, as we can only teach from the depth of the experience we have gained from our own personal practice. So even though the following pages are meant to help you ‘teach pranayama’, at first it is more helpful to look at these cues as helping you ‘practice pranayama’. That’s how we will move from the script to the heart, allowing the cues to flow naturally and effortlessly.
As Sri ShambhavAnanda teaches about the art of teaching, “I think you cannot really teach anybody anything that you haven’t practiced yourself, because you can’t learn to be a good yoga teacher or meditation teacher out of a book. You have to have some of your own real experiences. Only then do you have something to share, and it is your particular view of the meditation technique, or the posture, or pranayama that you are sharing. If you have practiced enough then you have something to give. However, you must understand that teaching is a process. Usually when you start out you attract people who are a little less evolved than you are, so you can help them” (114, SP).
Teaching Teaches You:
The last part of Babaji’s quote also reminds us that even if you feel like you haven’t done pranayama enough to teach, you still have a lot to share. In fact, no matter how much experience we have with pranayama in our personal practice, the act of teaching itself is essential for showing us the ‘holes in our teaching bucket’, the aspects of the practice that we might be missing. As Babaji describes later in the same quote, “My experience as a teacher is to discover what I am not. In the beginning I thought I knew a lot. Then I began to realize I did not know as much as I thought I did…If you have the attitude of being of service and helping people with what you know, then things will go well.” In this way, developing a personal practice and teaching go hand in hand. Our personal practice informs our teaching, and our teaching informs our persona practice. When done well, they create an upward spiral of growth for us as well as our future students.
A Familiar Template:
We have consciously made the template for teaching pranayama a mirror image of the template for teaching an asana in an effort to help you spend your time and energy on practicing, instead of memorizing a new pathway of teaching. We begin our pranayama with an introduction which is very much like our ‘setup’ when teaching a yoga posture. The Setup/Introduction is a time set aside for naming the pranayama, sharing a sentence or two to overview the technique in a simple way, as well describing benefits and rewards from the practice of the pranayama. This time also allows us to check in with the proper posture of pranayama, helping students find a way to practice that enables both stillness of body and fullness of breath.
Primary Technique:
From the Setup/Introduction we move into the “primary Technique” of the pranayama. Much like the primary movement of an asana, the primary technique of the pranayama traces a specific pathway for the breath to travel, as well as guiding students to walk that pathway over and over again. In this portion of the pranayama we are guiding the students in a breath-by-breath manner. For this reason our cues need to be precise and concise. Practice repeating the cues as they are written in the script of the teaching notes so that you can feel the pace for yourself, but eventually of course these cues will become your own as you are able to balance the content and the timing.
Different Breath Capacities:
Breath by breath cueing is an essential starting point for teaching the primary technique, but no matter how succinct or experienced we may be in our cueing, our breath capacities are all very different and therefore once the technique is established we have to begin to exit the breath by breath cueing style and enter into a more sustainable ‘narration style’ cueing method, which allows students to use the cues you give them at their own pace. This is primarily the style of cueing associated with our next cueing section, the Exploratory Depth Cues, but we have to bridge these two cueing styles consciously to make the transition work. This is what is known as the ‘exit strategy’, cueing in a breath by breath format with the intention of empowering the student to be able to continue without so much moment to moment guidance.
The Exit Strategy:
The Exit Strategy resembles how you might let go of the handlebars when teaching a child how to ride a bike. At first you would have both hands on the handlebars as you help them find their balance, reminding them to keep their eyes pointed forward and feet pedaling. Then you might take off one hand from the bike, allowing them to feel their own balance while continuing to cue them. Once you feel that the bike is well balanced, you might remove both hands, but keep walking next to them while cueing a little less, and finally you would allow the bike to cruise ahead of you, and your cues would be offered each time they come around the cul-de-sac.
Transitioning through the Exit Strategy:
The exit strategy cues of our pranayama follow the same pathway, keeping the cues simple and repetitive while also reminding them to begin moving at their own pace. Cues such as “let’s do one more repetition together” signal to the student that they will be responsible for the pranayama soon, and need to pay attention. And a cue like “As you do the next repetition on your own, remember to…” are ways to hand over the pace of the pranayama to the student, while also supporting them with the essential cues that keep the pranayama on track. In the end this is an intuitive process, like helping someone learn to ride a bike, but hopefully this analogy will help you make that transition more smoothly and consciously so that your breath by breath cueing is helpful, and that you can move forward into the narrative style cues before the pace becomes taxing for your students different lung capacities.
Exploratory Phase:
Much like our asana teaching structure, once the primary technique is established we can move towards the exploratory phase. The explorations given in the text here allow us to explore the subtler aspects of the pranayama, such as the qualities of the inhale and exhale in Puraka Rechaka, slower and smoother breathing in Full Yogic Breathing, and using mantra, counting and pauses in Nadhi Shodana. As you progress in your pranayama practice, and continue to train with Shambhavananda Yoga, you may find other avenues of exploration. In a typical pranayama exercise, there will only be time for one exploration— much like our asana practice. You will find that more than that can become challenging for most students purely because of the length of time it takes to full experience the explorations. So for the sake of the teaching environment in our level one training, we ask that you learn to practice at least one of the explorations for each pranayama.
Tasting the Soup:
An analogy that can help to guide you on the path of teaching in the exploratory section is like seasoning a soup. When you set out to make soup you get out the recipe (The Setup/Introduction), then you follow the recipe (Primary Technique), and every recipe ends with the statement “Season to taste” which alludes to the work of the exploratory section. Once the exit strategy has freed you up from constant cueing, take time to ‘taste the soup’ you have created. Do the pranayama as you have taught it, feel what your students are feeling, and this will inform you of what seasoning/cue to give next. Just like in life, the more times you cook this recipe, the better you will get at the final seasonings- but also just like in life, you gotta taste the soup to know what it needs.
Pranayama needs Quiet time:
And then, just like seasoning a soup, you have to stir it and give it time to integrate. This is accomplished in pranayama by giving your students ‘quiet time’ to work with the cue you just gave them, and let it work on them. The beauty of this moment is that it also gives you time to taste the new flavor of the soup that seasoning created, which will intuitively inform your next seasoning. After a couple of seasonings your soup is usually complete, but that requires attention and awareness. The point of this analogy is to emphasize that we must taste our practice personally to know what it needs, and we need quiet time in pranayama to allow for that to take place. Getting comfortable with the quiet time in the exploratory phase is important, and hopefully taking time tot taste your soup will allow you to fully embrace that quiet space.
Concluding the Pranayama:
The final aspect of every pranayama is concluding the pranayama. This resembles the ‘cueing out’ portion of our asana practice, cues dedicated to consciously releasing the effort of the pranayama, as well as time to feel the benefits and effects of our time spent practicing. There are cues offered in each conclusion section to help guide your students to absorb the particular benefits commonly associated with each pranayama, but like the rest of the cueing script, this is just a point of reference to assist you until your own experience of the pranayama produces its own benefits and rewards.
Summary & Reflection
Teaching pranayama is a subtle art, akin to meditation instruction, demanding precise verbal cues due to its lack of visual markers. Experience is essential; while scripted cues are a starting point, personal practice refines guidance. The teaching structure mirrors asana instruction, progressing from introduction to primary technique and exploratorations. Analogous to seasoning a soup, we taste our pranayama, feeling for what is needed and adding the exploratory cue based on what we feel will add to the experience. Tasting that cue then gives us quiet time in the pranayama, which is another essential aspect of the process.
Simple Pranayama Practices Video Tutorial
Additional Pranayamas
Candle Breath
Benefits
Calms the emotions and focuses the mind.
Procedure
Sit in easy pose. Breathe in deeply through the nose; feel the breath drop into the heart or navel center. Relax the palette and the shoulders, and exhale through a rolled tongue or pursed lips as though whistling. With a long, slow exhalation through tongue or lips, imagine that you are flickering a candle about a foot ahead of you. Repeat this practice for 3-5 rounds and return to a natural breath to observe the inner effects.
Sitali Breath
Benefits
Cooling to the mind and body. May be used anytime one feels overheated. An effective pranayama for hot flashes. Sitali’s cooling effect is accomplished via the inhalation passing over the wet tongue, which in turn cools the throat and the entire system.
Procedure
Sit in ease pose. Curl the tongue into a tube shape. If this is not possible, breathe in through an open mouth with the tongue touching behind the upper teeth. Breathe in deeply through allowing the prana entering the body to be cooled as it interacts with the wetness of the mouth. Exhale freely through the nose with a relaxed palette. Repeat this practice for 3-5 rounds with awareness of the cooling effect.
Robin’s Breath
Benefits
Heart-opening. Coordinates the movement with the breath. Warms the spine and opens the shoulders.
Procedure
Sit in easy pose. Place the hands in Anjali mudra (Namaste) at the heart. Inhale to lengthen the spine. Exhale, pull the navel in as you round the spine, reaching forward with the hands. Inhale, open the arms wide like wings and stretch the front body with a toned abdomen. Exhale, bring the hands back together, opening the back body. Inhale, breathe the hands back to Namaste. Repeat 3-5 rounds and relax to feel the effects.
Simhasana (Lion’s Breath)
Benefits
Relaxes and opens the throat and upper chest area. Warms the spine, hips and shoulders.
Procedure
Sit in Vajrasana or easy pose. Rest the hands palms down on the thighs and lift up through the crown of the head to lengthen the spine. Inhale here and begin the exhalation by sliding forward onto the hands. Press into the hands and extend the spine to gaze up towards the ceiling. Complete the exhalation by rolling the eyes to look up, extending the facial muscles and tongue as you expel the breath all at once in a guttural “roar.” Inhale and push back to your comfortable seat. Exhale, press back to your seat, relaxing the face into a smile. Repeat 3-5 rounds and pause to observe the openness in the throat and heart.