The Inner Fire of Yoga

Yoga Teaching Confidence Starts Here: Anatomy, Mindset & Authenticity with Karen Fabian

• Liz Albanis • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Outline

What if the thing holding you back as a yoga teacher wasn’t your knowledge, but your mindset?  Liz Albanis joined by Karen Fabian. Karen Fabian is an experienced yoga teacher, anatomy educator and author. 

Whether you're a new teacher feeling overwhelmed . Or an experienced practitioner ready to go deeper. This episode delivers useful tools and mindset shifts. To help you transform your teaching from the inside out.

About the Guest

Karen is the founder of Bare Bones Yoga. With over 20 years of teaching experience. And a background in rehabilitative counselling and healthcare administration. Karen brings a science-based yet practical approach to anatomy. Karen is an author of 3 books. To explore how yoga teachers can step into their full potential. By building both anatomical understanding and authentic self-belief.
Karen empowers yoga teachers across the globe to develop clarity. Confidence, and competence through her Yoga Anatomy Blueprint Learning Program. Karen offers yoga insights and tools.

Key Topics & Takeaways

  • Karen's persona; yoga journey and how it reshaped her career.
  • Mindfulness in Yoga
  • Why mindset is the common barrier for yoga teachers. 
  • The “walk and talk” teaching style and how to build confidence getting off the mat.
  •  Common limiting beliefs in yoga teachers and how to reframe them. 
  • The real reason many teachers feel the need to change sequences every week. 
  • Teaching “safe” yoga: myth vs. reality. 
  • How to understand and apply anatomy cues with confidence. 
  • Karen’s 10-step blueprint for learning anatomy in a practical, memorable way.
  • The importance of action-oriented cueing and watching your students. 
  • Why we need to rethink negative framing. 
  • How to use frameworks instead of memorizing scripts. 
  • Healthy detachment, self-inquiry, and the power of reflection after teaching

Want the full extended episode with bonus reflections?Join the 3R Program for deeper insights, bonus content, and supportive tools. Begin with a 14-day free trial as a to get immediate access to a part' of the program. 

www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/3R

Connect with Karen

Website: https://www.barebonesyoga.com

Instagram: @barebonesyoga

 https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/plan

The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who might be head to my website: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/podcast

For bonus content Join the 3R Program: Regulate, Rebuild, Restore. Start your journey with a 14-day free trial and learn how to create a sustainable, personalised yoga practice that supports your mental health and nervous system.

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I just started sobbing. Looking back on it, I recognize it as an emotional release from everything that I had gone through. Every single yoga teacher has said to me, I wish I felt more confident. So it's not like you're gonna be a more authentic yoga teacher, but not be like that in your life. Of course, it's a personal development path.

The reality is we can't control how people feel. We can't control how people think.

Welcome to The Inner Fire of Yoga, a podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albana, senior yoga teacher and yoga therapist in training. This podcast was born in 2024 after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but has a metaphor.

It has asked me to burn away what no longer serves me to transform and to rise stronger each time. This podcast is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow. The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host Liz Albanis, the content shared in these conversations.

Is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines. I had a great chat the other day with Karen Fabian. Karen is a yoga teacher, author, and founder of Bare Bones Yoga, with a background in rehabilitative medicine and healthcare.

She integrates her knowledge of anatomy and movement into her teaching, including her signature program, the Yoga Anatomy Blueprint Learning Program, where she trains teachers all over the world. Karen empowers yoga teachers to confidently lead yoga classes by sharing clear cues, signature sequences.

They can teach without notes, and by walking around and by understanding the reason for the cues they share, rather than just repeating cues. She hosts the podcast Conversations for Yoga Teachers, where she shares lessons in anatomy, teaching frameworks for queuing and sequencing, as well as interviews with expert guests.

Karen has authored, stretched, build Your Yoga business, grow your teaching techniques, and Structure and Spirit. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Rehabilitation Counseling, a Master's in Healthcare Administration, and is an ] E-R-Y-T-Y-A-C-E-P, and has passed certifications from NASM. She has been teaching since 2002 and lives in Boston, USA.

Welcome, Karen to the Inner Fire of Yoga podcast. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to get into this conversation. Great to have you here. So I thought I'd just start with how you discovered yoga. Yeah, so I discovered yoga on the encouragement of a friend of mine, and he was going to yoga classes as part of his routine.

Development as a bodybuilder. And so he was going to yoga class at this particular studio and he encouraged me to come. He said, it's really hard. It's hot yoga. I don't think you can do it. And it was sort of a challenge. And this was in 1999 here in Boston when  there really weren't a lot of yoga studios.

Yoga was not really popular here. And I was intrigued. So I went to the class and I remember in the first. Like 10 minutes as everybody was filing in, I was really taken aback by how many people there were and this was a weeknight. And then I saw the teacher walk in the room and she was setting up and there was just this like buzz, a buzz of just excitement, like this low level hum.

And I just remember saying to myself, what is going on in this room? Like I have never been in a space. Where I felt this sense of anticipation and community and like something is going to happen that I am going to experience, that could be really cool. And the class began and I had only taken one yoga class before in my life.

So I didn't have a lot of experience at that point in my life.  I was working, uh, in a corporate type job, but I had originally thought I wanted to be a physical therapist. So I already had a pretty well established love of anatomy. I was, I. Athletic and loved movement before I had worked in the role I was in.

At that point in the business world, I had worked in clinical settings as a social worker and a rehab rehab counselor. So I was very ensconced in health and wellness and healthcare and medical care, and clinical diagnoses and anatomy. So when the class began and we started doing poses, I thought to myself.

I didn't even know this kind of thing existed. This is a blend of all these things that I love and as the teacher who's now a really good friend of mine, started to teach and the particular way she was. Not just giving us physical instruction, but mental coaching along the way, or at least that's how I interpreted it.

I thought, wow, this is a blend even of the sort of counseling coaching that I did with clients, and I know sometimes people say this, I can say this, absolutely, for sure, emphatically that. That one class changed the direction of my life, but for that class, I might not be where I am today. So I think on some level, the universe was sort of conspiring to bring me to this class and show me that there is another way for you to be living your life.

It was a real pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of your life. Totally. And how did it help you? It was only the second time in my life I had taken a yoga class. The first time in my life was very shortly after I got divorced, and I took myself on a vacation and I went to this wellness retreat in St.

Lucia. So there were always different classes and that sort of thing. And one day I saw that yoga was on the chalkboard. And I went to the yoga class, which was in this room. It was up on stilts, and it looked out over the ocean. Oh. And it was sort of dusk. So it was a very idyllic setting. And I remember about halfway through, I just started sobbing.

I was just emoting, like my skin was molting off my body. It was so. Unlike me and so unexpected, looking back on it, of course, with the perspective of time, uh, I recognize it as, you know, an emotional release from everything that I had gone through, and there have been many times in my life when my practice has been an anchor for me in.

Difficult  times and also joyful times. I know my practice has changed a lot with age. Could you just elaborate on how your practice has changed leading up to 60? I would say like 55 to 60, I really became. Very interested in a lot of longevity practices, especially as it relates to women, like the decrease in estrogen affects the body and the mind, and inflammation and mobility.

So many things that estrogen has an impact on. So as a result, I realized I wanted to expand the physical practices I was doing for my health. Now my practice is shorter and more targeted to specific poses and not every day. The meditative and mindfulness piece of yoga has been amplified over the years.

So that mindfulness meditative piece has become almost more prominent than the physical aspect for me at this point. Yeah, it's more self-inquiry, taking it off your mat with more mindfulness in everyday life. Yeah, and a lot of the work that I do with yoga teachers that involves. Individual coaching and even group coaching to a particular extent, but really the individual coaching that I do, that to me is an expression of my yoga practice because the transformations that I've witnessed in my work with yoga teachers removes blocks that they perceive they have.

Between them as they are now and the yoga teacher, they want to be. And as I work with them and use differentcomponents of my teaching and training methodology, and they start to step into their fullest potential as a teacher, that to me is part of my yoga practice. Yeah. Yeah. Can you give the audience an example of.

What common mindset shifts you've helped with? One of the things that comes up a lot is what I have come to call the walk and talk a style of teaching where you're walking around the room instead of the practice with me approach where you're practicing with your class. Now of course, there's no right or wrong.

Teachers can do whatever they want. There also is of course a hybrid model where you're doing a little of this, you're doing a little of that. However, there are teachers who definitely practice with their class and believe that is the way yoga should be taught and or when they've experimented with walking around, they can't do it.

They believe that it's not possible for them even when they go to class and see a teacher doing the walk and talk and wish they could do it. When they try it, they can't do it. And I have a particular free training video on how to do the walk and talk, and every single time I do a video on it, I get lots of requests for the training video and one of the dms I got on Instagram in response.

The teacher said, uh, every time I try to get off the mat and walk around, I'm afraid, and I get back on the mat and just go back to practicing with them. So I offered to get on a Zoom call with her and what she shared was literally what was happening, that she was trying to do it, trying to get off the mat.

And what she said was. When I'm on the mat, I feel safe. Mm-hmm. When I'm off the mat, I feel danger. Mm-hmm. And I really want your listeners to hear the word choice because. When you are the teacher who has the problem, you don't hear your word choice as a sign of the belief that's causing you to do the behavior you don't want to do.

This sort of thing can only come out when you work with a coach because that person's role is to listen to what you're saying and to start to help you uncover the belief. That's driving the behavior you don't want. So in this case, this teacher wants to be the kind of teacher who can do the walk and talk, but has the experience of every time she tries it, she hops back on the mat.

However, in the conversation and the questions I asked her so that I could better understand what was causing her to hop back on the mat, she used the literal, specific words of safety. Versus danger. So as a trained coach, when I hear that, I can now start to ask more questions to better understand why would this yoga teacher perceive that on the mat, practicing with them is safe and off the mat is dangerous.

And that obviously led into a bunch of different areas, but these are often the mindset blocks that yoga teachers. Experience that block them from teaching the way they want. And one of my biggest concerns about the standard teacher training path is that there is no mindset work done with yoga teachers.

And it's almost always group training. And there's nothing wrong with group training and there's nothing wrong with the 200 hour.  Teacher training agenda. It's just that it doesn't allow for this kind of mindset work, which is a big piece of teaching yoga. Yeah, of course it is, and that's a great point you've raised there.

Mindset work in your standard teacher training would be useful, but 200 hours, it's a lot to hack in. It's really not enough. 200 hours. Yeah. I mean, I've been working in this way with yoga teachers for many years, and so I've developed almost. Kind of a scientific methodology around looking at a large group of yoga teachers and pulling from that group what are the common threads, and nine times outta 10, if not 10 times outta 10, the teachers always say to me, I wish I felt more confident.

And what I've discovered as I've looked across the board  at all these yoga teachers experiences is that. There's something triggering about teaching yoga. Yeah, and I don't necessarily mean triggering as we now sort of have come to define it with respect to trauma Big T and little T. However, I have absolutely worked with yoga teachers who have experienced trauma Big T, little T trauma of various scenarios.

Who are triggered when they walk into the room from a memory perspective because of different ways that they have processed their trauma. Now, having said that, let's also consider a situation where, and this is a true situation of a teacher I've worked with, uh, a teacher was raised in a home. With very stringent rules around grades and perfectionism, and there's the right way to do it, and there's a wrong way to do it.

And so as you can imagine, this is a person that grew up with a very rigid perspective on the world, raised a family, had a job, has a job, and took teacher training, started teaching yoga, and very quickly. Realized, I don't think I'm cut out for yoga, but yet wanted to teach yoga, but was having all sorts of problems with confidence and anxiety and stress, and not remembering the sequence and feeling inauthentic, like a whole number of problems.

And when we began to work together, one of the things that came out was that. She was changing her sequence every week. Yeah. And so every week she would go into the room and of course couldn't remember it because it was brand new to her, but her rigid, perfectionist mindset led her to believe that she had to change it because hat was what people would want.

And if she didn't change it, she would be wrong, or she'd be teaching incorrectly boring. So. Right. Boring. And so this is the sort of thing that when she walked in the room, the act of teaching was triggering this mindset that came from how she was raised. What we do as yoga teachers is highly unique and multifaceted in terms of there's a skill aspect.

Sharing cues, teaching a sequence. There's a knowledge aspect, understanding anatomy, understanding yoga philosophy, things like that. And there is a mindset piece. There is a, an ask to show up in a way where you are authentic. In that showing up authentically, you feel natural, you feel confident, and yet that the ability to do that in all of us as humans is shaped by our experiences.

I want your listeners to, especially if they're hearing these stories and it's resonating with them, to maybe for the first time having heard our conversation, realize. Wow. Maybe there is something about teaching that's bringing up these limiting beliefs in me that if I was teaching Pilates or working as a personal trainer or teaching Zumba classes or dance classes, maybe I wouldn't feel those things.

I. Something about yoga, that it is a longstanding practice, that it has a philosophical side, a historical side, a physical side, that there are gurus, there's a history, there's an expectation that you are walking in the room and you know what you're doing. And laden on top of it is all, are all these other things.

Gary? I taught well with yoga teachers. Many of them. Yeah. Yeah. But it just is a very unique role and that's why I always say to yoga teachers that I work with in my program, in your path as we work together to move you in the direction of the kind of teacher you wanna be. I always ask 'em at the beginning, what kind of teacher do you wanna be?

As we move in that direction, as we build momentum in that direction, you are going to develop a better relationship with yourself. Because to be that kind of teacher is to be that kind of person. So it's not like you're gonna. Be a more authentic yoga teacher, but not be like that in your life. Of course, it's a personal development path.

The path of a yoga teacher is a personal development path. One of the amazing opportunities for us as yoga teachers is to see these opportunities, to be the kind of teacher we wanna be. As an opportunity to develop a better relationship with ourselves to to have the transformations we want to have, even if we don't knowingly know we want to have them.

But in our initial thought of, I wanna be more confident as a teacher, well, guess what? In the example I gave you, this woman healed her way of looking at the world. As a very black and white, rigid place with rules and things have to be done a certain way through a whole bunch of different techniques and experiments I had her play around with in her classes, she realized she could go with the flow.

A little bit more than she ever thought was possible. She realized she could use a sequence over and over again, and no one was going to care that it was the same sequence. And in fact, what she said to me was, the only thing that's changing is I get to know it better, and I could walk around and I don't have to look at my notes.

Nobody even  cares. So this is what I mean. About the beliefs. The teachers think the beliefs are so strong, but with some experimentation we can start to chip away at them. Yeah, and a big part of yoga is a self-inquiry, and a lot of people don't realize that's a big part of it, getting to know ourselves better.

Unraveling these samskara that don't serve us and replacing with the samskara that do. And yeah, that's been part of my journey with my yoga. Absolutely. Do you find another issue that teachers get upset if someone doesn't like their class and they think, oh, there's something wrong with me, but I also like to remind fellow teachers that.

We've all got our people. We are not everyone's cup of tea. Yeah. Do you find an issue? Yeah, I think that it is an issue and I think that it starts even before the teacher begins to teach. Another aspect of the way yoga teachers are trained that I have a problem with is the whole model of feedback. The whole model of having a group of teachers in a group training, having somebody lead the training, having the teachers practice teach, and then sit and receive feedback from the person running the training.

Now, that's not to say that person's not qualified, but the whole essence of giving feedback. For the most part is an illustration of one's person, of one person's perception of the class they just took. And so long before a yoga teacher begins to teach, what they learn is that I am teaching to get good feedback.

Mm-hmm. And this is a problem for me because the reality is we can't control how people feel. We can't control how people think, and yet to teach our class with an expectation that we'll get good feedback. Whatever that is, is to set ourselves up to be very disappointed. And so number one, I would. Love if we just trashed that entire, burned it all to the ground and replaced it with a teacher teaching for, let's say the person who's running the training.

And imagine instead of that person giving, uh, that teacher trainee a list of things they did right and a list of things they did wrong. Imagine if that teacher running the training simply said, how do you feel now that you just did that 20 minute practice teaching session? How do you feel? Because now that's what really matters.

Now that mentor and that teacher trainee can  hopefully have the kinds of conversations that I'm having with the teachers that I work with, where we get into what does the teacher feel are the blocks to them teaching confidently using clear cues, knowing their sequence well. Understanding the, now we're focusing on the person that has control over certain things.

The other concept that I want to share that falls into this category, I haven't created this concept, but I use it in the context of teaching yoga, and I think I'm probably one of the few people who do this concept of energetic cording. So energetic cording, we know from sort of energy work is a concept.

However, in the context of teaching yoga, this is exactly what you're talking about, that feeling of I'm walking in the room to teach my class and I've got this energetic cord between me and all the students in my class. I may not know it consciously, but subconsciously I want them to like it subconsciously.

As I'm teaching, I'm  reading their faces and trying to perceive what I think they're thinking about this class. As the class ends, if people leave and they don't say, that was a good class, bye. I feel badly. Right, right. So what I often share with teachers, not to convince them, but to give them another mindset or another way to look at things, is the idea of having healthy detachment.

Healthy detachment. Think about. Going into your class, seeing the people there are there of their own free will will, they are totally capable. Even the beginners who some teachers might get really anxious for. 'cause I hear that a lot too. Yeah. Oh, the beginners are not having fun. Oh, I can't teach the sequence I wanna teach because there's two beginners in class and I'm worried about them.

They don't need your worry. They chose to be there. Or the person who tells me they have a rotator cuff tear or they have a lumbar disc issue, now I'm worried about them. If they told you about the injury, they know they have it and they're there. That's on them. That's not your job. You don't need to worry about them.

But this, all of this stuff that creates this cording. Is not the fault of the teacher. It is not even the fault. It is the result of an industry that has very long standing stories and narratives around things like there's a safe way to teach a class or an unsafe way to teach a class or ask for feedback or teach what your students want, teach what your students need all.

All these things create  messages and narratives that when you're a new teacher, you pick up on these things. So you become sort of indoctrinated into this thinking that, okay, so now I gotta go in the room and I gotta figure out what do they want? What do they need? Do they like it? Am I doing it right? Is somebody gonna get hurt?

Right, so this is my problem that we keep making the bar higher and higher, and the higher the bar is from the perception of the teacher, the harder it is to teach. And I'm qualified to speak on this because I've trained hundreds of teachers, and like I said, they all come up with these similar problems.

I wish I felt more confident. I feel like I need to change the practice all the time, or they'll get bored. Every time I try to leave the mat, it feels unsafe, so I just practice the whole thing, even though I don't want to. These are the common threads I was talking about before, and it's no  surprise on my part that these are the common threads when I stand back over 22 years of teaching, and I see that a lot of the stuff that was happening then is happening now.

Same teacher training protocols and agendas and patterns, same stories, same narratives. That's why it's happening. You've raised good points there with the feedback. Obviously we need to practice teach in our teacher training. What way would you suggest you would do it? Usually if you ran a teacher training?

Yeah. So like I'd said before, what I would simply do is focus 100% on how does the teacher feel about what they're doing. So let's say the person practice taught for 15 minutes, and I said at the end of that practice session, how do you feel? Oh, I really felt nervous. Well, where are the nerves coming from?

Well, I'm nervous that I don't know what comes next in the sequence. Okay, so. Let's have you practice again tomorrow. The same  15 minute chunk you just did. Let's have you run through it a couple more times and let's see, as you experiment with that same 15 minute chunk, two or three more times, if you are able to remember it a little better, what this.

Just repetition does is it speaks to the neuroscience of teaching yoga, and people don't talk about this. This is part of the problem with changing the sequence all the time. You literally don't give your brain a chance to learn it in any other context. I. Working with children, teaching children alphabets, teaching children how to tie shoes, teaching a teenager how to drive the car.

Every time you taught your teenager how to drive. Would you give them a new car? Of course not. You would have them use the same car. You'd probably take them on the same drive, but for some reason, because of the stories and the narratives and the expectations and the beliefs, yoga teachers. Oftentimes change their sequence, and then they wonder, why can't I remember it?

Why do I get  nervous? Why do I have to practice it with them? Right? So what I would say is start to pull from the teachers. What are they feeling? Maybe another thing that I hear all the time is I feel like I'm saying the same cues over and over again. I don't feel like I'm really speaking to the moment of what's happening.

Okay, well, the way to experiment. With that to fix that is watch what they're doing, speak to what you see. And the only way you can do that is if you're walking around because if you're practicing with them, you miss it. So I always tell the teachers I work with, say the cue and see what they do. Say again.

See what they do. Yeah. And see what they do. And I use a lot of what I call queuing frameworks. So instead of a script, instead of saying the same thing over and over again, use a framework to guide what you're going to say. So for instance, for the teacher who I'm working with who's learning the anatomy, I give them a framework of three action cues followed by one anatomy cue.

That speaks to one of the muscles ally contracting in the pose. So for instance, if you were teaching warrior one from downward dog, you could say Step your right foot forward, drop your back heel, reach your arms up. Action, action, action. Mm-hmm. Squeeze the muscle in your back thigh. Engage your quads.

That's the anatomy cue speaks to the muscle of knee extension in the back leg where the knee is extended. That's the muscle ally contracting. So I use different frameworks. Even something like, say the Q and C, what they do as a framework. You could go into your class and just have that be the framework, the approach, almost like an outline.

If you were gonna write a book and you were gonna write the outline first, think of a framework as a way to organise your thoughts. So now you don't need a script. You can watch what they're doing and speak to what they're doing. You could even just teach all from action. One of the cueing frameworks I suggest is just teach to action.

Speak to action. Step your feet, bring your feet together, reach your arms up, pull your belly button in, step your right foot forward, right? Just action, action, action. You can teach a really powerful class just speaking to action. That's a framework. So these are different things that. That I do with the teachers I work with, and I can't change how the yoga industry is running, but I have my niche of how I train teachers that I encounter.

I have a whole bunch of different ways that I find teachers out there in the world who are hungry for a more authentic, confident way of teaching, and those are the teachers that work with me and just transform. That's great. You probably got issues with the way anatomy is taught. I can tell you about mine.

I used to teach a lot differently when I first started teaching in 2012, and then I trained with Jo Fee, who is a senior assistant to Paul Greeley. And learn about how different our bodies are. And for instance, I went to a Pilates class and this relates to yoga because we were lying on the reformer pro.

So for those of you who don't know what prone is, we're lying on a stomach and we are doing swan, which is similar to Cobra pose. And the instructor said to me, why are your legs not together? And I said, well, it doesn't feel comfortable on my back. He said, but you have to have your legs together. It protects your back.

It's better for your back. I said, but I feel sharp pain. And I said, how does it help protect my back? And this teacher who was an exercise physiologist, said, I don't know, it just does. And I thought, well, if you're going to say that, no, why? It protects your back. But a lot of people, when they glue their legs together, they hit compression.

So they have bone on bone compression with the sits, bones hitting a bony prominence, a lesser trochanter. And so I think. A lot of us teachers can be really dogmatic about alignment. Many teacher trainings just memorize alignment cues and we don't think about the function of the pose. We're looking at the aesthetics.

Yeah, it looks to do. Or some as with your legs together, but why is it such an issue if they don't wanna have their legs together and their feet turn out? Maybe it feels better on their body because of the talk through the tibia or something, you know? Yeah. So one of the concepts this reminds me of that I teach is understanding the why behind the cue.

Yeah. So there the cue, you say, right? Literally the words coming out of your mouth, squeeze around your sitting bones. Let's say you say that. Mm. But behind that. Is the why, what's the reason for the cue that you're using? Now, of course, if we're referring to an anatomy based cue, we can look at it through the lens of anatomy, but this model works for anything.

But let's just play this game of an anatomy based cue. 'cause that's what you're talking about in what you experienced. And the unfortunate response of the teacher, I don't know. And this also hearkens back to a memory I have when I was doing an anatomy training for a friend of mine. And on one of the breaks we got into a conversation about a particular pose and she had a different approach to it.

And I just, out of curiosity, I said, oh, I'm curious. What's the rationale that you have for approaching it that way? And she said, I don't know. That's how I was trained. Yeah, so this is the same thing. It's this abdicating to perceived authority rather than asking as the teacher, what's the reason for that?

Why are you asking  us to do it, to teach it that way? So the why behind the cue, and the reason I speak on this a lot when I work with teachers is that's often where the confidence comes from because when you share a cue and you understand the reason for it, the why behind the cue, you can share it with so much more conviction, so much more clarity.

You can build so much more connection with your students because you can say it like in your case. If they're not doing it, you can rephrase it and see if that helps. But if you don't know the why behind the cue, you can't rephrase it because you only know the way to say it that you were trained to say it, and you don't know the why, so you can't rephrase it.

The rephrasing it comes  from understanding the why, the conviction, the belief behind your words. Comes from understanding the why. And so that's why the teachers that I work with love this model. And they'll say to me, how come nobody's told me this before? And I'm like, this is because, you know, it's just I have a unique way of looking at things, and this is part of what you're referring to here.

So. The other area of cueing that falls into this category that you're alluding to is the cues that are shared in the negative frame. Don't put your foot on on your knee and tree. So if I'm teaching tree and I'm saying, lean into your left leg, bring your right foot up to your inner right thigh, I'm sorry, lean into your left leg, bring your right foot up to your inner left thigh or below your knee, but don't put it on the knee.

That's all I say. So I leave it hanging. I leave it hanging out there. I don't say why not to put it on the knee. I don't say what will happen if you put it on the knee. I just say, don't put it on the knee. There are lots of cues that fall into this negative arrangement and you know that the students are thinking, I wonder what bad thing will happen if I put my foot on my knee.

And it also proliferates this. Thinking that yoga is inherently unsafe. Yeah. There are safe things to do and unsafe things to do, and this is again, a reason why so many teachers tell me, I want to teach safe classes. Well, a hundred percent safe. But yeah, it's like. What is a safe yoga class? If you're walking in a room with a bunch of people you don't know, you don't know anything about their medical history, you're not working with them one-on-one,  they're not talking back to you, and if you additionally aren't watching them and you're doing your own practice, right?

It's just not a recipe for. Any perception of safety. But by the same token, there's nothing inherently unsafe about yoga. So what we can do as teachers is understand anatomy, walk around the room, watch our students say the cue and see what they do. And in the example that you shared. Allow for differences, allow for interpretations on the student's part.

Give agency to the student to do it the way they want because we are not there to control them, but they can't bring their arms up in Warrior One because they've got a shoulder injury. Can they cactus their arms or leave them down if that serves their body? And I guess that's also the way we say it. If it feels good.

Than directing them and being dogmatic. And I think the other thing I've seen in yoga classes is. Pushing students too much. I listened to a Bikram teacher once in the pose, I can't remember the name of it in Bikram, but it's pretty much Ana standing wide-legged, forward bent, holding your feet, and she said, pull, pull, pull.

Gets your head to the ground. She just kept at me, singled me out. I felt the pressure. I thought I got my head to the ground, and as I did though. I felt this twang. It was my sciatic nerve and I limped out of the room, and that would be other advice. Don't demand that they go to the full expression of the pose.

I can say I have never been to a Bikram class, but I certainly am aware and knowledgeable about it, just to the extent of understanding what you're talking about. And I've certainly talked to a lot of colleagues who have Bikram teaching in their background. There's not just Bikram teachers that do that, and No, absolutely, absolutely.

It can be an approach. It can be any style of yoga. They might. Yeah. And I think that obviously what you're talking about is not something that I would agree with. The one thing I will say though, and this doesn't fall into the same category, but it's sort of adjacent and I do wanna speak to it, is a lot of the teachers that I work with have a perception that, and this is again part of the narrative of yoga, this idea of.

Saying to our students, do not so much do what you want, but do what feels good in your body. Take it easy. Like let's take the case of somebody who comes and says, oh, I have an injury, whatever the injury is. Oh, just take it easy. Just listen to your body. Right? Yeah. These sort of things that teachers say, I sort of put that in a category of things that teachers hear from other teachers.

Then they say these things, and in some cases. This is again where we wanna be watching our students. Hmm. If we just look at things through the lens of anatomy and exercise, physiology and biomechanics. Some injuries do well with physical challenge. Of course, when we're teaching a group, we can't be doing any one-on-one, so it's hard to judge.

So part of our conversation, I realize, does require a little more individualized work with a student. I just wanted to speak to it because there is, along with this belief that there's a safe class and an unsafe class. There is also this perception that we don't want students to push themselves, especially if they're injured.

Well think about if you've ever gone to a physical therapist with an injury, it is painful. Now, granted, we are not acting as physical therapists. We are not treating people, but I bring that up because that is. Muscular work you are doing. So the answer to that is not running away from it. As a teacher out of fear, you're gonna hurt them.

The answer to that is to learn the anatomy, to learn how to walk around the room, to learn how to watch your students, to learn how to share clear cues. That's the answer. And of course, to give people agency over what they wanna do in your class. But to run away from it is to almost rob them of a chance that they could have to learn something new to build muscle.

I guess it's because the word stress has a negative. Connotation because we confuse it with distress. But there is healthy stress and there is unhealthy stress. And if you don't use it, you lose it. And that's why when you have complete knee replacement, they get you out of bed pretty quickly and the rehab hurts.

And that's why you hate your physiotherapist, we say in Australia, but they do it because they have to.  Right. I guess it's finding the happy medium, not like pushing them like this teacher did, and it's my fault too. I shouldn't have listened to her. But when you're a new student, you don't always know that.

Of course, when we have a good understanding of N, we have a good understanding of injuries more. Like if it's an anterior disc bulge versus a posterior disc bulge, which movements are going to aggravate that. So understanding anatomy is important, but I do believe. It's hard to cover enough in 200 hours.

Yeah. What I've created to sort of fill the anatomy learning gap, which is what I call it, I wish I had learned anatomy in my 200 hour. I hear that over and over and over again. Mm-hmm. And so my program fills that gap. But I needed to uncover an easy way for people to learn anatomy to impart. Dispel the myth that it's hard to learn because the problem for the teacher when they try to learn it in their 200 hour and they don't, is they develop a belief that it's too hard to learn, and they also develop belief.

That I can figure it out on my own, hence all of the going on Amazon and buying the anatomy books that they tell me they do. Yeah. And it is just about impossible to, number one, learn anatomy from a book alone. And number two, learn it on your own as someone who doesn't understand it. So what I've created over many years and continue to refine is a 10 step blueprint.

Yes. You just follow. The steps. And the other piece that's so important in that is that it's a specific set of principles. Mm-hmm. It's not everything. It's not nothing. It's the stuff that matters. And I'm qualified to know what matters because I've been studying anatomy since I was 18 and I'm in lots of different contexts and I've been teaching for 22 years.

So I have developed. From my experience, the ability to pull from the big topic, am I the only one? Of course not, but I am highly confident that my methodology works because I've run so many people through it, and that's what I meant before when I said scientific method. I'm not changing the rules of the game.

Every time I keep running teachers through this methodology over and over again and watching their results, do they feel more confident? Are they better able to share cues? Are they able to answer student questions? These are results that teachers want, and that's how I gear the program and the blueprint so that they get the results they want.

That's how the transformation is not just feeling different, but actually acting different, teaching different in a way that I want. So imagine the sea of stuff  under the umbrella of anatomy. And realizing, okay, I'm gonna follow this blueprint. It's 10 steps, and it's going to allow me to focus on just what I need to know as a yoga teacher within my professional scope of practice.

And all I need to do is follow the steps. That would be pretty easy as much as a physiotherapist or orthopedic surgeon. But you need to know certainly. Exactly. Exactly. And so that's. The method that I use that has been really, really successful in my work with teachers, and I love, I call them light bulb moments.

The moments where I'm working with teachers, they're going through the steps or having our coaching calls and they're saying things like, oh my God, that's what that Q means. Or, oh my God, I used such and such a cue in my class and somebody asked me a question about it afterwards, and I could explain why.

Or somebody needed a modification or somebody asked me about some funny feeling they were having in half pigeon in their hip, or I feel so much more confident sharing anatomy in my cues. These are results of. Shifts that teachers make. And like we said before, it's not just the anatomy, it's not just the queuing, just the sequencing, it's the mindset too.

So I call those the four pillars of exceptional teaching, the mindset, the anatomy, the queuing, and the sequencing. And of course there's the other components as well, but we need to have some foundation. To build for people so that they can be out there teaching and feeling like it's easy and fun. Build their competence and yeah, that they can actually learn anatomy.

They don't need to know as much as a physiotherapist, but they do need to  know anatomy and not just rely on memorizing alignment cues like saying before. Yeah. So could you give the audience an example of the first three? Oh gosh, of course. Yeah. So we start with what is anatomical position? So anatomical position in anatomy is the home base of shapes.

It's pretty much Tadasana, except the feet are hip width. But when we understand the qualities of anatomical position, like head is centered over the shoulder, palms are facing forward, shoulders are externally rotated, hips are level, feet are straight ahead, feet are hip width, distance apart. There's so much in AP that we can pull from, from a queuing point of view.

So that's. Discussed in step one. Step two is what are the anatomical movements? Now that we know what anatomical position is, what are the anatomical movements, this becomes so important because most of our teaching is  done in conversational phrasing. Reach your arms up to the sky, but reach your arms up to the sky.

The why behind that cue is shoulder flexion. So if all I know is reach your arms up to the sky and I don't know what shoulder flexion and I'm teaching warrior one and somebody has bent arms, I have no idea why that person might have bent arms because I don't even know. Arms up to the sky is shoulder flexion.

If I don't know what shoulder flexion, I sure as heck don't know what muscles do shoulder flexion. I sure as heck don't know what sh what muscles do, shoulder extension. So I don't really have any way to know. Is this person just not listening to me? Why would this person have bent arms? And even knowing what I know about anatomy, I still can't know for sure, but I can have a much better approach to helping that student if I understand the fundamentals.

Step three is especially, sorry, especially if the student came into you, the start of class and said to the teacher, oh, I can't do any  shoulder flexion in class. And if the teacher doesn't know what that is, they're like, same thing. Same thing. Yeah, and then we go from anatomical movements to key bones and then key joints, and then at that point we talk about how muscles work.

Think about how many classes you go to where the teacher is saying things like, engage, contract, lengthen, uh, shorten, uh, squeeze all these words in conversational phrasing that refer to muscular action. But I'd be willing to bet that many of the teachers that use those words again, why behind the queue.

Couldn't even say, what muscle am I asking them to engage? What does engage mean? So how muscles work becomes such an important next step. And then from there we move into key muscles of the body. Not every muscle. There's about 600 and  some odd muscles in the body. Not every muscle, but there's a good 80 to a hundred we should know.

So that's when we get into that. And then once we're done with that, we go into applying it to teaching, applying anatomy to cues, applying anatomy to sequences, and then from there we go to Fascia and Myofascia release. So that is the blueprint. One step that I missed in between is muscles and poses. Once we go through the key muscles of the body, we look at muscles and poses, and that's often where teachers wanna start.

They wanna look at a pose and break it down. Tell me what muscles are doing what, but you need to do the steps before, otherwise you won't understand the muscles and the poses. Yeah, if you don't know how muscles work, if you don't know about key joints, if you don't know about key bones. Right. How are you gonna know what a trocanter is if you don't know about the femur?

We learned that up in step three. Yeah, so this is why when a teacher says, oh, I didn't learn anatomy. Let me go on Amazon and buy an anatomy book, and they open up the book and it's a bunch of pictures of poses with arrows pointing to the muscles. After a couple of days, they close the book and they go, it's too hard to learn.

Well, of course it is. It's hard to learn anatomy from a book, and it's hard to learn it on your own if you don't know it. Yeah, it's hard to get motivated to read the book and you don't have anyone to ask questions. Oh, hang on. That doesn't make sense. Yeah, and it's often good to have examples of, totally, this was what this means, or.

How it's gonna look differently in a student. Totally. Totally. One of the things I love about teaching anatomy, and one of the things that teachers always say to me is, I love the way you bring it to life. Yeah. And that to me is so important because how  many times have you been to a yoga teacher training and they pull up the slide deck and it's just going through the slides of the muscle pictures and.

I mean, I have been to trainings like that and people fall asleep. Number one, when I was a newer anatomy teacher, I would pull up the slides and I would see the people falling asleep. And I knew early on this is not the way to teach it. And so you have to bring it to life. And so I have a lot of different ways.

To bring it to life so that it is a dynamic, interesting, engaging experience for the teacher. And not just that, also just what you said, so that the teacher can remember, can learn, can apply it when they go into their classes. If you could give yoga teachers three or four tips to take home today, what would it be?

I would say the first one is to create a signature sequence that you love. Start with what do you love about yoga? Not necessarily what you were trained or what you took in somebody else's class, but what do you love about yoga? And put that in a sequence and do it in a way where you're not necessarily looking at the books or looking at the social media or looking at the YouTube videos, just using, even if you're a brand new teacher.

What you know as of that day to create a sequence based on what you love and that becomes your signature sequence. And then go out there and experiment with teaching it as much as you can, as often as you can in service to getting to know it. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is to use as an approach to queuing, and this is just one approach.

Again, in service of giving some people some starter tips, use action cues and as much as you can be watching what they're doing. So say the cue and see what they do. And the last thing I would say. To kind of wrap everything up that we talked about with regard to mindset into one small piece is after you teach every class as you're driving home or walking home, simply ask yourself, how do I feel?

How do I feel about the class I just taught? Not how did they feel? Not what did they say, not how many people did I have. Not anything related to anything outside of you. Simply ask yourself, how do I feel and listen for what comes up. Because in what comes up is the problems that you wanna solve for, and also the wins that you had.

That you, you can relish and begin to see hopefully a pattern of things that keep happening, that you make happen when you teach, that you love about how you're teaching. And that question then becomes really the start to pulling forth. What are some of maybe the limiting beliefs or challenges you're having in that area?

It's a form of self-inquiry. Yeah, that makes sense. To finish up, Karen, how can people connect or work with you? Sure. I have a one-to-one program and I have a group program. Mm-hmm. Both of them. You can find on my website, which is bare bones yoga.com, on my Instagram link, which is bare bones yoga, and you can also just send me a DM on Instagram and just say, Hey.

I heard you on the show and I'd love to find out more about how to work with you, but those are the best ways to find me. Oh, great. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you for coming on my passion project, Karen. It's been lovely to have  someone with your experience and to share so much wisdom with people on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you for joining me on podcast. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your wellbeing. If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from you just to fill in the form on the podcast page of my website.

Your voice is an important part of this journey. I want this podcast to reflect the conversations that matter most to my listeners. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from these conversations. Don't forget to subscribe. It helps grow this incredible community of resilience and support.

Until next time, take care of yourself and never forget. The  power, the possibilities of a regular yoga practice. See you soon.

People on this episode

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Liz Albanis

Host
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Karen Fabian

Guest