Save Yoga / Teaching

Language in class, and the claims that slip in

Detoxifying, realigning, releasing trauma.

Class language accumulates claims that would not survive being written down: that a position detoxifies an organ, releases stored emotion, compresses or stimulates a gland, or corrects an alignment problem. Much of it is inherited and repeated without examination.

It matters more than it appears because students take it seriously. A person told that a practice releases trauma may pursue it instead of appropriate care, and a person told their pain is an energetic blockage has been given an explanation that prevents them seeking a real one.

The alternative is not sterile instruction. Describing what a position does mechanically, and what it might feel like, is more useful to a student than a claim about physiology, and it is also more interesting once you have heard the claims a hundred times.

Teachers who have removed this language from their classes generally report that nothing was lost. The practice does not depend on it, and the students who valued it usually valued the attention and care it was delivered with.

It is worth noting that removing unsupported claims does not require removing the philosophical content. There is a substantial tradition of ethical and contemplative material that makes no physiological claims at all, and teachers who want more than exercise instruction have it available without asserting anything about organs.