Ep 126: How to Teach Your Students Body Awareness

Teaching body awareness in yoga is one of the most underused skills a teacher can develop, and one of the most impactful things you can offer your students. This episode makes the case for why this skill deserves a central place in how you teach, and gives you concrete tools to bring it into your classes, starting with your very next class.

This episode includes:

• Why Saying "Listen to Your Body" Isn't Enough
•  Why Teaching Body Awareness Matters for Your Students
•  Why Body Awareness Matters for You as a Teacher
• Practical Ways to Teach Body Awareness
• What Students Experience When You Teach This Way

Resources Mentioned:

Sequencing Made Easy - a clear, practical framework for building classes that are accessible and well-structured. 

Transcript

Monica 0:00

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system insights, plus all the real-life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. We know that yoga is often described as a mindful movement practice, and we also talk about the practice as a way to help students get out of their head and into their bodies. Studios advertise it as an antidote to the disconnection of a stressful modern life, a space to slow down, to feel, to come home to themselves. And yet, in most yoga classes, some teachers never actually teach students how to do any of that. They for sure cue alignment, the breath, and the transitions, but the specific teachable skill of actually noticing what is happening in a student's own body, feeling the difference between your left hip and your right, recognizing when one shoulder feels like it's working harder than the other, sensing how a pose changes the moment their breath changes. These skills almost never get taught explicitly. Students are left to themselves to develop it if they develop them at all. This episode is about that gap and what you can do as a teacher to help close it. Teaching body awareness is one of the most valuable things you can give your students. It matters for you as a teacher just as much as it matters for students. So I'm gonna walk you through some concrete examples of how to actually build this into your classes without adding time or making it overly complex to what you're already doing. Let me start with the actual phrase, Listen to your body." I'm sure you've said it. I have too. It's so common in the language that we use in yoga. And the thing is, it's not a wrong thing to say. The intention behind it is real. What you're trying to communicate is pay attention to yourself, honor your own experience, do not push past what your body is telling you, and these are great concepts to teach. But for most students, it doesn't really land, not the way we intended to, and not because they don't wanna listen to you, but because nobody ever taught them how. Listening to your body is a skill. It requires a framework and the ability to distinguish between different kinds of sensation and noticing things that most of us have spent our whole lives ignoring. You cannot just tell someone to listen and expect them to know what they're hearing. What students need is not the instruction to listen. They need someone, you, to show them what to listen for and to give them the space to do it, which means slowing down our classes. When a student develops genuine body awareness, something fundamental shifts in how they experience their practice and how they experience their body outside of class too. Think about the student who has been coming to your class for two years maybe and still cannot tell you which side of their body feels tighter in a hip stretch, not because she's not paying attention, but because she has never been asked to notice that. She's been taught the pose, cued the breath, told what to do with her arms, and she follows instructions beautifully, but the internal conversation between her mind and her body has never really been taught to her. Now think about what becomes possible when you start teaching her to notice. She begins to understand that her right hip is consistently more restricted than her left, that after a week of sitting at a desk all day long, she can feel it in her lower back before it becomes, like, true long-lasting pain, that her breath shortens in certain postures and deepens in others. She learns to distinguish between sensations, what feels like a productive challenge and what feels like a bit of warning worth taking note of. She begins to build a relationship with her body that is based on felt information rather than making assumptions. This matters far beyond your yoga classes too, which is amazing. A student developing body awareness becomes someone who notices the sensation of tension before it potentially becomes an injury, who notices when she's feeling stress in her body before it overwhelms her nervous system. She becomes a more informed participant in her own health because you are giving her the experience of paying attention and showing her what to look for. For students who are working with pain or recovering from an injury, this skill is especially important. A student who can accurately describe what they're feeling, where they're feeling it, and how it changes through different positions gives you vastly more information to work with. They become a partner with you in figuring out what their body needs, and they leave class feeling genuinely heard because the experience of their body has been treated as relevant and worth attending to. Now, let's flip this around because what I just described is also enormously valuable for you as the teacher. Teaching body awareness makes you a more effective teacher because it makes your students better at telling you what they need, and it changes the nature of what happens in your yoga room in ways that will stay with you for long periods of time. When your students know how to notice side to side differences, they start telling you about them. When a student says, My left shoulder always feels different in this pose," that's information you can work with. It changes the question from, how do I teach this class, to how do I teach the actual people, the actual students in my class? And that is a completely different and more responsive kind of teaching. It also gives you an early signal system for things that might be developing under the surface A student who has learned to notice their body will tell you when something feels unusual possibly before it becomes a problem. That is good for them. It's also good for you because one of the most valuable things you can do as a yoga teacher is to begin to catch things early. Teaching body awareness requires you to slow down. I mentioned this earlier. It requires you to add pauses into your sequences, moments where students are not receiving instructions but are simply noticing. Those pauses are where their practice deepens. They are where the meditative quality of yoga actually is. And when you create them intentionally, your class stops feeling like a fitness class with spiritual language sprinkled in here and there and starts to feel like something different. Students can feel that, and they come back for this feeling. Let me give you three specific ways to bring this into your classes because I do not want this to feel theoretical for you. You can actually do this. The first one is before and after comparison. This is the most simple version of body awareness you can teach, and it works with virtually every level of practitioner. You do a pose on one side, let's say a hip opener, or a spinal stretch or a shoulder stretch, whatever you're working with. And before you move to the second side, you bring students back to a neutral position and ask them to notice. What do they feel on the side that was just, uh, worked or stretched? How does it compare to the side that has not been targeted yet? Does the hip feel lower? Does the shoulder feel more open? Does the breath move differently through one side of their rib cage? You're not asking them to fix anything here or to judge anything. You are just asking them to notice the difference. takes Only about 30 seconds, and it truly can change your classes. You're giving students who have been going through the motions a reason to pause and pay attention. They discover that the two sides of their body feel different from each other, sometimes dramatically, and that discovery is genuinely interesting to them. They start to get curious about themselves in a way that they've never been invited to in other yoga classes. The second approach is mid-sequence breath check-ins. At a natural pause in your class, coming into child's pose, settling into a mountain pose, resting at the end of a standing series, ask your students to just pause and notice their breath without trying to change it. What is the quality of the breath? Is it short and high in the chest, or does it move all the way into the belly? is it smooth or choppy? You're not cueing Ujjayi breath or a specific technique. You're teaching students to feel what their breath is actually doing right now in this moment. Most students have very little practice with this. Breathing is usually something that happens without them paying much attention, except when something happens or goes wrong, or they notice like really quickly that they're holding their breath. But when you invite them to notice it as information, you are helping to open the door to curiosity. Over time, students who practice this begin to use their breath as a genuine signal, recognizing when tension is starting to build, when they have gone past their edge, when they need to rest. That is exactly the kind of self-knowledge that makes a yoga practice meaningful over the long term. The third approach is using sensation language in your cueing. This is less about a specific moment in class and more about how you talk. Instead of describing what a pose should look like, describe what it might feel like and shift to asking questions so that they answer for themselves. So instead of saying, Press your feet into the mat," try adding on, "Notice the contact between your feet and the floor. Where is the weight? and what happens when you shift it slightly forward? Instead of saying, "Open your shoulders," or, Draw your shoulders back and open your chest," try adding, What do you notice in the space between your shoulder blades right now?" You're not asking students to perform a shape, you're inviting them to investigate a sensation. This kind of language does something important. It takes the teacher out of the position of authority over what the student should feel and puts the student in the position of expert on their own experience. You become a guide helping them explore the body they already live in rather than an instructor telling them what their body should be doing and what their body should be feeling. Students respond to that differently. They trust it more and they trust you more. I wanna talk about what students actually experience when a teacher includes this kind of intention into a class because I think it's important to understand why this is so worth doing. One of the most meaningful things I have heard from students is that when the cuing is this clear and this grounded in sensation, they don't need to watch the teacher. They can close their eyes and be fully inside their own practice. this is important for my students especially because I mostly teach online now. And instead of students having to stare at their computer screens, they can close their eyes, follow my cues, and practice this meditative movement in their own bodies. When you cue like this, this tells you something real about what is happening in your classes. Your students are not following instructions anymore, they're experiencing something. Students who are taught body awareness in their yoga practice feel seen in a way that goes beyond having their alignment corrected. They feel like the teacher understands that they are not just a physical body to be arranged into shapes, but a whole person with an interior experience that deserves being paid attention to This is not a small thing. This is the kind of teaching that creates loyalty from your students, trust from your students, and students who keep coming back year after year, not because your sequences are new, but because your class gives them something they cannot find anywhere else. And for students managing pain or working around an injury, the ability to notice and describe their own experience is genuinely empowering. It shifts them out of feeling like a passive recipient of a yoga class into feeling like an active participant in their own well-being, and you have given them that. If you're teaching students who are actively in physical therapy, once they begin to connect to the sensations that their bodies are feeling, they're able to go back to their physical therapist and have more informed conversations. They can tell them what they've experienced in their bodies since the last time they had a session, and it just makes for more educated, more informed sessions where patients or your students can actually have conversations with their physical therapist. And you are helping to teach them that. If you are thinking about how to build more of this into your classes and want a practical framework for structuring sequences with intentional space for awareness, I have a free resource called Sequencing Made Easy. It's a guide that walks you through how to build classes that are well-paced, well-structured, and include the kinds of natural pauses where awareness practice can actually happen. You can grab it in the show notes below. Teaching is not just about what you put into a class. It's also about what you create space for. Body awareness lives in this space, so build it into your sequences and watch the reaction that happens with your students. I hope this episode helped you think about slowing your sequencing, teaching more intentionally, and if you're really serving your students with the choices you're making and the pace at which you're teaching your classes. If you're enjoying these episodes, leave a review and share it with another yoga teacher. Don't forget to check out the free sequencing resource in the show notes, and thank you so much for being here. Okay, I'll see you next week. All right, bye.