Published May 7, 2026 12:49PM
When I started teaching yoga more than 30 years ago, I tended to share incredibly detailed explanations of each pose during class. I sometimes even ran past the scheduled end time and students had to remind me they had busy lives and needed to leave! Eventually, I came to understand that as they juggled those busy lives, students could only take in so much information at a time. And that as a teacher, one of the most essential things I could do to help students is pace my sharing of knowledge.
When I overwhelmed them with too much information at once, I wasn’t making the practice approachable for students, no matter my good intentions. What I found is that in order to create effective and accessible yoga classes, I needed to ask myself some essential (and sometimes surprising) questions. The answers informed not only the information I shared but my sequences and how I showed up as a teacher.
5 Questions to Ask Yourself As You Plan Yoga Class
One of the biggest challenges—and responsibilities—as teachers is figuring out what to share, how much to share, and in what order to share it. The following considerations can help you identify what will actually support the students in front of you as well as your evolution as a teacher. For each question, you’ll find a couple additional and more prompts that might help you focus on the specific ways that question shows up in your teaching.
1. Who Am I Teaching?
Is the sequence appropriate for the students I’m teaching?
Can I let go of my original plan to support who is in the space and what they need today?
One of the signs of an experienced yoga teacher is the ability to think on the fly and shift the class plan according to how students are responding. That skill can take time to develop. It also demands a firm understanding of the basic foundations of yoga practice before you can feel confident enough to improvise. It’s similar to learning how to improv when playing a musical instrument. We need to first build the basic skills before deviating from the plan, otherwise it tends to land a little discordantly. Be patient with yourself as you learn.
Being flexible and adaptable also means letting go of teaching everything you may have planned to share and releasing your own perfectionist tendencies. You can teach by example when you “go with the flow” and showcase your ability to be adaptable and creative. This could mean responding to a request to practice hip-openers or address questions about how to release tight shoulders. It could also mean slowing the class down and offering individual pointers rather than rushing through a planned sequence.
2. Am I Trying to “Fix” Students?
Do I see my students as lacking in some way?
Do I assume that my job is to fix or change them?
What would class look like if I trusted students?
How can I give them agency over their own practice?
One of the ways that ableism, ageism, and other harmful behavior based on stereotypes seep their way into yoga classes is through the idea that as teachers, it’s our job to “heal” our students. Even for yoga therapists, this is a common misunderstanding of how yoga works.
Our responsibility is to share access to practices and tools that students can rely on to work on themselves. But each student’s journey is uniquely theirs. Our role is limited to creating a supportive space for them to do that work. That includes not overwhelming them with information or keeping them after class ends to give them more information that we might think they “need.”
3. Am I Helping Students or Making Them Reliant on Me?
Is my goal to educate my students or make them reliant on me?
What would my classes look like if my goal was to empower students?
How can I help them build their own personal practice?
Rather than focusing on keeping students coming back to class week after week, I like to focus on my role as an educator. For example, many of us struggle with the idea that we need to offer new sequences each week in order to keep students interested. I have found that repeating similar sequences week after week offer students a chance to learn some foundational skills that they can bring home and work on in their own practice. I often use an 80/20 principle, which means I offer at least eighty percent of the same poses and practices each week, and about twenty percent new or different.
Although capitalism teaches us that we need our students to come back to our classes week after week, yoga tradition works differently. It reminds us that our role as a temporary holder of this ancient tradition requires that we freely pass on what we have learned so that we can inspire the next generation of practitioners to learn from yoga and make it their own. Of course we can charge for class. But we need to remember that our primary focus is helping students build their own practice by educating them about the fullness of yoga so they can put it into action, not ensuring our classes are packed.
4. Am I Teaching Yoga or Poses?
Am I committed to the fullness of yoga as reflected in the eight-limbed path?
Can I find ways to share all aspects of yoga?
Asana, or the poses, is what most people are coming to yoga to experience. But if we teach only the physical practice, we cheat students out of an expansive practice that includes yoga’s ethical teachings, pranayama, and meditation.
These more subtle aspects of yoga might actually be even more powerful than asana. They offer students tools for working with their nervous system, addressing stress, and creating moments of peace in their lives.
Even when we feel insecure about teaching the non-physical aspects of yoga, we can share insights with students that will shape their understanding of the practice. A teacher doesn’t need to know everything in order to impart helpful information. Honestly sharing aspects of what has worked on your journey, without making the class all about you, can land as even more authentic and meaningful for your students.
One way to approach this is to bring them along with you as you continue to learn. For example, instead of using a theme each class, you could commit to focusing on one aspect of yoga philosophy in your own practice. Sharing honestly by explaining, “I’m working on ahimsa, non-violence, this week by paying attention to my self-talk,” is a lot more powerful than telling students, “Practice ahimsa.”
5. Am I Overfocusing on MY Experience of Yoga?
Can I let go of my own experience enough to recognize that my students’ journeys are different than mine?
Can I recognize that they might grow from different practices?
Can I create space for them to experience the same practices very differently than I do?
One of the key elements of both accessible and trauma-informed yoga is reminding students of their inherent agency. That means they have choice and power of what they do and how they do it. This is especially important for people who are facing personal challenges or societal oppression.
The simplest way to remind our students of their agency is by allowing them to have their own experience during practice, and to create space for them to explore that in depth. For example, how do you feel when a student purposely ignores your instruction, opts out of doing a pose, and rests in Savasana? Can you get over your desire to keep everyone moving together and let that student have their own practice?
More important than the content of our classes is the way we teach. That includes embodying the teachings of yoga by showing respect and kindness to our students through what we share with them. It’s also essential that we show that same respect and patience for ourselves in recognition that we, too, are students and always learning, no matter how long we have been teaching.
Learn more about designing effective yoga sequences with Jivana Heyman in a free workshop series.
