Latin Is The New Sanskrit

I remember one of the first really challenging yoga classes that I took in New York, when I was starting to get serious about yoga (we had dated on and off since I was a senior in college, but I had resisted settling down) sometime around 1999. The teacher spent the first part of class talking about the five kleshas, (Sanskrit for obstacles) and how these obstacles of the mind affected our behavior. I had never heard of kleshas before, but I listened as she went through the list (ignorance, egoism, attachments, aversions, fear of death). We then went into a vigorous vinyasa sequence; I sweated, breathed, relaxed, and left with that yoga high, and with some new knowledge of yoga philosophy.

It didn’t seem out of place for the teacher to bring philosophy into an asana class, and I have since taught many classes that way myself. The practice of yoga is an integration of art and science. As such, it is completely appropriate to approach yoga with the goal of increasing awareness of both your physical habits (through pose adjustments from the teacher to prevent unhealthy patterns) and your mental ones (when the teacher uses yoga philosophy to illustrate a real life experience).

It strikes me as strange, however, that with all the different styles of yoga that are out there, it’s rare to hear a yoga teacher talk about muscles in the classroom. I don’t mean basic alignment cues, as in how much to bend your knee in Warrior 2, or to ground down through your big toe mound in Trikonasana (admit it: you’ve said that one. I have too). I mean actual names of the muscles that the students are using in their bodies at that very moment. Why is this?

I will admit, when I took my first teacher training, the anatomy module was an impregnable fortress of Latin surrounded by putrid swamplands of kinesiology, and I was miserable and confused. Over the years however, and in particular through studying with Jill Miller this past year, my teaching has changed to encompass as much anatomy as I can get away with, because I believe that physiology is as important to communicate to students as philosophy. 

Here’s an example from my class a few days ago: when in Warrior 2 pose, the abducted position of the arms requires two muscles to hold them in place, the deltoids and the supraspinatus. I don’t expect students to already know what or where these muscles are, but I respect them enough to know that they are intelligent and capable of learning by embodying this anatomy themselves, considering they all have bodies to practice with. So I turned around and touched the two muscles on my own shoulder and upper back, and I also demonstrated what commonly happens when the muscles that raise the shoulderblades are unnecessarily contracted as well.

I asked the students to lower their arms, and then with this new knowledge that they had acquired, to raise their arms to shoulder height again using only the two muscles they needed. Fourteen demonstrations of efficient shoulder movement followed, and it made me very, very happy. Will they remember the muscle names? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but they now know it has nothing to do with their neck, and I think they’ll remember that at least. This doesn’t have to live in a vacuum from teaching yoga philosophy, either: when I use that demonstration again (and please, use it too in your own class!) I could even tie it into one of the kleshas, and talk about having attachments to too many things when we can often do what we need with less.

I’m not saying that your flow class has to completely change into an Iyengar-style picking apart of every single pose, but I think taking a few moments here and there to impart some of your study of the body would be invaluable. And if you’re thinking to yourself “But all the muscle names are Latin, and they don’t speak Latin,” I would remind you that none of them speak Sanskrit either, and yet they have learned all the Sanskrit pose names through your repetition, as well as probably several other words that are practically ubiquitous at this point (Namaste, anyone?).

Yoga is a practice of embodiment. The human body is a humbling structure full of stunning, brilliant architecture. Why shouldn’t we learn and teach as much as we can of it to our students? Why shouldn’t students of yoga know as much as their gym-going counterparts, so that they can practice intelligently and avoid injury? Why shouldn’t we as teachers take it upon ourselves to continue learning, to hold ourselves to a higher standard than what is currently required of us (especially since future legislation will likely raise that standard anyway)? Why not, since we are working with people’s bodies, and in a therapeutic capacity, train to the level of a physical therapist? The worst thing that could happen? You might be mistaken for one.