Performing Regulation
Can you remember the last time you taught a class when you weren’t feeling your best? It may have been a personal crisis, a tough day, or a difficult morning, but something was weighing on you as you walked into the yoga studio that day. And try as you might, you were unable to settle yourself or set it aside, and you taught anyway.
We do this as teachers, don’t we ….
As a teacher or any sort of service provider, there is always this unspoken agreement that you will show up, composed, together, calm and ready to step into the role you have chosen as your path. No matter what is happening in your life, you leave it at the door and focus on the students in front of you. Students are there to learn, and you, well, you are there to guide.
As yoga teachers, we tend to discuss cueing and pacing when running a training, not when we are standing at the front of our own class on an ordinary Monday evening with our Yin yoga students. There is an extra layer to this when you are guiding a Yin, restorative or more meditative practice. I know this from years of teaching and from a belief I have held for a very long time: a settled teacher helps create a settled room.
In training, you teach about the conditions that help to make the body feel safe. You talk about pacing, about cueing, about the environment you are trying to create and hold. And yet, even as you are saying it, your own neuroception, those largely unconscious signals running beneath that professional composed you, may not be reading the situation as safe at all. And my god, your body knows what your face is working hard to hide.
There was a time when I was running a Yin teacher training in my early years, teaching multiple classes a day, co-running a studio, and trying to hold a difficult situation in my personal life together at the same time. The students had no idea, and one of them even messaged me after to say it was the most grounded training she had attended. I still find that interesting. Did I really put on such a great show? Maybe our attention towards performing has a life and quality all of its own, regardless of what is happening beneath. Maybe that is part of what we mean when we talk about practice.
“There will be time, there will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” ~ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I am going to be careful here, as I write this, given all the talk and popularity around the nervous system and how it draws extensively on polyvagal theory, which has become increasingly popular within somatic and therapeutic work and now, of course, the world of yoga. There is so much debate ongoing around it that to talk about it as a settled fact would be a disservice, but it also does describe something very real: that we can perform calm while our bodies are doing something else entirely, that the performance of calm and the experience of it are not the same thing, and somewhere within that gap is where a great deal of yoga teaching actually lives.
What I have noticed, both in myself and in teachers I have worked with over the years, is that this sustained performance is itself a massive load. It is not just emotional, though it is that, but in the way that keeping a lid on what you are actually feeling has a cost on the body. Sometimes, we have to put on the professional face even when our inner world is anything but steady or grounded, and it requires something of us. We come home, and we are knackered, right? Flattened. Maybe wired and unable to sleep.
And for many teachers, this is not a load they picked up recently. A significant number of people arrive at yoga not from just wanting to get fit, but through something more urgent: injury, a period of grief, anxiety, a stretch of life that felt unmanageable until they found the yoga mat. Yoga helped. Sometimes it helped so much that, at some point, they arrived at the conclusion that if this helped me, I want to offer it to others too. The impulse is genuine and very real. But it can also mean that some teachers step to the front of the yoga room still carrying the very thing that brought them there in the first place, but now charged with holding space for everyone else.
And none of this is happening in comfortable conditions. We may have arrived carrying that load; we perform regulation even when we may not feel it, and it certainly comes at a cost, all of this held within a culture that has decided the yoga teacher has, by definition, done the work. This expectation is so baked into yoga culture: we teach this, therefore we embody it. You know about the nervous system; yours is fine.
Teaching is genuinely hard to sustain financially. The cost of living is real for all of us, and many yoga teachers are managing incomes that do not quite cover what life costs, holding together classes, courses, and other work to make it all add up and pay the bills. Crisis, when it does arrive, tends to arrive in lives that are already pretty damn stretched. When the personal and the economic land together, the load compounds in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who has not lived inside it.
Nobody really talks about this in public because the professional standards around wellness culture say that you, above all people, should be totally fine. You have the tools; in fact, you should be teaching yoga for free too. And well, if you are struggling, it implies that the tools do not work, that you have not applied them properly, or both, and perhaps you should get a real job. And so it stays private, because the very culture that brought most of us here has also made it almost impossible to talk about openly.
There is a question I have never had a clean answer to: Do you tell the room? Do you say, something is happening in my life right now, and I may not be at my best, and I want to name that rather than pretend otherwise? Or does saying that ask the students to carry something they did not come to carry? There are teachers I admire who are honest about where they are in a way that creates a feeling of genuine intimacy. And there are teachers whose honesty feels a lot like offloading. But the line between them is very fine.
Maybe the fact that it remains a question is part of what keeps you honest in the room. What I think I actually believe, having turned this over for a good few years now, is that the problem is not whether you say something or stay quiet. The problem is the underlying assumption that, as yoga teachers, we are supposed to be the most regulated and steady people, and that our job is to embody a way of being and help students find their own version of it through modelling. I run trainings on that premise, and I would not say it is wrong. But I was also the teacher in the paragraph above, and that is a tension I have not as of yet fully resolved within myself. This way of teaching can turn our inner life into a product to be managed and presented to the world, and for many yoga teachers, myself included, it becomes exhausting.
But what if the most honest teaching you ever do happens on the days you were least sure you should even be there? Not despite what you are carrying, but because of it. Because knowing what it costs to be present does change the quality of your attention, in ways that steadier days sometimes don’t.
Somewhere, there is a teacher reading this before a class they are not sure they have the capacity for. They will go in anyway. They usually do. I wrote this for you.
In June, I am offering a free public lecture on the autonomic nervous system and yoga, focusing on how these ideas affect both students and teachers. It will be on 16 June at 19:00 UK time, and anyone can attend for free. You can join the lecture live by signing up here: https://deesideyogainstitute.com/nervous-system-launch-lecture
