The Camera Does Not Breathe Back
There is a particular silence in a room you are teaching to no one; it feels loud.
I have been recording a course this past week since coming back from France. Ten hours of it, on the nervous system, made for teachers. I set the camera up, I sit down, and I talk about the vagus nerve and allostatic load to a lens and a small red flashing light. Then I do it again, because my neighbour's very yappy sausage dog went on a barking rampage, or I lost the thread of what I was saying, and it all just felt very clumsy.
In the yoga room, you never teach alone. You teach to the students in front of you, and you are watchful of any change. A student's shoulders visibly drop, and you slow the count; someone is holding their jaw, and you find another way in and through; teaching is really a conversation even when you are the only one speaking.
The room breathes with you, and you follow it instinctively; none of it is conscious.
My little DSLR doesn't offer this; it records it all but gives nothing back to me, and I find that challenging because there is not a single moment where you can feel the room understand what you are trying to convey. You say the words out loud, but it's like how a deep well receives a heavy stone.
The joke of it is what I am recording. Ten hours on how one nervous system reads another, on why a room can soften or tighten together, and here I am, teaching it into a lens that has no nervous system, and it's never going to read mine back.
I know this sounds ridiculous and even as I write it, I feel silly, but I kept pausing for a response, and I realised that so much of my teaching is not about the words so much as about reading how those words are being received. The constant, half-conscious adjustments were made to work with the response and faces in front of me. And when you strip that away, it all feels so much thinner, more exposed, just me talking to an empty space and that flashing red light.
Over the first hours of that discomfort, with no one nodding their agreement or understanding, I realised how precise my language needed to be, because I don't know if it landed because there is no face to tell me it has.
In a strange way it feels cold to teach like this, but I also think now, looking back at those recordings, that it is in fact more honest. The material, the work and my words have to stand on their own, without the warmth of a room to prop them up.
And that yoga room, for all I love it, it will never reach the teacher living in a village with no studio, the one who cannot get to Deeside, the one practising at eleven at night once the children have gone to bed. I will never see her shoulders drop, but she will receive this teaching anyway. The one thing I thought was essential to teaching, the reading of the room, the response, in some strange way has turned out to be a gift of the yoga space, but not a requirement of the work. Does that make sense?
Now, do not get me wrong: if given the choice, I would choose the yoga room full of students over the silence of just me and the camera and an empty space. But they are two different things really, and the work this week has shown me just how lucky I have been to have both.
And my wee camera has given me something back this week really; after a week of no faces to lean on, it has made me choose every word with more care, and that care will come home with me to the students I teach next time.
If your own July has lost its shape, I have put a few slow practices in the free library. A somatic yin practice for resetting after a scattered day, a fifteen-minute yoga nidra, and a gentle morning yin. No camera required. Just you, and whatever the day has left of you.
Warmly, Gem
Free library: https://gemmaryan.co.uk/resources
