Five things I learned from my online yoga students

Morning Yoga regular Michelle made this collage of all the pet taxes paid for missed class over the years

By Alana

I hate being bad at stuff. 

I was an overachiever in school, first flute in concert band, and prone to drop any activity I wasn’t immediately good at for fear of looking dumb.

So when my friend and I signed up to do our yoga teacher training together, I told Amber I was going to “practice the crap” out of teaching before we even started. It was that or, horror of horrors, risk being bad at something I’d never done before.

Maybe it’s the influence of my East Asian side - my mum is from Hong Kong where stellar achievement is essential from infancy to get onto the “right” track of society. Or perhaps it’s my dad’s relentless work ethic. But in November 2021, I invited friends and my mum to our first online Zoom class. Most had never done yoga before. We had a blast. They asked questions. Gave me feedback.

Kayaking off the course of Panana with Dana, my mum’s coworker who joined her for Morning Yoga for years and then hung out with me in Panama on a yoga retreat!

I taught free yoga classes five days a week with that group for months. We were coming out of the pandemic, connection-starved and stir crazy from life under lockdown. The preparation helped. My yoga trainers were impressed, and I was offered a class on the studio schedule when I graduated teacher training.

As life got busier and I had more chances to teach, I slowly decreased my Morning Yoga online classes. But I continued to invite anyone interested to attend and our group ebbed and flowed in size with friends and students I met in person.

We had folks from KW and the GTA, sure, but also had friends join from Hong Kong, Australia, the Netherlands, and from sunny islands on vacation. Once, folks on the call were in five different countries!

Digital down dogs from Switzerland, Canada, Hong Kong, Netherlands, and Costa Rica

This October, after four years of online teaching, I made the tough decision to end the program. Balancing the day job, my in-person classes, and my work with KO Yoga, was adding up. 

I will always be grateful to my online crew, my first yoga students, who gave me the confidence to lean into this work I love. Their curiosity, questions, and commitment shaped the teacher I am today.

Here are a handful of the many lessons my online students taught me.

Being ridiculous is okay

I continue to be shocked that people like my weird and zany classes. My online students taught me that being my authentic and ridiculous self while teaching isn’t just okay - it humanizes the experience for everyone. That my approach of overexplaining, inviting questions, and decentering the teacher on screen in favour of a collective experience will resonate for some. 

Strange creatures have been known to attend Morning Yoga on Halloween

You have time to do yoga

My friend Michelle woke up at four-something AM to catch the bus to work, then joined class from work before starting her day. She did this for years! 

We’re all busy, but Michelle taught me that intentionality in pursuing your goals is necessary. We only get so many priorities in life: pick one for your mind, one for your body, one for your soul, and create a routine that fulfills them (and guess what, yoga can help with all three 😉)

Teaching beginners is a gift

In teacher training, you practice teaching to other yoga teacher students -  people who move their bodies regularly and know the names of yoga poses. 

My online crew was not those people. Many were brand new to yoga. Explaining camel pose in a way that actually feels safe and useful over Zoom to people who you can only kind of see - that takes precision of language and empathy. If you’re a yoga teacher working on refining your cueing, teach beginners, teach online, teach athletes who don’t do yoga.  

You don’t need much to practice yoga

My friend Kevin lived in Hong Kong for several years which was great because he wanted to do yoga, but he sure wasn’t a morning person! So the twelve hour time difference allowed him to participate regularly.

His Hong Kong apartment was maybe twenty square feet. He had to turn sideways or put his legs on the wall for his twists or for shapes with arms out to the sides. The tiny space forced creativity on his part and on mine as I offered pose variations.,

I had other friends who joined class without a yoga mat, from their office, or from their bed because showing up for the community, connection, and intentional time for themselves was the goal, not the asana. They taught me that many so-called barriers to moving, being present, or taking time for ourselves are invented.

Practice is a habit

The yogic niyama of tapas suggests that we deepen our understanding of self by embodying discipline. The students who found online classes most rewarding were those who formed a habit around it. More than once, they told me their day didn’t feel right if they didn’t get their yoga in. I was moved by how they sometimes found other mindful ways to move, breathe, and be if they couldn’t make it to class. 

Last Wednesday was my first morning not teaching this online group - breaking a habit years in the making. I felt off and a little sad when I realized why - I was missing our small but committed community of movers. 

But I know I’ll always carry a bit of my online crew with me.

They’re in every long story I tell while my students hold a boat pose and curse me, in every joke about the “short arm big booty club” (we still need t-shirts), and in every set of cat scratches or paw prints on yoga mats I see (because we always pay our pet tax).

Harvey’s favourite classes involve yoga straps he can chase or tune up balls he can chew