3 Reasons Why Knowing Who You Serve Matters.
With the increasing popularity of yoga and advances in health sciences it is becoming obvious that yoga can help manage all sorts of conditions and become an alternative form of therapy.
The word Therapy in fact, derived from the Greek word θεραπεια, means to cure, to heal and when yoga it is targeted & prescribed appropriately it can in fact heal.
Knowing your student(s) is in fact foundational in creating targeted & effective yoga practices.
When we know who the practices we design are for we can also find ways to engage with them, because for yoga to work we must practice.
For example, when I work with children the focus of our practices is fun, but when I work with older adult the focus of our practices is connection and community. In chair based yoga classes community is vital.and by creating opportunities to connect and socialise students have good reason to come back.
Finally it matters for accessibility. It is simply not good enough when a person comes to our class to ignore their limitations and simply say “do what you can”, another one that I also hate is “do what feels right”… it is our responsibility to keep our students safe, to keep them coming back, and it is also our responsibility to help them access the benefits, effect and function of the practices, we must therefore adapt! Adaptation is a powerful tool and offers access to the asana or its effect, so that students can practice yoga and benefit from it.
The chair is in fact a wonderful tool that allows those less able to access the practices of yoga, as a prop in a general yoga classes, or even holding centre stages in your classes. The chair can in fact be the key to accessing practices that can make a real difference in the lives of those you teach.
So to summarise, It is therefore important to know who our students are in order to
1. Create targeted practices.
2. Find ways to engage and
3. Access the practices of yoga and keep students coming back to the mat (chair) to practice with us.
The more they practice the quicker they will heal.
Find out More about chair based yoga:
