Holding Space When Times Are Hard

Life is hard—but how we show up for our students in difficult times can make all the difference. In this episode, I talk about ways to create a consistent, supportive space for yoga students during tough times—for them, or for us as teachers.

Chapters:

Introduction (0:00): Welcome to today’s episode, exploring how yoga teachers can support students during difficult times.

Challenges of Showing Up in Hard Times (0:49): Teaching during national and global tragedies and navigating collective grief.

Consistency and Ritual for Students in Grief (2:03): The stabilizing power of ritual and how to create a dependable class structure.

Maintaining Clean Energy and Showing Up (5:26): Holding space with care and consistency, even in challenging circumstances.

Personal Story: Teaching During a Family Crisis (7:52): I share experiences balancing personal grief and professional responsibilities.

Nothing Lets Go Unless It Feels Supported (14:01): The importance of support in creating space for emotional release.

The Importance of a Go-To Class Plan (18:45): Why every yoga teacher needs a reliable, adaptable lesson plan for tough days.

Conclusion and Affirmation (21:10): Centering students’ agency with the affirmation: “I hold the space with sympathy and clean energy.”

Additional Resources

Get my go-to lesson plan for challenging days: Greatest Hits Back-Pocket Lesson Plan

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Transcript

S1E9: Holding Space When Times Are Hard

[00:00:00][00:00:00] Introduction To Holding Space

Can I tell you something? And this is probably something you already know. Life is not easy. But how you show up for your students in the hard times is the key to making them feel seen, safe, and connected. 

I'm Sage Rountree. 

And this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. In season one of this podcast, we're exploring the ways to gain confidence as a yoga teacher. I know personally, I never feel less confident in teaching than on those really tough days, whether they're tough because of some global circumstance or some personal circumstance, either for my students or for me, myself. So in this episode, let's explore how we can show up and properly hold the space for students even on days that are really tough for them and for us.

[00:00:49] Challenges of Showing Up in Hard Times

I've been teaching yoga for over two decades. And that means living in America that I have taught the day after and the day of some truly horrific mass [00:01:00] shootings. 

I think the worst was Sandy Hook. On that day. It was a Friday. We had yoga teacher training that night. And I remember that we were all absolutely stunned. But, you know, from going through your own yoga teacher training, that part of the process of teacher training is having some time and space to share our feelings with each other. 

I have taught open classes after other shootings, like Las Vegas and Parkland. And in those, I generally try to offer some broad acknowledgement of the horrific nature of these events and then not to dwell on them, but instead to give the students time and space to process their own experience. 

Those are just a few examples of the kind of national or even global situations that you might find yourself teaching through or immediately after. There's a sense of collective trauma and grief after these events. But you may already know that some of the students in your class are [00:02:00] experiencing some personal trauma or some personal grief. 

[00:02:03] Consistency and Ritual for Students in Grief

For many years, I taught a group of two couples. They were best friends and neighbors, and many days all four of them would be there together. Or sometimes it would be just one couple and the wife from the other. Her husband was such a lovely man. Came down with pancreatic cancer, went into hospice and eventually died just after we were in yoga class together. 

That was on a Tuesday. And when I went back to teach on Thursday, that two day old widow was there for class. The small private lesson class. Uh, just the three of us. And what can you say to your students in a situation like this? Other than here we are, let's breathe together and let's try to take some comfort in the ritual. Ritual is deeply powerful. And if you are lucky enough to have a student show up with that raw grief that they're willing to share with you, the best you can do is just hold the space for [00:03:00]them and go through the familiar elements of your class. Give them that container of consistency, because when you feel like your whole little game board just got completely up-ended, it can be very soothing to have some ritual, to have those regular elements. It's simply to be still and breathe with space for whatever happens as you go. 

Now you're lucky if you realize that your students are in that acute stage of trauma and grief. Not so that you can fix it for them, but so that you can hold that space for them in a tender and open way. Recognize that most of your students are experiencing some kind of trauma and grief, whether it is acute or chronic, long-term trauma and long-term grief that you will never ever know about. 

So with that in mind, we want to create a container for them to have the experience, the same sense of care and comfort and refuge that they could find in your class if they had shared that their husband had died [00:04:00] two days previously, How do we do that? Well, friends, we do it in the exact same way. We create a consistent container in our class where we bring a certain kind of mood, a certain kind of openness and welcoming. 

We bring our students in like a welcoming host to our classroom. We provide them with a beautiful buffet of choices so that they can put on their plate what they have the appetite for on that day. Some days people come up really hungry for movement. And other days people come into the studio really hungry for stillness. And we can still serve all of those people at the same time. 

If we build a classroom where there is plenty of conditional language, where there is plenty of open-ended questioning inquiry language so that students can make choices for themselves. And where we quite explicitly say more than once over the course of class, everything that I am offering is just that and offering. [00:05:00] Everything I am suggesting is optional. You can make your own choices about what works for you. As my seminal teacher Bryan Carey used to say everything is optional. 

Just like being here is optional. And on those days when it took all of the effort that your students could find to make it into the classroom. Those are the days when having the options and the sense of agency is most important. 

[00:05:26] Maintaining Clean Energy and Showing Up

In 2020, we closed down my yoga studio for several months during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. 

And first we opened outside and then eventually in October or November of 2020, we opened inside. This was back in those good, bad, old bad old days of social distance. And we had to tape off the floor in the classroom that really could hold probably 24 mats. I could only hold nine because of social distancing rules. And boy, can I tell you how we showed up for those nine people? 

Or sometimes classes [00:06:00] had fewer than nine people, but they could never have more than nine people. We showed up for those people with our whole heart. We showed up for those people with a sense of ritual and orderliness that was deeply comforting. In that horrible period where everybody felt like the world had gone completely topsy turvy. Especially given the pandemic nature of it all. 

And then we were still doing yoga in masks. We recognized the sacred duty that we teachers had to our students, some of whom this yoga class that they chose to come to was the only form of social contact that they would have live with people in the course of an entire week. And we know everybody had their own individual threshold for tolerance and comfort and safety, but some of these people were pretty hesitant about being out in person together with others and they used their chit, their chip, their one social interaction of the week on coming to yoga. What a beautiful [00:07:00] testament to the power of the yoga practice and to these students' practice. And their dedication to it, that this is how they would choose to spend their, um, their risk tolerance coming to yoga in person, in a mask, in a small group with social distancing. 

So we held that space for them, myself and my comrades at the yoga studio by giving them ritual and consistency.

Now sometimes the grief and the trauma are your own either because you are also personally processing and experiencing a global circumstance or something national or something, even more regional, like the horrible hurricane that came through Western North Carolina not all that long ago and swept some of our neighbors away wholesale and really, upturned their lives. In these circumstances, you need to be tender with yourself as well. 

[00:07:52] Personal Sotry: Teaching During a Family Crisis

I have personally taught after some very traumatic circumstances. 

My father struggled with his health for [00:08:00] several years before he died, ultimately from leukemia. But along the way, he had an issue with a brain tumor that had to be removed in an extensive surgery. Well, the surgery itself could only be scheduled for day three of a five day teaching yoga to athletes training 

I was leading live. So I spent all of day three of this five day training unaware of whether my father would make it out of surgery and it was a tough day to teach, but I showed up, I kept my students front and center and I, honestly, I used my students and my attention on them as a welcome distraction. I think you probably know that when you are teaching, if you're doing it right, you become this vessel, this channel for, let's not put too fine 

a point on it, you become this vessel and this channel for the divine. And the, the divine is passing through you in service of your students. So when you feel like you are waiting to hear from the hospital, that's something to remember that you were there in service, just like we went [00:09:00] over in episode one of the season, you are not the hero. 

You're simply the guide. You're holding space for your students to have their own heroic journeys.

Dad made it through the surgery, but a few days later came down with a horrible case of bacterial meningitis that landed him in the ICU for 72 super dicey hours. It was unclear whether he was going to make it out or not. And during that time, I remember as I was processing my own acute trauma and grief, that little acts of kindness from people at places where I went like at the Krispy Kreme or at the deli up the street from my parents' house of people being sweet to me, even just looking at people's beach vacation pictures on Facebook, gave me a sense of normalcy. And gave me a sense of deep, deep comfort. 

So remember. You are offering that sense of normalcy, that sense of deep, deep comfort to your students when you can channel the divine in their [00:10:00] service. 

Earlier this year, I had to have a second round of biopsies on a lump in my breast that proved to be benign. But if you've been through this or you have a loved one who has, you know, the wait is really stressful and feels interminable waiting to hear the results of the biopsy. And I had the biopsy, maybe on a Thursday, 

and then we knew it was going to take a few days to get the information back. And of course, that call came through right before I walked into the classroom to teach my regular weekly class. And when the doctor called, maybe not the best bedside manner, he left a voicemail that said almost literally, Hey Sage, I'm calling with the results of your biopsy. 

Everything's okay. But call me back. BUT call me back?!? And I didn't have time. I tried to call him back. He had left for the day. There was nothing to do. I couldn't catch him. There was nothing to do, but go in and teach my regular class. Now I have an Apple Watch on [00:11:00] and I have it set to silence all the notifications that typically come through on my phone over the course of an hour, none of them come through to my watch while I'm teaching pro tip, you can use focus mode. 

If you teach at a physical location to set this do not disturb when you arrive at the physical location. So I have this set. It's worked for me for years. About halfway through that class I was teaching after just having heard this voicemail from the doctor, everything is fine, but call me back. I felt that on my watch, which is really weird. 

And I knew that zip, that haptic feeling was the biopsy results landing in my, MyChart. Now MyChart is, um, like a healthcare portal that we use here in the States, many major healthcare providers use it. So I knew that I would have information, but I'm not going to stop my class. Go out and look it up. I knew that this information would be waiting for me on the other side of my class. What do you do? You just keep [00:12:00] going. 

You keep the focus on your students and you say less, you allow for more quiet. You take your own deep breaths in those quiet periods. I remember going out to the car afterward and deciphering all of this copy on my own, reaching ultimately the conclusion that this was really just a doctor with no bedside manner. Everything turned out to be fine, but it was very stressful.

And I hope that my students had no idea about any of it. If I did my job properly, my students were totally unaware of this. Which leads us to this question, under which circumstances should you disclose to your students that something traumatic is going on and under which circumstances should you keep it to yourself? I think under almost every circumstance, you should aim to keep it to yourself. 

If you're finding it tough to keep it to yourself, you may want to get a sub for that class, if you can otherwise say the bare minimum that you can. And turn the [00:13:00] attention back to your students, back to their breath, back to them getting to make their own choices for the practice you are about to lead. Now in different circumstances beyond the weekly class, like yoga teacher training, I can tell you, I feel like the situation is a little bit different if only because I'm extrapolating from possibly justifying my own personal choices in these situations. So I already told you that my father had an all day surgery while I was leading a yoga teacher training, but then he also was in the last hours of his life in a different teacher training. 

And I a hundred percent shared with my students what was going on. On, because I could have gotten that call on the way into the next session with them. 

Ultimately he died while I was at home overnight and they got the word and then I saw them the day after and they were so kind to me. 

Little break there to say they were so kind to me. And they said something that is really useful. I think, um, when you're dealing with somebody with grief, tell us about [00:14:00] him.

[00:14:01] Nothing Lets Go Unless It Feels Supported

All right. A little light editing there, but I think it's useful for emotion to come through from your teachers. Another thing that makes me cry in the context of yoga teacher training is this message that I have shared called nothing lets go unless it feels supported.

It's the biggest takeaway I think that I got from my own 200 hour yoga teacher trainer, her name was Lesa Crocker, and she said, nothing 

lets go unless it feels supported. And this is true physically. But it's also true just psycho-socially, the examples that she gave were these. If you pick up your kid from daycare and the daycare teacher says, oh, he's been an angel all day, but he promptly turns into a devil in the car That's because nothing lets go unless it feels supported. 

He had to keep his act together all day, but he knows he's safe with you. Or you walk in after a bad day and your spouse looks at you and says, honey, what's wrong. Or your mom calls, and she knows from your hello, honey, what's wrong. Um, nothing lets go unless it [00:15:00] feels supported. 

Your students generally are not there to offer you that support. This is a lesson that Alexandra DeSiato, my co-writer, and I hit hard in our book, Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses. Alexandra shares a story about going for a massage and her massage therapist had just been through an upsetting breakup. And Alexandra being a fantastic communicator and a careful listener asked a question that then received an answer over the entire 60 minute massage. 

So that by the end, Alexandra wound up feeling 

More. 

stressed than when she arrived for this massage that was supposed to de stress her. We don't want to make that mistake as yoga teachers. One more story from my personal experience in 2018, I was in a major house fire. The house was actually declared a total loss. But it wasn't my house. It was my mother-in-law's house. We'd gone down for a [00:16:00] family event on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning around 2:00 AM woke up to the sound of the windows exploding and a horrible smell. 

Everybody got out of the house absolutely fine. That's the most important thing. There were no pets. That was also very important. And even though we had been through this traumatic event, we were then sent home back up here from Charlotte. Up here to Chapel Hill in our pajamas with this sense of absolute shock. We had been through this deeply upsetting, but very condensed event in the nighttime. 

And then we came home. And well about 5:00 AM. I had texted some of my staff to see if someone would be on call to cover. My Monday night, 6:00 PM class, ultimately, after taking a nap, getting up, having a good shower, I decided I'm going to go teach my class. I think it will be great for me to have some sense of consistency and ritual. 

 On the [00:17:00] way in. I debated whether I would share with my students what was going on with me. Ultimately, I decided that I would drop a quick mention to them because I was feeling pretty spacy. I was spacy for about six weeks after this event, that is the effects of acute trauma. But I thought I probably ought to give them the word in case I kind of drift off. I felt secure in my sequence, which is something that we'll cover in a moment here. But I wanted to give them some context because this is a really tight-knit group of regulars and my class always starts lying down. 

And I remember just mentioning, oh, by the way, if I drift off or seem a little out of it, it's because I was in a major house fire overnight. The students all sat up from lying down on their backs, which is a sweet show of compassion, but also a signal to me that maybe I should have kept this information to myself because I made it about me and not about my students. Didn't want to be like that massage therapist who dumped all of her trauma on [00:18:00] Alexandra during her massage. 

And in retrospect, I probably would make a different choice going in. 

Here's why this matters because the energy in your yoga class should flow one way, especially during the 60, 75, 90 minutes of your class. Having a little bit of chatter with your students before class and after class, great. But during class, you want to keep the focus on your students. You're the guide. 

They're the heroes.

Once you hit the point where your students are trying to take care of you, it's all over. You now have become the antihero. You have walked in and centered yourself instead of them. So friends, when in doubt, leave it out. 

[00:18:45] The Importance of a Go-To Class Plan

So now, what are you going to do next time that you anticipate having a hard day in class? It's useful to plan now for what you're going to do then. Go into your phone notifications, your watch notifications and [00:19:00] turn off my chart. Set yourself, a backup sub have their number handy so that you can reach them. 

And you know what to do if you need to call in a sub on short notice, this is one of the many examples in your yoga teaching career, where I would cite that Eisenhower quote. When going into battle plans are useless. But planning is indispensable. Having thought through in advance how you can muster up a sub on short notice may prove indispensable down the road. You might even create a little group in your phone contacts that is emergency sub list so that you can hit more than one person at once in the circumstance where you might need to scramble for a sub super last minute.

And for those days when you are inevitably dealing with life's vagaries, but you're still cool to teach, 

it is so useful to have a go-to class plan, a back- pocket lesson plan. You might already [00:20:00] know when you hear these terms, what your go-to plan is. It's your comfort food plan. It's the one that you could teach in your sleep. If you don't know what that is, I have one for you. It's the very class that I taught that weekend that my father died and to my regular students, without letting them know my father had died, a few days later. You can come to my website and get it. 

It's also linked in the show notes. It has the benefit of being a really adaptable and customizable plan that scales for a wide variety of yoga class formats. You can use it in a flow class. You can use it in a gentle class. You can use it in a class for athletes or athletic balance. Like I teach. 

You could even take one segment out of this greatest hits lesson plan and slow it way down to teach a yin class. So please use mine or have one of your own that you keep on hand. That will also help you have some consistency for your students. Maybe this is [00:21:00] the very lesson plan that you've been working with every week over the course of the month. That would be your go-to. You just go back a few weeks and do that one again.

[00:21:10] Conclusion and Affirmation

An affirmation for us as yoga teachers who are also humans, but who want to center our students' agency. 

And remember that they are the heroes and we are simply the guides. I hold the space with sympathy and clean energy. 

I hold the space with sympathy and clean energy. 

I hope this has proved useful. I hope this is a part of the planning that proves indispensable to you in your next real life circumstance, where you need to teach when times are hard. I'd love to hear how this lands with you. And hear if the greatest hits lesson plan is useful, you can find it in the show notes and you can find my links there as well. 

I'm @sagerountree with no letter D on all the socials. My [00:22:00] website is sagerountree.com and the podcast website is yogateacherconfidential.com. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you next time.