99. What to Do When Your Yoga Class Goes Off the Rails

The second class I ever taught went off the rails before I said a word—and then I spent an hour making it worse by apologizing for not being the regular teacher. Two students set me straight the next day, and I still teach from that lesson two decades later.

In this episode, I’m separating the two things yoga teachers mean when they say a class went off the rails: the logistics problem that happens in the room, and the private disaster that happens entirely inside your own head. Only one of those is visible to your students.

I’ve covered the logistics side elsewhere on the show: medical issues (Episodes 34, 40, and 52), challenging behavior (Episode 33), rooms that are too small or too big (Episodes 39 and 49), phones and watches and timers (Episode 96), covering someone else’s class (Episode 38), and the class nobody shows up for (Episode 24). This episode is about the other kind.

I draw on a few earlier conversations along the way: why the student who walks out mid-class almost never has anything to do with you (Episode 3), why a bored-looking face is usually a sign of concentration (Episode 8), why silence is a tool rather than a failure (Episode 19), and why one honest debrief beats replaying the tape a fourteenth time (Episode 59).

You’ll walk away with language for changing course mid-class, a way to triage what’s actually an emergency versus what’s just embarrassing, and permission to let a mistake pass without comment at all. Listen now!

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? The second yoga class I ever taught went off the rails before I said a single word, and then I spent an hour making it worse. hadn't planned to teach that night. In fact, I had given my first ever public class the evening before, and I was still riding the adrenaline of having survived it when the front desk staff told me that Bryan, the regular teacher whose class I was standing in the hall waiting for, wasn't going to make it. My hand shot straight up. I said, "I can teach this class." So I walked into a room full of people who had come for someone else, taught them the sequence I had prepped for the night before, and then I apologized roughly every four minutes for not being Bryan. The next day, two of those students found me. They were school teachers comfortable with giving and receiving peer critique, and they asked whether I was open to some advice."Of course," I said."We could tell you weren't Bryan," they told me, "so you didn't need to apologize for not being Bryan." that was more than 20 years ago, and I still teach from this story all the time. It was in episode two of this very podcast. It shows up in my book, The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook, in the chapter on executing your plans as instruction for anyone covering someone else's class. Don't apologize for being a sub, because you're not Bryan, and being yourself is the whole job. In truth, the class had not gone off the rails that night. I had, in my own head, out loud, in front of people who were simply glad somebody had shown up to teach them. Today, we're talking about what happens when a yoga class goes sideways, which derailments your students actually register, which ones live entirely inside your own head, and what to do at minute 22 when you've lost the thread and there's a room full of people on mats waiting for you to say the next thing. I am Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. After more than two decades of teaching and 15 years of co-owning a brick-and-mortar yoga studio, I have come to think that yoga teachers use the phrase off the rails for two completely different experiences, and we would all be better off pulling them apart. The first kind happens to the room. Somebody starts snoring in Shavasana. A renegade handstander kicks up in the middle of the floor during a gentle class, which I have watched happen, and which is not a relaxing experience for the students nearby. You get 13 students, and you have only 11 bolsters. Somebody faints. Somebody walks out at minute 20 without a word. As I put it in the handbook, the more you teach, the greater the probability of something going wrong in your class from heart attacks to fart attacks. The second kind of going off the rails happens inside you as the teacher. You cue left and look up at a room full of right legs. They will not correct you. They will do the other side and trust that you meant it. You blank out on where you were going, and you stand there flipping through your own perimenopausal memory while everyone waits in a lunge. You forget to tell everyone to breathe out, which I once discovered when a student gasped, "Can we exhale?" And you rush the second side, which every one of us does, usually because we said all our best cues on the first side, and we haven't yet grown comfortable with silence. So the first kind of off the rails is a logistics problem, and this show has spent a lot of time there already. We covered medical issues in episodes 34, 40, and 52, challenging student behavior in episode 33, not having enough room in episode 39, and having too much room in episode 49, phones and watches and timers recently in episode 96, covering someone else's class in episode 38, and the class nobody comes to in episode 24. So go listen to those when you need them. The second kind is what I want to spend our time on because this going off the rails is the one that has yoga teachers awake at 11:00 at night running the tape, and it's the one your students almost never see. Notice what separates these two kinds of going off the rails. When the heat stops working, nobody in the room thinks you broke the furnace. When you lose your place in your own sequence, it arrives as evidence about you, filed away in the drawer in your mind where you keep every reason you might not really be a yoga teacher after all. That's why a two-second stumble can occupy a whole evening keeping you awake, while an actual fire alarm just becomes a funny story by Thursday. Three things are true about the class you are still replaying, and I would like for you to hold all three. Number one, only you know where the sequence is heading. Only you know exactly where your sequences are going. Your students don't know all the things you meant to say. That sentence comes straight out of the professional yoga teacher's handbook, and it's the one I would write in big Sharpie on your lesson plan if I could. You wrote the plan. You know which transition you skipped and which pose you had promised yourself you would include, but your students walked in with none of that. So the gap between what you intended and what you delivered, the gap you can see in high definition, is typically invisible from a mat. There's a formula I use for this. It's borrowed from the service industry. Satisfaction equals perception minus expectations. Satisfaction equals perception minus expectations. Your students' satisfaction is built out of what they think they got, measured against what they came expecting. Your lesson plan isn't in that equation anywhere. It was never on the menu they were reading. And if you are following my advice to repeat your classes week over week, you're still including just enough variety that your students are expecting there to be a little minor plot twist on the sequence in every class. Proof from my own classes. As a former radio DJ, I used to pour real effort into the playlists I made for studio classes. Then I started traveling more to teach teams on fields and in gyms, and I got used to going without music, and eventually I stopped using music altogether. One night after class, a long-term regular came up to me and said,"You didn't use music tonight.""That's very perceptive," I told him."And I haven't for six months." Ah, Frank. He similarly didn't notice I had bobbed my hair for several weeks after my haircut until he finally did. So six months for Frank to notice there was no music. He was a devoted student who came most weeks for a decade, and it took him half a year to register a change I had agonized over. When students are really in the zone, when they are doing yoga, their attention is turned inward, not toward the production values. Point number two, drop the story you are telling yourself about what your students are thinking. You will never really know what your students are thinking, and often it's that student with the most inscrutable expression who is having the deepest experience. Don't fear the resting bitch face. A slightly furrowed brow is usually the sign of someone concentrating. If you look out and see a room full of smiles and hear laughter at every brilliant quip you offer, your students are focused on you rather than on their own inner experience, which means you're entertaining them instead of facilitating something. I have three stories about this. I was leading a teacher's intensive in a room with terrible acoustics, so I asked everyone to draw close to me. I kept saying, "Draw closer, draw closer, draw closer." One student stayed outside the semicircle. I asked her by name to come closer, and she scooted forward about a foot. I decided it was a lost cause and kept going, and at the end of that five-day workshop, she told me she had just been in the hospital with her son the night before she came to the workshop. He had the flu, and the doctor said she might be contagious for 24 hours. She badly wanted to be there, and she did not want to infect anyone. That's why she stayed where she was. And yes, that is a pre-pandemic, pre–mask normalization story. My colleague and co-author, Alexandra DeSiato, was teaching a class once when a student picked up and left mid-class, kind of gesturing to her with an apology on the way out. Alexandra sat down afterward to write her, and while she was at the computer writing to check on the student, an email arrived from this very student. She had had a creeping feeling that she'd left the kettle on, and when she got home She was right. She found it dry and glowing red on the burner on her stove. The third story is mine and comes from outside yoga. Back in 1996, the heyday of step aerobics, I was such a fan, I was headed to my regular step aerobics class when my father called to tell me my grandmother had died. I hung up and kept moving on autopilot. I went to the gym anyway, and 15 minutes into the step aerobics routine, it hit me that I did not want to be at step aerobics. I packed up my equipment, and I walked out. My leaving had absolutely zero to do with that teacher. Episode three makes this case about the student who walks out, and episode eight makes it about the blank face. Both hold up. It is almost never about you. And point number three, the narration is the derailment. There's a sidebar in the Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook called "The Cook Must Simply Grin and Bear It," and it exists because of Julia Child. You may know that Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, AKA MMM, is a Julia Child-themed program I offer on yoga sequencing using the recipe as the metaphor for lesson plans. Julia said, when a dish went horribly wrong, her instruction is never to apologize. She thought it unseemly for a cook to twist herself into knots of excuses because admissions like that only make a bad situation worse. They draw attention to your shortcomings, or worse, to your self-perceived shortcomings that don't actually exist, and prompt your guests to think, "Yes, you're right. This really is an awful meal." That's the Bryan lesson, you're not Bryan, with a chef's hat on. Nothing I did in that room when I subbed for Bryan hurt anyone. The apologizing did because every apology is an instruction that tells the room where to look and hands your students a problem they did not have 30 seconds earlier. I meant it in the Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook when I wrote that teaching yoga isn't brain surgery or landing a jet plane. The work matters, and it also holds up under a remarkable amount of fumbling So now what? Here's what to do at minute 22 when your brain futzes out. Here are the moves in roughly the order you will need them.

First, triage with one question: 12:13

is anyone hurt or am I embarrassed? Those are two entirely different situations, and they get two entirely different responses. If someone is hurt, you stop teaching and you handle it. Maybe you need to call 911 or the emergency services number in your country. Episodes 34, 40, 52 walk through exactly what to do, including the one where the emergency is your own. If instead you're just embarrassed, you keep teaching. Embarrassment is not life-threatening. It isn't an emergency. It has never once required a room full of people to stop what they were doing. One quick acknowledgement if you think it warrants it, then nothing more. Never apologize is the headline, but it isn't the whole rule. A quick, "Oops, I forgot triangle pose," or, "Sorry, I mean your left leg," demonstrates your humanity and it gets the class back on the same page. There's nothing wrong with it. What costs you is the second sentence after that, and the third, and the explanation of what you had originally planned. Just say it once in five words and move on. You are allowed to let a mistake pass without comment altogether too. Another tip, use landmarks instead of directions. Mirroring that business of reversing left and right when you're facing the room is a real skill, and I'm still working on it after over two decades of teaching yoga. The workaround I love, skip left and right and use something in the room. Lean toward the window, reach for the back wall, turn to face the door. I once taught a workshop in a gym where somebody had taped a giant letter R in the top left corner of the back wall and a giant letter L in the top right. Brilliant. Another tip, have language ready for changing course. When you need to signal that something different is coming, reach for a cue rather than a confession. We're changing things this round. Listen closely. This time. Key change. Plot twist. Any of these turns an improvised save into a deliberate choice, and your students will hear a teacher steering rather than a teacher scrambling. Or maybe you say nothing. You aren't getting paid by the word. Teaching yoga in a classroom is not like delivering stand-up comedy or announcing the news on the radio, and there's no such thing as dead air on a yoga mat. When you don't know what to say, say nothing. Give one or two cues to get people into the shape, then let them be there. The more unsure you feel on a given day, the more quiet you should build into your class. Three seconds of stillness reads to the room as spaciousness and reads to you as an eternity, and only one of those readings is accurate. Episode 19 goes deeper on this. Protect the ending. If you are running long, cut from the middle, drop a round, shorten a hold, skip the variation you were saving. Don't compress the ending to make room for material. If you're running short, slow down and give a longer Shavasana. In all my years teaching and owning a studio, nobody has ever complained that class ended on time, and nobody has ever asked me for a prorated discount because class ended a minute early. Not once. After a class you would say went off the rails, debrief once, then close the kitchen. After that class, make some notes while it's fresh. What you planned, what went well, what surprised you, whether you deviated and why, how it landed, what didn't work. Do this after every class, roses, thorns, and buds, or keep, drops, and adds if that framing helps. Then stop. Running the tape a fourteenth time turns into rumination, and it produces nothing your students will ever benefit from. Episode 59 has the longer version of this. And a counterweight, because I don't wanna leave you with the idea that nothing

matters, one thing really does: 16:12

canceling. Do your very best never to cancel a class, because it damages student confidence in ways you can't measure. Fumbling a cue costs you nothing. Not being there costs you something real. The class you are replaying tonight almost certainly registered with your students as a perfectly good Tuesday. They came, they moved, they breathed, they felt better. They went home. The disaster is a private screening, and you are the only one holding a ticket to that show. And y'all, remember, it's just yoga. That isn't a diminishment, it's proportionality. Remember that your students will appreciate how they feel after taking your class. Maybe a lot, but none of them are in such dire need of yoga that something that is a 95% perfect class will get them annoyed. Keep that in mind when your inner critic gets loud. We get to do real work that helps real humans feel more at home in their real bodies, and we get to do it imperfectly over and over, ideally for decades. I would love to hear your stories about classes that went off the rails. Tell me about the class you were certain was a catastrophe, and what your students actually said to you afterward. I bet they really liked it. I collect these, and they help more yoga teachers than you would guess. You will find me and over 3,000 other yoga teachers in The Zone, my free community at comfortzoneyoga.com. Come tell us what happened. Thank you so much for joining me for Yoga Teacher Confidential today. I'm gonna put all of the episodes I referenced in the show notes, and we're gonna talk next week about some other memorable episodes, 'cause next week is episode 100 of this show. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you there