You’re bored teaching yoga.

This happens to me every few months. Here’s the scene. The room is full. People are grooving and moving. My cues are crisp and clear. But I don’t have a spark in me. Everything shines in a technical sense, but I lack vibrancy.

The space that true yoga teaching comes from resonates from a deep interest in the principals and practices of yoga.

The knowledge is in my head because I’ve been teaching and studying for years. But when I’m not vibing on it, the soul of the practice doesn’t come out of me for my students.

When I drop into a space that lacks soul, this signals to me that I need to see new teachers do new things. There are no new ideas, only new ways to make them be felt. Yoga is like this. The practice is 5,000 years old. But we have been adapting, changing, blending, and stretching what the practice is for nearly that long. As yoga entered the west, it immediately began to blend with other movement practices and create new ways to approach the old teachings. That’s my key out of a stagnant personal practice and a rote teaching approach.

Watch other types of movement practices.

There are people out there moving in interesting ways. Gymnasts, martial artists, dancers and guys like Ido Portal and Dylan Werner are all changing how we approach movement. To the western mind, yoga is a movement practice. Connect with people innovating and exploring novel movement modalities.

Read the books.

Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Brene Brown, Alan Watts, Sam Harris, James Nestor and many more bring the teachings of yoga, breath, and an examined life to the world in authentic ways. Read their books. Use those books as a place to prime the mind to dive into the original texts: The Baghavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, Tao Te Ching, etc. Let your modern mind absorb the lessons and then find their source.

Practice more yoga.

If all I do is teach, I have nothing new to share. When I have nothing new to share, the classes become repetitive. Find new teachers, new studios, online or in-person. Practice more yoga and let yourself be led by your peers in the industry. Notice what teachers are doing that you do all the time. Notice how they cue the namaskars differently than you. Notice how they incorporate transitions. Freshen up your practice by being led through someone else’s.

You will get bored. One of my yoga teacher trainees posted on Instagram this week that she just taught her first class as a registered yoga teacher. As a teacher trainee, this swells me with pride, especially because she’s a naturally gifted teacher. But she will get bored, eventually. It happens to all of us.

Yoga teaches that all things come to pass, the burning of your thigh, the stretch in your hip, the anxieties in your mind, and even the boredom of the practice you learned that principal from. Things arise. Things disappear. Show up. Vanish. If you’re bored, keep moving. It’ll pass.