What Your Yoga Teacher Is Really Looking At

There is a dead giveaway that lets every (good) yoga teacher know the depth of your experience as a practitioner. No, it’s not how far behind your head your foot goes, or how many surya namaskars you can do. It’s much more subtle than that.

What she’s looking at is your hands. In one glance, she can tell if you’re newer to yoga and whether you can focus your attention or not. There are plenty of other things that give her information, too, and I guarantee she’s using as many of them as she can to get a complete picture and help you in the best way possible.

And she wants to help you, because when you work your hands well, your practice will be safer. Then she can start to give you more challenging poses and more refined alignment cues. Here is a short video to help you get healthy hand alignment, reduce the risk of injury in your hands, wrists, elbows and shoulders, oh, and look like a badass!

Update: The series of alignment-based posts is now called “Virtual Workshop” and you can find all the posts by selecting this category in the drop-down menu on the right side margin of the home page.