Tending the vessel

I was incredibly honoured recently to be invited to help with a vinyasa teacher training. One of the things we discussed was how to share what we love about the practice with our students. Because the yoga we see online or on social media can so easily become outward. The shapes and the aesthetic. And that's fine, up to a point. But it's not what draws many of us who now teach to it.

What lights us up is the internal stuff - the soulful bit. The question of how a practice on a mat can make us better at being human off it. What keeps many of us coming back is harder to explain. The quieter internal shifts. The strange way practice sometimes changes how you meet the rest of your life.

But how do we share that with our students if that’s not what they are looking for? Or, for those who are receptive to more than the “exercise” without trying to over-engineer an emotional experience for them? You can't make someone feel something. And if you try, it usually backfires, or the practice becomes less about student discovering something within themselves, and more about what you want to “pour” into them.

That conversation has stayed with me. Because I think it gets at something important about what good teaching actually is. It's not about performing your own love of yoga at people. It's about creating the conditions for them to find their own way in.

Which brings me to Cole Chance - a yoga teacher and somatic guide whose work I've been drawn to for a while. She talks about the body as a vessel: A good vessel needs two apparently opposite qualities at once - structural integrity and openness. Walls firm enough to hold, and an opening wide enough to receive. A pot with no sides can't cook anything. A sealed pot lets nothing in or out.

We're the same. We need enough structure (groundedness, a sense of self, actual boundaries) to hold our experiences. But we also need enough openness to let life in. To be moved. To receive difficulty and beauty without immediately deflecting them. Otherwise we spend all our time protecting ourselves from the very things that might change us.

I built a class around this recently - a slow flow moving into yin, structured around that image of the pot, the cauldron, the hearth. The flow to build the vessel. The yin to steep in it. The flow built heat and structure first, and then the yin gave us somewhere to sit inside it for a while.

What I love about the vessel analogy is that it helps bring to life something that I think yoga helps us understand - that the external and internal aren't in opposition. The strength, the structure, the effort... it's not the point, but it's what makes the softer stuff possible. And maybe that's true of teaching too. You need enough of yourself present to hold the space. Just not so much that it becomes about you.

That's the kind of yoga teacher I want to be. I don't always know if I manage it. Sometimes I finish a class genuinely unsure what came across and what just stayed inside my own head.

But maybe that uncertainty is the point. A vessel doesn't need to know exactly what it's holding, or what will be made of it. It just needs to keep its shape, stay open enough to let something in, and know when it's time to pour back out.

So I keep tending it. Holding enough to let things steep. Staying open enough to be changed by them. And then, when a class is ready, offering it out and letting go of what anyone does with it.

Not because I'll ever get the balance right. Because that's what tending a vessel actually is.