The Poses We Used to Dread: Our Teachers Get Honest

Your yoga teachers have complicated relationships with poses too. We asked a few of them to share a pose they used to dread or still find genuinely hard, and nobody sugarcoated it.

Ryan is making crow pose his summer project. He has always found it uncomfortable to practice and teach, so instead of avoiding it he is spending the summer breaking it down to figure out why it trips so many people up. His real goal is to make it feel less like a gatekeeping pose and more like something actually available. A lot of arm balances get taught in ways that imply they are only for certain bodies or certain experience levels, and Ryan wants to change that.

Landen used to not really like triangle pose and now it is one of his favorites to practice. Teaching it is a different story. That split is pretty common among teachers: the poses that feel best in your own body are not always the easiest to explain. Triangle is a pose that asks for length, rotation, and stability all at once, and when it finally clicks it opens up the side body in a way that is hard to find anywhere else in a standing sequence.

Ellen finds Warrior 3 hard to practice herself and teaches it using chairs and the wall. That is worth knowing because Warrior 3 looks straightforward and is actually a lot to coordinate: one leg holding everything up, spine long, hips level, lifted leg and torso in one line. Using a chair or wall is not a workaround. It lets students feel what the pose is actually about without spending all their energy on not falling over.

If you are new and finding certain poses frustrating, this is the context that helps! Your teachers have been there. The difference between them and a beginner is not natural ability. It is time and a willingness to keep coming back to the hard stuff.