🌱 Welcome to the very first edition of The Yoga Student Digest!

Hey there! I'm Shauna Hay-Viets, a yoga teacher who is always first and foremost a yoga student. Welcome to my new weekly newsletter! 🎉

If you're reading this, it means you want more than just another yoga video. You want to actually understand your practice, not just follow along with it.

Each week, I'll be sharing what I'm learning, teaching, and working through on my own mat, practical breakdowns, honest answers to real questions, and the occasional story from my own very imperfect practice. This is a place to learn from my practice, and to share your own journey, so we can keep learning together.

So, why am I doing this, and what's in it for you?

While I am a 200-hour certified yoga teacher, the one thing I've learned is that the more I learn, the less I know. Yoga has such a vast history and a deep well of practices and techniques. As more teachers and students come to the practice, that history and set of techniques gets filtered through more and more interpretations. Which makes them both harder to trace and more important than ever to actually understand.

So, here, I will not be "the expert" teacher. Hence the title, Yoga Student Digest. After all, you can only learn so much in 200 hours, and even with alllllll the additional trainings and independent study I've continued with since, I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface. But I will share what I do know, what I learn, and how I think about things along the way. I'd love for you to contribute too, so we can learn and grow together.

This is your place to learn the why behind the poses, get real answers to the questions you've been afraid to ask, and remember that even your teacher is still very much a student too.

You'll get this newsletter weekly, including new blog posts, videos, and free resources along the way. I'm going to do my best to make this a consistent weekly commitment.

You can always reply to this email to let me know how I'm doing or ask a question you'd like me to cover. And I'd love to chat with you over on Instagram to hear what you're enjoying most.

Let's do this!
~ Shauna 🌿

Episode 1 - 10 Things I've Learned About Being a Yoga Student After Nearly a Decade of Teaching

As a certified yoga teacher for the past 9 years, I’ve learned a few things about yoga. But it’s not so much what I’ve learned about yoga itself as what I’ve learned about being a yoga student.

Yoga is one of those subjects that feels infinite. The more you learn, the less you know.

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Take, for example, how to define yoga. What even is it?

You can Google a quick definition that defines yoga as “unity” or “union”. You can see it being practiced with your own eyes and call it an exercise or movement practice - a form of physical fitness. Some consider yoga to be a religion. Yoga can even be a verb (do you even yoga, bro?😂). Then when you start listening to experienced yoga teachers, you learn that yoga has SEVERAL definitions. All right, but incomplete by themselves.

When you step away from the noise, though, you realize none of that actually matters. What matters is what yoga does to you. And how it impacts you as a person.

So here are a few things I’ve learned as a yoga teacher about being a yoga student.

1. Most people still think they are “not flexible enough” for yoga

As far as the movement practice goes, every yoga teacher you talk to will say the same thing: “You don’t do yoga because you are flexible; you do yoga to get more flexible”. And it’s true! And yet, when you talk to people who don’t do yoga, they often say it’s because they are “not flexible enough”🤦🏼‍♀️. Or maybe that is just their go-to excuse when people are too polite to say “I just don’t want to try yoga” 🤷🏼‍♀️.

My take: we need to show more inflexible people doing yoga! Personally, I am not very flexible, never have been. I am definitely more flexible when I do more yoga, but that is part of the point! Do more yoga, get more flexible.

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2. The yoga mat is a training ground for life.

You may think you’re doing yoga to get better at yoga - more flexible, balanced, strong, etc.- but really, you’re training for life. Here is what I mean by that. Your yoga practice should confront you. It should push you to new limits, to “your edge” as it’s often called. It should make you think and question yourself - especially when you’re lying in savasana. It’s also where you intentionally practice things like moving with more stability and paying attention to your breath.

All of these experiences are training exercises. For how to prevent falling when you slip on a wet spot. Or how you notice your breath shallowing when you’re feeling stressed. Or how you’re about to react when your kid won’t stop crying, or someone cuts you off on the freeway driving like a lunatic.

The things we put ourselves through on the mat help us better deal with things off the mat. And when you realize that, you’ll keep going to class.

3. Yoga is undefinable.

I talked about this before, but it is something I learned about being a student by becoming a teacher. The more you practice and study yoga, the more you learn about the rich philosophy that backs it up. Sure, it is a movement practice, but it is SO much more than that. If you let it, yoga will truly transform how you see yourself and how you interact with the world. It will change how you think, and eventually how you act. Not because someone is telling you to think or act a certain way, but because you will become more aware of your thoughts and feelings and how you impact others. Once you are aware, you cannot unsee what you’ve noticed.

4. The more you learn, the less you know

You might think that 200 hours studying something is a lot. And it is. But it is nothing when you look at the curriculum that is left out of teacher training. Sure, I learned some great ways to cue poses, design a sequence, and guide a student through a really great yoga class. But you then become aware that the amount that you’re not learning exponentially overshadows what you are learning. It’s very humbling, and a little overwhelming when you’re used to being an “A” student.

My advice: remember you have the rest of your life to learn what you can learn. But in the meantime, focus on implementing what you do learn to make it effective and helpful for your life.

5. There is no shortcut to improvement - such as life - you have to show up and do the work.

This is some tough love right here. If you want to get better, you have to do the work. Showing up to class and checking the box won’t deliver the results. You have to push yourself. If you want to get more flexible, you have to stretch more, and perhaps differently. If you want to get stronger, you have to lift more. If you want to get more mobile, you have to move more. If you want to learn how to do a handstand, you have to practice and be willing to fall. If you want to get better at anything, you have to practice that stuff that is hard.

6. You can always surpass “your edge” eventually, but you’ve gotta be patient, or you could injure yourself.

Sorta continuing the topic from #5. But when you do do the work, it does pay off… eventually. Sometimes you want your progress to go faster; sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. But when you do the work, you will get stronger, deeper, more mobile, more of whatever it is you’re putting in the work to do.

In yoga classes, teachers often refer to “your edge”. This is that point when you’re going as far as you can go into a pose where you’re really feeling it - it is genuinely difficult, but if you push yourself too far you could hurt yourself. So you learn how to flirt with your edge, dance around it, staying on the side where you’re struggling but still safe, inching yourself toward a new, further edge.

Hint: Think about how that can be a metaphor for other areas of your life.

7. Hot take: Every human on the planet can (and should) do yoga

Obviously I’m a little biased here. But I don’t care who you are, what you do with your body, how well it works, what you believe, or how you show up in the world. You can do yoga, and you should do yoga.

Yes, people with physical limitations can do yoga. It might look a little different than you or me, but it is still yoga. And they should let yoga look however it looks in their body.

You might be one of the most fit people in the world, doing tons of other types of exercises; you should still do yoga.

Even if there are things you disagree with in yoga, you should still do the rest.

Tell me if you disagree with me.

8. When you take control of your practice, you take control of your life

What I mean here is that there is no “one right” way to do yoga, and by taking control of your practice, you are deciding what your practice looks like.

It can look like adding some stretches and breathwork into your running warm-up/cool-down.

It can look like seated meditation.

It can look like belly breathing.

It can look like whatever serves you best.

But when you take ownership of your practice, you are making it fit your needs so that you can keep doing it. And by “doing it,” you are improving in something; you are getting better at some area or aspect of your life. When you decide to make yoga work for you, you are committing to getting better at something, and when you decide to get better at one thing, you can decide what the rest of your life will look like as well.
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This is not to say you have control over your life and everything that happens to you, but you can decide how you will approach and respond to the decisions you make and the ways you react to things.

9. Building confidence and accountability in yoga translates.

When you start to see yourself get better at something, whether it's getting a little deeper in your Warrior 2, or holding Warrior 3 for a split second longer, or increasing your depth in a chaturanga (just to name a few examples), that confidence will translate to the rest of your life. You will see yourself improving in something and realize you can improve in something else that may be even more impactful (and perhaps a bit scarier).

That also goes for accountability. When you take responsibility for your own actions and your own progress, you realize how much of what happens to you is really up to you.

10. Yoga is still yoga even when you don’t move.

Yoga is life (to borrow the sentiment from Danny Rojas in Ted Lasso). Yoga is a movement practice, yes, but it is also a way of being. You don’t have to move your body to practice yoga.

One definition of yoga that I really like is “yoga is liberation from personal and collective suffering”. To practice yoga is to move towards the liberation of yourself and others away from suffering. This could be suffering in your body, in your mind, in how you think and carry stress. Yoga gives you the tools to liberate yourself and to be that source, or companion, of liberation for others.

My take: continue to study yoga in all the forms that you can and try to implement those practices to create habits that support your path to physical, mental, and soulful freedom.

So, there you have it. Some of the lessons I’ve learned about being a yoga student through my journey as a yoga teacher.

I’d love to hear from you! What did you agree with? What surprised you? What do you disagree with? Let’s chat on Instagram!

What did you think of the new newsletter?

I'd love to hear from you; reply!

What would you like me to cover in a future newsletter?

Thanks for testing this out with me. See you next week!

~ Shauna 🌱