The second class I ever taught went off the rails before I said a word—and then I spent an hour making it worse by apologizing for not being the regular teacher. Two students set me straight the next day, and I still teach from that lesson two decades later.

In this episode, I’m separating the two things yoga teachers mean when they say a class went off the rails: the logistics problem that happens in the room, and the private disaster that happens entirely inside your own head. Only one of those is visible to your students.

I’ve covered the logistics side elsewhere on the show: medical issues (Episodes 34, 40, and 52), challenging behavior (Episode 33), rooms that are too small or too big (Episodes 39 and 49), phones and watches and timers (Episode 96), covering someone else’s class (Episode 38), and the class nobody shows up for (Episode 24). This episode is about the other kind.

I draw on a few earlier conversations along the way: why the student who walks out mid-class almost never has anything to do with you (Episode 3), why a bored-looking face is usually a sign of concentration (Episode 8), why silence is a tool rather than a failure (Episode 19), and why one honest debrief beats replaying the tape a fourteenth time (Episode 59).

You’ll walk away with language for changing course mid-class, a way to triage what’s actually an emergency versus what’s just embarrassing, and permission to let a mistake pass without comment at all. Listen now!

• Choose Two—$900: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-two
• Choose Three—$1,250: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-three
• Choose Four—$1,500: h

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you!

For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Threads

And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com.

My husband took his first yin class with me at Kripalu and told me afterward that I should rename the practice. He wasn’t entirely wrong: a room built on stillness produced an enormous reaction in his body, and that’s yin working exactly as designed.

In this episode, I break down the three mistakes I see yoga teachers make most often when they teach yin: treating it as a slower version of a flow class instead of its own physiology, cueing “find your edge” as though it’s a complete instruction, and building a class from five favorite poses instead of a real sequence.

Yin looks like the easiest class on the schedule to teach, and it’s the one most likely to leave a teacher at the front of the room wondering what her job is right now. Getting the physiology, the cueing, and the sequencing right is what turns a yin class into one students come back for.

You’ll walk away knowing what tension and compression actually explain about why every body looks different in the same shape, how to cue an entry so a first-time student understands what you mean, and how to adapt the 6–4–2 framework you already use for flow into a structured yin arc.

Listen now!

• Choose Two—$900: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-two
• Choose Three—$1,250: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-three
• Choose Four—$1,500: h

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you!

For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Threads

And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com.

All yoga pants are see-through. Your expensive pair, the clearance-bin pair, all of them—under the right light, in a deep enough fold, the fabric gives away a little more than you bargained for. That isn't a flaw in you or your students. It's fabric and physics, plain and simple.

In this lighthearted episode, I walk through the 2013 Lululemon recall that erased roughly two billion dollars in market value, then tell the story of my student Andrea, who landed a job teaching the New York Jets and got handed an XL t-shirt as her dress code. The lesson lands without anyone having to lecture: you read the room, and you dress for it.

From there I get practical. There are two sides to this for teachers—what we wear and where we look. I share wardrobe advice you can use this week (including the dressing-room test that tells you the truth), when a private word to a student is genuinely a gift, and why looking away with kindness is its own form of hospitality.

Underneath the jokes is something every teacher recognizes: the very human feeling of being seen before you feel ready. Dressing with care and looking away with grace is one small way we take care of the room—for our students and for ourselves. Curious about teaching athletes, dress code and all? That world is what I get into in my Teaching Yoga to Athletes training.

Listen now!

• Choose Two—$900: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-two
• Choose Three—$1,250: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/checkout/fundamentals-bundle-choose-three
• Choose Four—$1,500: h

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you!

For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Threads

And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com.