You can say the correct thing twelve times. Clean. Anatomically sound. Nicely toned. And the student’s body will still stare at you like a cat being offered calculus.
Then you say one different word. Not smarter. Just truer for them. And suddenly the ribcage moves. The foot organizes. The breath stops pretending. It’s annoying. It’s also the job.
Teaching yoga—anything that lives in the body—is a translation problem. The anatomy is pretty fixed. The words that reach it aren’t. Michael put it plainly mid-class: “finding the right language for the individual is going to basically tell that you have capacity.” Not “build” capacity. Tell it. Like the capacity was waiting for the right sentence to believe itself.
This is why he collects language like tools. He’ll coin something on the spot—“refactor” for an ankle adjustment—and it lands better than a paragraph of careful explanation. New words for new positions. Sometimes slang is just precision with a grin.
He also publishes teaching texts pulled from real student cases. “If you think it’s about you, it probably is.” It’s a vocabulary research project conducted in the Mysore room, with receipts.
And when you run out of synonyms? Good. That edge is where you have to actually see the person in front of you. Not the pose. Not the script. The person. Especially now, when generic instruction is being mass-produced by machines that don’t have a body to listen with.