Drawing from three decades in the contemporary world of yoga, Susan shares reflections from her experience as a student and from her over 20 years as a teacher. This is the book she would have wanted to read when embarked on her teaching journey, clarifying the terms, principles, and motivations affecting how yoga is taught today.
Insightful, wide-ranging, and informative, this book is an inspiring companion for emerging and established yoga teachers and students alike. It offers a solid foundation for understanding yoga today, clarifying confusion around yogic concepts and related topics. Find out how to identify the qualities of a good teacher and how to recognize a poor one, and explore ideas for harmonising yoga teaching with an integrated personal practice.
Susan wrote this book because in over 30 years of practicing and over 20 years of teaching yoga, she was increasingly dismayed by the lack of basic understanding of yoga amongst ‘certified’ yoga teachers. She wanted to create a resource where all aspects of yoga she sees as fundamental are explained in clear language to avoid the confusion that arises about such things as understanding our modern habits in the context of yoga (for example, reflecting on the role of social media and on yoga as a business), while emphasizing the need for discernment and self-awareness - the most powerful evidence of a balanced yoga practice. She examines issues that concern all contemporary yoga teachers, like when to perform adjustments, yamas & niyamas for teachers, trauma sensitivity, avoiding cult dynamics, problems with modern YTTs, and the issues of accreditation and certification in an industry with no certifying body (which entails explaining the misconception that Yoga Alliance is a certification board).
Susan intersperses personal experience with teaching, and specifically how parenting, loss, and illness affected (and ultimately benefited) her teaching and practice. Teachers and practitioners who have read it say they are learning things they never knew in decades of practice and even teaching.
[Susan] has written this rather wonderful book which I want to recommend to all of you who are yoga teachers or aspiring yoga teachers. (Here I’m using the word ‘yoga’ to mean Modern Postural Yoga as taught in studios worldwide.) It is really a much-needed book that addresses the many issues and problems in the modern yoga world, and points the way toward more grounded and responsible (and responsive) teaching of modern yoga. Hareesh (Christopher) Wallis, Author and Saiva Tantrik Teacher, Boulder, CO.
Thankful for YOU and your beautiful book about teaching yoga… a must for every sincere yoga TT’s book list. Julia Goetz, Yoga Teacher.
Susan Hopkinson’s understanding and expression of modern postural yoga in Teaching Yoga In An Upside Down World is extremely informed, beautifully insightful and practically approachable. A truly relevant reading for teaching asana based yoga in the 21st century and an essential guide for emerging and established asana based yoga teachers. Thank you Susan for this AMAZING resource! Kristin Cantrell Varner, Oregon.
