Why Every Teacher Teaches Differently
· @Erika
Middle finger or index finger forward? A question about Downward Dog that is really a question about who you listen to.
On Monday, a teacher tells you to point your middle finger forward in Downward Facing Dog. On Wednesday, another teacher says the index finger. By Friday, you’re standing at the top of your mat wondering which one is right, and whether you’ve been doing it wrong all along.
Students ask me this all the time. My answer usually surprises them: both teachers may be right, and neither of them can answer the question for you.
Why teachers teach differently
Every teacher teaches from somewhere. Some cue according to the school or lineage they trained in, and they pass on what was passed to them. Others teach from their own experience: what healed them, what injured them, what they discovered in their own bodies over years of practice.
And some teach from belief. That can be a belief about alignment, about tradition, or simply about what yoga is supposed to look like.
None of this makes a teacher wrong. It makes them human. A cue is never neutral; it always carries the history of the person giving it.
Where my teaching comes from
I should say where I come from too, because my cues carry a history like everyone else’s.
My roots are in India. I began reading the Mahābhārata in 1994, and in 1995 I started asana practice and began reading the Yoga Sūtras with T.K.V. Desikachar in Madras. He became my first and longest teacher, and I later studied yoga therapy at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram. After his passing, I continued learning with the Mohans.
Over three decades, other teachers and traditions shaped how I practice and how I understand the texts:
Practice: Geeta Iyengar at RIMYI in Pune, B.N.S. Iyengar in Mysuru, Ashtanga intensives in Mysuru, the Bihar School of Yoga in Munger, the Ghosh tradition with Muktamala Mitra in Calcutta, and Dharma Mittra in New York
Texts and philosophy: the Yoga Sūtras and Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā with Dr. Chinmay Pandya, years of Sūtra study with Swami Gyansiddhi and Swami Tadatmananda, Advaita Vedānta at Arsha Bodha Center, Vedānta with Dr. Rohit Dalvi, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika with Dr Chinmay Pandya, and non-duality with Rupert Spira
Each lineage taught me something. Sometimes it showed me what I wanted to carry forward, and sometimes it showed me what I didn’t.
Alongside the tradition, I studied the body as a living network:
Anatomy and biomechanics: years of study with David Keil, and pain, trauma, and anxiety with Dr. Kelly McGonigal at Stanford
Fascia and tensegrity: Anatomy Trains and Body Reading with Tom Myers, fascia study with Dr. Carla Stecco and Robert Schleip, and fascia and myofascial pain with Dr. Helene Langevin at Harvard’s Osher Center
Energy meridians: a diploma in Traditional Chinese Medicine from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, NADA ear acupuncture certification, and Meridian Yoga Therapy Levels 1 and 2 with Dr. Rose Erin Vaughan
These are the voices behind my cues. They don’t make my cues right for you, but they are why I can tell you where each one comes from.
How I teach, and why
My teaching is shaped by my teachers, above all Desikachar, and by more than three decades of my own practice. But when it comes to how I cue a pose, the reasoning has to hold up on its own. For me, that reasoning comes from anatomy, biomechanics, tensegrity, and the energy meridians of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
In Downward Dog, all four lead me to the same cue: the middle finger points forward.
Anatomy and biomechanics. When the middle finger points straight ahead, the wrist, elbow, and shoulder tend to line up. The load travels through the joints instead of twisting across them, so you don’t add tension or pressure where you don’t need it.
Tensegrity. The body is not a stack of bricks. It is a tension network, with bones held within a continuous web of fascia. When the hand is placed evenly, force spreads through that whole web, from fingertips to spine, instead of collecting in a single joint.
The meridians. In TCM, the yin channels of the arm (Lung, Pericardium, and Heart) run along the inner arm into the hand, and the Pericardium channel ends at the tip of the middle finger. Rooting evenly through the palm and the middle finger keeps these lines open rather than compressed, so energy can move as freely as the joints.
That is my reasoning, and I stand by it. But a reason is not a law. Your bones, your joint spaces, your fascia, and your history of injury may tell a different story.
Does it matter?
Let me ask you a bigger question. Does it matter for your liberation whether your middle finger or your index finger points forward?
No. No one has ever become free because of their hand placement. No one has stayed bound because of it either.
For your body, though, it can matter. If you come into Downward Dog five or ten times, it makes little difference. If you come into it every day, hundreds of times a week, as in a daily practice with lots of vinyasas, the repetition adds up. Over months and years, you will feel it in your wrists, elbows, and shoulders, and along the fascial lines that carry that load into your neck and upper back.
So there are two questions here, and it helps not to confuse them. One is about the body: what serves this structure, over time? The other is about freedom, and no cue answers that one.
What the tradition actually asks of you
Patañjali says remarkably little about how to do a pose. His whole teaching on asana is three words: sthira sukham āsanam (Yoga Sūtra 2.46), a posture that is steady and at ease. He gives no finger placement and no fixed shape, only a quality you have to find for yourself.
Desikachar carried this forward from his father, Krishnamacharya. In that tradition, the practice is adapted to the person, not the person to the practice. A good teacher looks at who is in front of them. The responsibility doesn’t end with the teacher, though. Svādhyāya, self-study, is part of the practice itself. A teacher can offer you a technique and the reasoning behind it, but only you can feel what it does in your body. The teacher points; you have to look.
Try this
Next time you practice, make it an experiment rather than a test:
Come into Downward Dog with your middle finger pointing forward. Stay for five breaths and notice your wrists, elbows, and shoulders.
Rest in Child’s Pose for a few breaths.
Come back into Downward Dog with your index finger pointing forward. Stay for five breaths and notice the same places.
Ask yourself: where did I feel ease, and where did I feel strain?
Repeat it over a few days, because one practice can mislead you. Then let your body, not my voice and not anyone else’s, have the last word.
The beauty of it
Every teacher teaches according to what they know, what they’ve lived, and what they believe. That will never change, and it shouldn’t. Listen to all of them with respect, and then go home and find out for yourself.
That’s the beauty of yoga: it only becomes real when it becomes personal.