Hey everyone, welcome to Yoga Lans Yoga Teacher Companion. I'm your host Jason

Krandall and this is the second episode in a three-part series on practicing and

teaching Chaturanga. There's something that I want to lead with right now which

is we talk and acknowledge that practicing Chaturanga is difficult. It's a hard

pose. What we don't often talk about is it's a really hard pose to teach as well.

And one of the reasons that's such a difficult pose to teach is because people aren't there for

very long. You kind of have this like high repetition experience but low duration experience.

And so it's difficult to get people to understand and learn some of the more technical nuances of

the posture because they're not there long enough to actually experience it. We're going to talk

today about modifications and alternatives to Chaturanga. We're even going to talk about what I

think is a really not good alternative in transition. There's an alternative in modification. There's

something that's commonly done as a modification or an alternative that I don't think is a very great

idea. But as we look at these modifications, I want to acknowledge that these are really great

modifications but they're also really great teaching tools. I like to use the modifications

that I'm going to show you here in a moment. Not just for people that struggle with the pose and

need these as support structures. I like these tools as a teacher because it can help me teach

components and technical aspects of these postures that are really hard to teach without them.

So my favorite modification includes the use of a belt. We're going to look at two modifications

with props. The first one is with the belt. And then we're going to look at a modification without

props. So I understand the downside of using a belt is one there's a little bit of user error

possibility. And two, not everyone has access to belts and blocks. So we're going to look at

something to do if you don't have access. But if you do, this is my single favorite thing

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