Breathing Life into Zoom / Part I
This fall I will be back at the New York Open Center teaching Awakening Your True Voice: Support Health and Vitality through Better Breathing, a six-session virtual class on Zoom. Teaching on Zoom has been a rich and revelatory experience for me, in spite of early technical challenges. Much has been written about the discomfort and lassitude brought on by the endless sitting on Zoom meetings, but it does not need to be so. I have found that Zoom sessions can be enlivening for both the student and teacher, and I can honestly say that Zoom has made me a much better teacher in that I have had to communicate the essence of my work both through the clarity of my own demonstrations and the precision of my explanations. I have become quite alert to keeping the energy in the “Zoom room” going. How wonderful it is when people leave a Zoom class more energized and enlivened than when they entered!
My process in teaching on Zoom is really no different from how I teach in person. Every moment I am teaching, I experience in myself what it is I would like my students to experience. I “live” the words I am saying throughout my whole being. It is enormously powerful, and it doesn’t matter whether it is in-person or virtual. As one of my Open Center students wrote after a class, “Thank you for sharing your passion and your energy with us. Even in this virtual classroom, I can feel it so clearly; it radiates out through the computer screen. I'm grateful to you for being a guide on this journey of awakening to the power of breath, flow, and voice.”
I begin every Zoom class with getting students to sit comfortably erect. That requires that students become aware of how they are sitting. Are they collapsing in the chair or are they rolling behind their sitz bones (the bottom bones of the torso)? I demonstrate what our body looks like in this collapsed state, and I then demonstrate how to sit on the sitz bones with the chair rising up to support me; this is comfortably erect. Students instantly feel enlivened and it improves their mental focus. Sitting comfortably erect is not just for Zoom. If you integrate it into your life you will find that your breathing will become fuller and and your voice stronger. Such a simple tool but with such far reaching implications. Try it at your next Zoom meeting. Your body—and mind—will thank you!
