Why do people come to yoga class?  Why is the studio filled with 15 eager students one week and only 3 the next?  We yoga teachers tend to take class size personally, scrutinizing our teaching choices and wondering “What did I do wrong?”  ”Did they not like the new music?”  ”Maybe I should do less balances and more backbends?”  

But after 10 years teaching yoga in Vermont, I’ve come to see dramatic spikes and drops in class size as a factor of the weather and the season, more than anything else.  

In the fall, yoga studios fill up as people return from summer vacation and fit yoga into back their regular schedules. Motivated with back-t0-school energy, Vermonters often respond to the shorter days of September by seeking community and stress relief in yoga class.  

And by November, when the gray cold settles in and the long dark afternoons descend, people flock to yoga.  My steadiest yoga numbers have always been in the fall.  But then come the holidays, winter travel, illness and snow days.  Winter yoga is precarious– either people have a bad cold and can’t breathe in downward dog or they’re snowed in because the plow guy is late…

By April, yoga picks up briefly, mostly during times of low pressure.  Give me a rainy morning (or evening) and I’ll give you a full yoga class.  But once the sunlight returns and the weather is clear, people emerge into the springtime world.  They don’t want to be indoors in the yoga studio– they want to be out working their gardens, riding their bikes again, hiking or walking.  Given the choice between yoga practice and outdoor exercise, many Vermonters choose the latter.

Then comes the solar-powered frenzy of June and the Solstice.  Long glorious days mean gardening fever, along with jam-packed social calendars, parades, farmers markets, and the busy-ness of the end-of-school.  Some people turn to yoga as an oasis of calm in the storm, but early summer classes are unpredictable.

 By July and August, vacations have started, and a teacher just needs to keep teaching, keep breathing, and anticipate the steadiness of autumn again.  

And so the cycle continues.  As long as a few students come to class, we stay with it, filled with the give-and-take energy of asana practice, the shifting dynamics of teacher and student.

As B.K.S. Iyengar once said to a disciple:

“You go wait at the Yoga Shala.  If somebody comes to class, you say “Thank you God I have someone to teach.”  And if nobody comes to class, you say “Thank you God I do not have to teach today”.  

(This is a story I heard during class from one of my own teachers, in turn.)

Namaste.

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