What Yoga Teacher Training Teaches us About Distractions in a Yoga Class

I Was Featured on YogaInstructor.io!

I’m honoured to have been featured in the article “How to Handle Distractions During Yoga Class: 7 Tips” on YogaInstructor.io. The piece includes wisdom from a variety of yoga professionals on how to gracefully manage those inevitable moments; phones ringing, late arrivals, emotional releases, heaving breathing and the countless ways the outside world can creep into our sacred space. I’m sharing a few ways that by going deeper into our practice, yoga teacher training teaches that distractions are in fact not something that hinders our practice.

I’m sharing a few additional thoughts and nuances that didn’t make it into the final piece, especially from the perspective of a trauma-aware, somatically rooted teacher.

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What Yoga Teacher Training Teaches About Distractions – They aren’t the Enemy: They are the Messenger

One of the biggest shifts in my teaching came when I stopped seeing distraction as something to fight off or fix and instead began approaching it as feedback.

Distraction tells us:

• A student may feel dysregulated
• The space might not feel safe or grounded
• Someone’s attention system is trying to protect them by scanning for danger

As teachers, our job isn’t to eliminate all noise it’s to create a container strong enough to hold what arises without collapsing into it.

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3 Somatic Approaches I Use in Class When Distraction Arises

1. Anchor the Body, Not Just the Mind

If a student seems fidgety, lost in thought, or reactive to external noise, I’ll often cue them into physical sensations:

• “Notice the weight of your body in this pose.”
• “Feel the texture of the mat beneath your hands.”
• “Sense your breath moving in and out through the nose.”

These are not just calming, they’re regulating. They shift awareness into the body, where safety and presence are more accessible.

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2. Hold Space Without Needing to Fix

Sometimes, a student becomes visibly emotional or unsettled during practice. I don’t rush in. I let them know, through soft voice, non-reactive energy, or optional grounding cues, that they’re safe and supported.

The space we hold as yoga teachers can’t always be tidy. But it can be steady.

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3. Narrate the Distraction Without Judgment

If a loud truck goes by or someone walks in late, I might softly say:

“Let the noise be part of your practice. Can you return to breath, even with it?”

This normalizes the experience and reminds students that yoga isn’t about perfect conditions, it’s about presence in imperfection.

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What I Emphasize in Yoga Teacher Training

While the YogaInstructor.io article offers helpful tips, the conversation often stops at managing the surface-level classroom experience.

Many of us feel like we need to be in the perfect space, have the best yoga mat, the newest leggings in order to practice yoga. The truth, we don’t need any of these things.

The opportunity to go deeper in your yoga practice through yoga teacher training teaches distractions are not a limitation to our practice. The practice isn’t about having the best clothes, the perfect space, the practice is more about how do we integrate it when we don’t have everything “perfect”.

Distractions are a part of life, not just in our yoga practice.

In yoga teacher training, we explore how we handle distractions, why they arise and what they can teach us.

Some of the tools and topics we dive into include:

• Energetic presence as a teacher – how your nervous system sets the tone
• Holding space vs. fixing – why discomfort doesn’t always need intervention
• Somatic anchoring techniques – using sensation to bring students back without shame
• The myth of “perfect” space – letting go of control
• Trauma-aware classroom cues – responding to emotional moments with compassion, not panic

Distractions, whether internal or external, aren’t disruptions to the practice, they are the practice. When you learn to meet them with grace, you become the kind of teacher that students feel safe with, even when things don’t go to plan.

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Final Thoughts

Distractions aren’t a failure, they’re part of the practice. When we welcome them with grace and curiosity, we teach something far more powerful than stillness. We teach resilience. We teach how to come back.

If you want to read the full article I was featured in, head over to YogaInstructor.io – 7 Tips for Handling Distractions in Yoga Class.

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Interested in learning how I integrate somatic practices, trauma-aware facilitation, and real-world classroom support into my yoga teacher trainings and workshops? Reach out or explore upcoming programs.