The Worst Yoga Class I Ever Taught (and what it taught me)

I taught the worst yoga class of my career, and it made me a better teacher.

Not in a poetic, “everything happens for a reason” way. In a very literal, slightly humiliating, glasses-breaking, word-slipping, can’t-tell-my-right-from-my-left kind of way.

Allow me to set the scene.

It’s 2024. Prime time hot class, a full room… 25 people, plus the studio owner. The kind of class where you don’t get to hide. If you’re off, everyone knows it.

And I was off.

You know how yoga teachers mirror the room, so your right becomes their left? That only works if you can actually tell your right from your left.

That day, I was doing marginally better than a toddler who learned last week. I was cueing the right si­—I mean LEFT side, missing the other, then awkwardly circling back like I meant for the sequence to be totally different on the righ—LEFT side. I didn’t.

And then, it got worse. I started tripping over my words…

Not a full tongue-tied breakdown, just enough friction to notice. Pauses where there shouldn’t be pauses. Sentences that started confidently and ended… somewhere else. If you’ve ever tried to recover mid-sentence without drawing attention to it, you know exactly how that feels.

As I'm stumbling over my directions and now my words, I'm aware things are going less than ideally. And then...

Then I stumble onto someone’s glasses.

No, not metaphorically. I literally stepped on them with my whole foot. The lens pops out of the frame. I freeze.

There’s a split second where the whole room seems to stand still, as I realize I have to carry on, like I meant to do that too. What else are you going to do?  

I apologize, handled it as best as I could in the middle of class, and carried on!

Well, I wish that was as bad as it got…

It wasn’t.

I continue, silently reassuring myself that I'm going to survive, that surely it can't get worse. Ha.

We're winding down, the end is in sight! Seated stretches... I open my mouth, meaning to say something about the “kink” in your neck. Instead, what actually comes out is me calling a room full of students (and my boss) “kinky.”

Not quietly. Not subtly. Confidently, in a packed room.

That’s the moment I realize my brain has fully disconnected from my mouth, and there’s no going back. Brain offline!

At that point, the class is no longer about delivering what I planned. It’s about getting through to the end without making things worse!

"Keep the structure, keep people safe. Keep it simple, Sadie." I think to myself... We go back to basics as I attempt to "take my foot out of my mouth".

Well, despite feeling completely mortified, I finished the class. And, I didn’t get fired.

The student’s glasses, apparently, had a history of doing that anyway. And most people didn’t notice half of what I thought they did. I asked.

That part matters.

Because the story in my head was loud and dramatic. I had turned it into a full professional collapse. In reality, it was a slightly (?) chaotic class that people moved through, sweated in, and—based on the feedback—still got what they needed from their practice.

That gap between my story and their experience is where the actual learning happened.

In yoga, we talk about Svādhyāya as self-study, but most people treat it like a quiet, introspective practice. They think: journaling, reflecting, analyzing patterns from a safe distance.

And, that’s one version of it.

The other version is much less polished. It’s watching your own reactions in real time when things don’t go the way you planned.

What showed up for me that day wasn’t necessarily “bad teaching.” It was embarrassment, urgency to recover (disappear), the impulse to overcompensate or fix it, and a very strong desire to put the moment behind me as quickly as possible.

That’s all useful data.

Because those reactions don’t just live in a yoga room. They show up in conversations, in business decisions, in relationships, and anywhere else there’s pressure to perform or get it right. The class just made it obvious; it pointed to where I needed to shine the light of awareness and look a little closer.

There’s also a quieter lesson here that most teachers don’t like to say out loud: being experienced doesn’t make you immune to bad days. It might make them more spectacular, but it definitely changes how you handle them.

A newer teacher might spiral or avoid teaching for a while. A more seasoned teacher still feels the hit but knows how to keep going without turning one off moment into a full collapse. Not because they’re more confident, but because they’ve seen themselves be off before and survive it (that right and left thing happens more often than you think!)

That’s the part people don’t see when they imagine what “good teaching” looks like. It’s not consistency in performance or delivery (although those matter, too). It’s the consistency in getting back up after being knocked down that creates true momentum.

And if you can’t laugh at yourself somewhere in that process, you’re going to have a rough time. Not because humour fixes everything, but because it interrupts the instinct to take every mistake as proof that something is wrong with you.

Sometimes you mix up your right and left...

Sometimes you step on glasses and accidentally call a room full of people kinky.

Either way, you take responsibility where it’s needed. You repair what you can. You pay attention to what came up internally. You have a good giggle about being human.

And then you teach again.