136: Holding Our Seat with Ethan Nichtern
Holding grounded space as a teacher is one of the most important and most hard to teach skills for new yoga teachers. How can you be confident doing something you are new at? Do you need to actually be confident? What do we do when challenging situations knock us off our center?
To answer these questions and more, I’m so honored to have my teacher and friend Ethan Nichtern with us today. Ethan Nichtern (he/him) is a renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds and several other titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Home.
In this episode you’ll hear:
how we define confidence, and why as a teacher of buddhism, Ethan wanted to write a book about it
how a conversation about privilege and social location is necessary when talking about confidence
the myth that Buddhist teachings advocate for overcoming a sense of self and how fits into a Buddhist book about confidence
an overview of the 8 worldly winds and how they show up in our lives
US election thoughts and predictions! 😬
Learn More From Ethan via his socials below:
Recent Podcast Episodes
Is yoga exclusively connected to Hinduism? What is the caste system and why would a western yoga teacher need to understand it? How much of yoga’s complex history do modern yoga practitioners and teachers really understand?
In this powerful and thought-provoking conversation, I welcome back Anjali Rao — yoga educator, activist, and author — to unpack the intertwined histories of yoga, caste, patriarchy, and colonization. Drawing from her new book Yoga as Embodied Resistance, Anjali challenges us to explore how caste hierarchies and colonial legacies still shape modern yoga spaces, language, and access to practice today.