Why I Hated Teaching Drishti for Years and What Changed It.

WHAT DRISHTI, CAROL DWECK, KELLY McGONIGAL, AND ALIA CRUM HAVE IN COMMON

I hated teaching drishti.

For years. I could not figure out why focus your gaze to one point would help quiet your mind. When I would hear where your gaze goes your body would follow that did not make sense to me.

I could not explain any of those mechanisms. I heard teachers around me saying the word so I just would throw it into class. Literally for years.

Why would looking at one spot on the wall change anything.

The more I studied anatomy and neuroscience the less satisfied I became with the standard explanation.

Of course vision influences movement, but how. If in camel I told you to take your gaze to the back wall and that where you set your gaze your body follows, if that were true did that take into account the relationship between the scapula and the rib cage and how it impacts the cervical spine. So if I did not set up the posture well, would not where the body is following the gaze be going with dysfunction.

And of course stabilizing the gaze can affect balance and orientation.

But that was not the question I was trying to answer.

The question was: what capacity am I actually asking practitioners to develop.

That question changed everything about how I teach.

The Physical Is the Entry Point. Not the Destination.

This is one of the foundational principles inside APEX. The physical practice is where we begin. But it is not the goal and it is not the entire story. We start with the body because it maps with the koshas and it is the most accessible doorway into everything else.

Movement is concrete. Breath is tangible. Gaze can be directed. A posture can be adjusted. The physical gives people something to grab onto and creates opportunities to develop something much deeper.

Attention. Awareness. Learning. Adaptation.

Most yoga teachers stop at the physical instruction. The best teachers recognize that the physical instruction is simply one thread of an entire tapestry.

Carol Dweck Was Not Really Studying Motivation.

She was studying learning.

Her research on fixed and growth mindset demonstrated that two people can encounter the exact same challenge and learn completely different lessons from it.

One person encounters difficulty and concludes: I am just not good at this.

The other encounters the same difficulty and asks: what can I learn from this.

Same challenge. Different mindset. Different outcome.

Now think about your yoga classes. Two people hear exactly the same cue.

One immediately filters it through a story they have been carrying for years. I have never been flexible. Balance is not my thing. My back is bad.

The other becomes curious. What do I notice today. What changed. What feels different.

Your cue did not change. Their mindset did.

Kelly McGonigal and Alia Crum Asked a Different Question.

Not whether stress exists. But how our relationship to stress shapes our experience of it.

Their work suggests something remarkable. Two people can experience similar physiological demands and interpret them very differently. Those interpretations can influence how they cope, how they behave, and even aspects of their physiological response.

That does not mean mindset eliminates stress. It does mean our interpretation becomes part of the experience.

The same principle appears in contemporary pain science. Pain is not simply a measure of tissue damage. It is influenced by the nervous system's ongoing assessment of threat. What we believe about our body, what we expect, what we predict, becomes part of the experience itself.

Different fields. Remarkably similar observation.

And neither McGonigal nor Crum is arguing that mindset is a clinical treatment for stress, trauma, or chronic pain. But they are pointing at something that every yoga teacher needs to understand.

For practitioners living with chronic pain this matters directly. What a practitioner believes about their pain, whether it is permanent or changeable, whether movement is dangerous or safe, whether they have any agency at all, measurably influences the nervous system's threat assessment and therefore the pain experience itself.

For practitioners carrying the weight of trauma the same principle applies through a different mechanism. Healing is not the erasure of difficult experience. It is the gradual development of new predictions that can exist alongside the old ones. New evidence that the body can be trusted. That discomfort does not always mean danger. That something different is possible.

The yoga teacher is not a therapist. They are not treating trauma or chronic pain. But they are either creating the conditions for that kind of prediction updating or they are not. And understanding the mechanism is what determines which one they are doing.

Martin Seligman and the Nervous System That Stopped Trying

Martin Seligman's research on learned helplessness adds another layer that is directly relevant here.

His foundational work showed that when people repeatedly experience outcomes they feel they cannot influence they eventually stop trying even when the situation changes. The nervous system learns that effort does not produce change. That action does not matter. And it stops looking for new evidence.

That is not laziness. That is not weakness. That is a prediction so deeply encoded through repeated experience that the system has stopped updating.

You see this in yoga rooms constantly. The practitioner who has been told for years that their body is broken, that certain movements are dangerous, that they are too tight or too old or too damaged. They are not unmotivated. They are operating from a nervous system that has learned helplessness about their own capacity. And no amount of encouragement or inspiring themes will change that prediction.

What changes it is new experience. Repeated. Meaningful. With attention.

Seligman's later work on flourishing, his PERMA model, identified engagement as one of the central pillars of human wellbeing. Engagement in his framework is not just enjoyment. It is the state of full absorption in activity, what researchers call flow, where attention is completely directed toward the present experience. The capacity for that kind of engagement is precisely what the attentional practices of yoga develop. Drishti. Breath awareness. Meditation. Yoga Nidra. Each one is training the ability to be fully present with what is happening rather than caught inside a story about it.

The practices you are teaching are building exactly the capacity Seligman identifies as foundational to flourishing. And they are doing it by giving the nervous system that stopped trying new evidence that it can direct its own attention. That it has agency. That something can shift.

That learning is the foundation of everything else.

So What Does This Have to Do With Drishti.

Everything.

Because I think telling someone where to look is a tiny part of the story. The bigger part is teaching someone how to notice.

Notice where attention goes. Notice your thoughts without getting attached to them. Notice when your mind wanders. Practice returning. Again and again and again.

That is not simply concentration. It is the beginning of something much more important.

Metacognition.

Psychologists use the word metacognition to describe the ability to become aware of our own thinking. To notice that we are thinking. To recognize when attention has wandered. To recognize the story we are telling ourselves. To recognize the prediction we are living inside.

Without that capacity a fixed mindset remains invisible. A stress response remains automatic. A prediction about pain remains stuck in a loop. A nervous system that stopped trying never receives the evidence it needs to start again.

Awareness comes first. Only then can anything begin to change.

Read That Again.

You cannot shift from a fixed mindset until you first recognize that you are operating from one.

You cannot change your relationship to stress until you first notice how you are relating to it.

You cannot rewrite predictions about what your body is capable of until you first become aware of the prediction you are already carrying.

You cannot offer a nervous system that has learned helplessness new evidence until you create the conditions for it to notice something different is possible.

Metacognition is the prerequisite. We are not talking about positive thinking. We are talking about the big Y yoga. Those timeless principles. Awareness. The observing self.

Suddenly Drishti Looks Different.

We have spent years teaching drishti as a balance strategy. Just a focal point. A place to set your eyes.

Perhaps the ancient teachers were pointing toward something much deeper. Maybe the eyes were never the destination. They were simply the doorway.

The physical practice used to cultivate attention. Attention that gradually becomes awareness. Awareness that makes learning possible. Learning that allows old predictions to be updated. A nervous system that begins to trust that something can change.

Different language. Remarkably similar observation.

Which Brings Us Back to the Original Question.

How do you teach mindset.

Not by giving better motivational talks or choosing more inspirational themes. Not by telling students to believe in themselves or to be up to something bigger or to push outside their comfort zones.

You teach mindset by developing the capacities that make a different mindset possible.

Teach the eight limb path. Awareness, observation, attention. The ability to notice thoughts without immediately becoming them.

That capacity can be practiced during drishti. It can be practiced during breath awareness. It can be practiced during meditation. It can be practiced during yoga nidra.

The physical practice becomes the doorway. Not because movement changes mindset directly. Because movement gives us a tangible way to practice the mental skills that support learning, adaptation, and growth. And because a nervous system that has stopped trying needs a concrete, embodied, immediately accessible experience of agency before it can begin to believe that agency is possible.

The Question That Changed Everything for Me.

I no longer ask where should people look.

I ask what capacity am I asking them to develop. What are they actually practicing when they practice this.

That question changed the way I teach every pose. It changed the way I think about sequencing, cueing, and even elevated how I understood yoga itself.

Because perhaps drishti was never just about the eyes.

Perhaps it has always been about teaching us how to notice.

And before we can change the way we think, we must first learn to recognize that we are thinking.

Join the Conversation.

This month's APEX Community workshop is What If Drishti Was Never Just About the Eyes. The Neuroscience of Attention, Awareness, and Transformational Teaching.

Together we will explore how attention, mindset, stress physiology, and modern neuroscience intersect with one of yoga's oldest practices and why understanding that changes every teaching decision you make.

Community members it is included in your membership. Public registration is $67 (Click here to register to attend live or get the recording.)

Link in the community hub. July 14 at 12pm EST.

For more information on the APEX 300 hour Teacher Training click here.