Jun 15, 2026 · 1 hr 31 min · 11 segments
Chad Herst, author of The Performance Trap: The Ache No Success Will Ever Fix, talks with J about departing from deeply ingrained…
Chad HerstGuestI am wondering, whoever you are, are you on your way to a yoga class right now? And that could be a class that you're teaching, or it could be a class that you're taking.
And if you are on your way to a yoga class right now, will there be jump back sun salutations in that yoga class? I'm curious how many of you listening do jump back sun salutations as a regular part of your practice.
Now, I imagine there are many of you, like myself, who did jump back sun salutations for many years, but at some point we stopped, right? I mean, maybe not all of us.
But I, I imagine there's many of us, as we've gotten older, at some point, we stopped doing jump back sun salutations.
Man, like coming on [laughs] 20 years ago or something more, there was a v- very specific time in my life where I made this choice about what my practice was gonna be and what I was gonna teach.
And it meant letting go of a certain approach to practice where you're challenging your body.
Like, I became this gentle yoga guy at a certain point because I let go of something in practice that has to do with accomplishing the forms in any way.
And I've been thinking about that a lot because I had a recent experience as a teacher that required me to do jump back sun salutations with students.
You see, those of you who've been listening for a while know that for more than a year now, I've been teaching at the local juvenile detention center with boys ages, like 11 to 16, who are incarcerated.
And these boys get removed from, like, general population and put into these pods where they're given, like, kind of a, a whole battery of different kind of treatments, and part of it is yoga classes.
And I've been doing it for a year, and recently I had an experience there that I just haven't had as a teacher in a long while.
I teach two classes, two classes back to back, and in the first group that I see, pod three, there's really just been, like, two boys in that group.
There was some others that have, like, uh, have left, but there's these two boys who've been with me consistently for, like, some months, and they have totally gone there with me.
Like, they've really got into the breathing thing that I do and the gentle yoga thing that I do and the dialogue.
One of the boys read Tara Brach's book, Radical Acceptance, and comes in with all these interesting questions and, like, that pod has really been what you would imagine.
If you were gonna say, "I'm gonna go teach at the local detention center," and you were to imagine, like, the best possible scenario of what that would be like, that's what my experience has been in this one pod.
They're kinda unruly, and I've been really seeing if I could kinda win them over and joking around with them, and I thought that I had kind of been making some headway.
But then, like, some weeks back, I had a class with them that it actually kind of fell apart, where I sort of looked up from demonstrating, and none of them were, like, paying attention to me.
I am wondering, whoever you are, are you on your way to a yoga class right now? And that could be a class that you're teaching, or it could be a class that you're taking.
And if you are on your way to a yoga class right now, will there be jump back sun salutations in that yoga class? I'm curious how many of you listening do jump back sun salutations as a regular part of your practice.
Now, I imagine there are many of you, like myself, who did jump back sun salutations for many years, but at some point we stopped, right? I mean, maybe not all of us.
But I, I imagine there's many of us, as we've gotten older, at some point, we stopped doing jump back sun salutations.
Man, like coming on [laughs] 20 years ago or something more, there was a v- very specific time in my life where I made this choice about what my practice was gonna be and what I was gonna teach.
And it meant letting go of a certain approach to practice where you're challenging your body.
Like, I became this gentle yoga guy at a certain point because I let go of something in practice that has to do with accomplishing the forms in any way.
And I've been thinking about that a lot because I had a recent experience as a teacher that required me to do jump back sun salutations with students.
You see, those of you who've been listening for a while know that for more than a year now, I've been teaching at the local juvenile detention center with boys ages, like 11 to 16, who are incarcerated.
And these boys get removed from, like, general population and put into these pods where they're given, like, kind of a, a whole battery of different kind of treatments, and part of it is yoga classes.
And I've been doing it for a year, and recently I had an experience there that I just haven't had as a teacher in a long while.
I teach two classes, two classes back to back, and in the first group that I see, pod three, there's really just been, like, two boys in that group.
There was some others that have, like, uh, have left, but there's these two boys who've been with me consistently for, like, some months, and they have totally gone there with me.
Like, they've really got into the breathing thing that I do and the gentle yoga thing that I do and the dialogue.
One of the boys read Tara Brach's book, Radical Acceptance, and comes in with all these interesting questions and, like, that pod has really been what you would imagine.
If you were gonna say, "I'm gonna go teach at the local detention center," and you were to imagine, like, the best possible scenario of what that would be like, that's what my experience has been in this one pod.
They're kinda unruly, and I've been really seeing if I could kinda win them over and joking around with them, and I thought that I had kind of been making some headway.
But then, like, some weeks back, I had a class with them that it actually kind of fell apart, where I sort of looked up from demonstrating, and none of them were, like, paying attention to me.
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