A few weeks ago, I posted a simple carousel on Instagram in my “Here’s the Tea” series for yoga teachers: not every pose needs you to call out a Sanskrit name. The comments rolled in—some grateful, some furious, most somewhere in the thoughtful middle. This episode is the longer answer that didn’t fit on eight slides.

I walk through what I was actually trying to say in the post, where the conversation sharpened my thinking, and why this was never really an English-versus-Sanskrit question. To a brand-new student, “Triangle” is no clearer than “Trikonasana,” so the real skill is describing the shape so well that the name—in any language—has something to land on.

Along the way, I steelman the smartest pushbacks from teachers who love this language—the lineage argument, the repetition argument, and the case for using both—and offer three rules for using Sanskrit well: learn to pronounce it (with teachers from inside the tradition like Dr. Anuradha Choudry and Dr. M. A. Jayashree), pair it with English so the meaning travels, and tell the stories the names came from (with a nod to Dr. Raj Balkaran’s lovely book The Stories Behind the Poses).

I close with a simple way to decide what to say in any given room. The question was never “Sanskrit or English.” It’s who am I serving, and what helps them feel at home in their body and their breath while also respecting the tradition of yoga.

This isn’t a hot take. It’s a call to center. If you’ve ever felt squeezed between honoring the tradition and meeting your students where they actually are, this one’s for you.

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