Teaching Yoga, Teacher Trainings: Some thoughts

I just watched this video interview with John Friend, where he shares his thoughts about teaching yoga, and his own process of becoming a yoga teacher. I don't know much about Anusara yoga, beyond having taken a few Anusara classes here and there a few years ago. But I think that many of the things that he says here about becoming a yoga teacher are very interesting, and apply to aspiring teachers of any yoga style. Here are a few points that he brings up, along with my own thoughts and comments: 

(1) Teaching before one has even done the practice: Friend points out this phenomenon early in the interview, citing his own experiences with people who want to join his teacher trainings. I will confess here that I also succumbed to this tendency when I first started practicing yoga. I taught my very first yoga class (in 2005) only six months after I went to my first yoga class, after attending a weekend teacher training program. If you had asked me at that time what my motive was for teaching yoga, I would have said that I wanted to share the joy of yoga practice with others, or something like that. But now, with a little more time and honesty, I'll confess that I was also driven by a certain narcissistic urge to feel important and respected in front of large crowds of people. Because I was naturally flexible in some areas, I was able to put on a show of being a "yoga expert". Eventually, other circumstances in my life beyond my control made me put teaching yoga on hold, and I have not formally taught a class for about two years now. Fortunately, nobody was hurt (to my knowledge) during my short tenure as a yoga teaching charlatan :-)

But on a larger scale, I personally think this tendency of yoga students wanting to be teachers without much practice experience of their own is an unsettling, and possibly dangerous thing, both for the aspiring teacher in question and for his or her students. After all, in theory, almost anybody who has $3000 (or more) to spare can just walk off the street these days and enroll in a yoga teacher training. If you think I'm exaggerating, well, I'm actually speaking from experience. A couple of years ago, this studio I taught at started offering a 200-hour Yoga Alliance Teacher Training under the sponsorship of a large prestigious yoga corporation. I attended the information session, but did not do the training, because I couldn't come up with the money at the time. At the information session, the teacher trainer who was to lead the training went out of his way to reassure everyone present that they did not have to be able to do x or y asana in order to become a yoga teacher. Fair enough. But I also got the sense that there wasn't any particularly strong effort to emphasize the importance of having a personal practice as a teacher; all I heard were vague, feel-good assurances to the effect that "If you are doing your best, you are good enough." Nor was there any requirement for the participants to have been practicing for any length of time; in fact, the official line at the information session was that all that was required to do the training was simply a "desire to deepen one's practice."        

I have no statistics to show how many of the participants at this teacher training already had an established personal practice before they joined the teacher training; nor do I know how many of them developed a personal practice as a result of participating in this teacher training. But it might be interesting to note that the teacher training sessions were conducted one weekend a month over a period of six or seven months, in order to accommodate the busy lives of the participants. This, by itself, may not mean anything, but I can't help wondering: If somebody did not already have an established personal practice coming into the teacher training, how likely would meeting for one weekend a month with a teacher trainer be to lead to this person's establishing a personal practice by the end of the teacher training? 

One might think I'm being very harsh here. After all, one might say, yoga teachers (and yoga teacher trainees) are people with regular lives and obligations, just like everybody else. They are individuals who have nobly decided to take time and space out of their already very full lives to deepen their practice and share the joy of the practice with others. Why be so harsh on them? The trouble is that there seems to be a disconnect here between what we expect of yoga teachers and what we expect of other professionals in whose hands we similarly place our bodies in. For instance, we expect commercial airline pilots to have clocked a certain number of hours in flight time (not just in "training") before we deem them capable of flying our bodies from point A to point B. Similarly, it seems, at least to me, that there should also be a similarly objective requirement for aspiring yoga teachers to have clocked a certain amount of personal practice time on the mat before we entrust our bodies (and minds and spirits) to them in a yoga class. 

(2) The tendency to connect going deeper in the practice with becoming a teacher: This is another phenomenon that Friend points out in his interview. This phenomenon might not be so surprising, in light of the fact that teacher training programs out there actually cite the desire to go deeper in the practice as a minimum (and often, the only) entry requirement. In fact, it is quite possible that these very teacher training programs may have played a key role in fostering the impression that going deeper in the practice equals becoming a teacher. After all--and I'm being very cynical here--fostering such an impression makes perfect sense, from a purely business point of view. If one's goal is to get more people enrolled in one's teacher training program, it makes sense to go for the lowest common denominator on the list of possible desires that yoga students could have, something that is vague enough to be easily fulfillable, and yet broad enough to appeal to the largest possible number of yoga students. Thus, something along the lines of "You will deepen your practice at the end of this program" is a better selling point than, say, "You will be able to put your leg behind your head at the end of this program" or "At the end of this program, you will open your third eye and have kundalini gushing forth from your muladhara chakra like water from a fountain."

Again, if I may cite my experience here, I can personally attest to the fact that going deeper in the practice does not equal becoming a teacher: Nor does becoming a teacher equal going deeper in the practice. Over the last couple of years, as I focused exclusively on my personal practice, I have been able to feel more deeply what the practice does to my mind and body, and what it means to me. I suppose it is possible that I may venture into teaching again sometime in the future (hopefully, without hurting anybody), but for now, I am quite happy doing my own practice (and talking and blogging about it), and do not feel that my practice is lacking in depth or is not going any deeper just because I do not teach.

(3) There might not be a demand for yoga teachers where one is living: This is an interesting point that Friend brings up. He cites one case in which in a certain city, statistics indicate that the number of yoga teachers are equal to the number of yoga students. I suppose his concern here is that if one tries to become a yoga teacher in a place where there is no demand for one's services, one may be setting oneself up for a lot of frustration and possible disillusionment.

I think his point is well-taken. But I also wonder if there may be times where a teacher needs to step up and create the demand for what he or she has to offer. After all, back when many senior Ashtanga teachers first started teaching, most people did not even know what yoga was. So they were in an environment where there was no demand for their teaching, simply because nobody knew anything about what they had to offer. I can't help thinking: If they did not put themselves out there, so to speak, and endure lots of frustration in the process, would there be the community of Ashtangis that we have today?     

(4) One should not become a yoga teacher in order to escape one's day job or life: Friend brings up this point towards the end of this video. I think it's a very well-taken point. In any case, I suspect that anybody who becomes a yoga teacher in order to escape dissatisfaction with his or her day job/life will soon discover that there is really no escape: As a yoga teacher living and operating in this world, one essentially faces the same fundamental challenges that one would confront in any other job, albeit in slightly different manifestations. The same issues of dealing with difficult people, making enough to cover the overhead costs and pay the bills, etc., etc., remain.

   

These, at any rate, are my thoughts on teaching yoga and yoga teacher trainings. I understand that many of you out there are actually yoga teachers, and that some (or even many) of the things that I describe may not jive with your experience. But as always, I thought I'll put my thoughts out here first. If you have anything to share, I'll love to hear from you.