You think, breathe, and dream about yoga. Your yoga confederates are your best friends. You talk yoga every chance you 
get. It’s your reigning passion and metaphor; you prescribe it for every human ill. Why not teach? Since you must make a living—pay the rent and feed the cat and maybe even support a family—you want to do something that you love. Something that fires you up in the morning and gets you up out of bed and doesn’t deaden your spirit. Because I can tell you, having done 9 to 5—high heels, commuter-jammed subway, two elevators up to the 96th floor of the World Trade Center—it’s not worth doing something that you do not love.But are you prepared for the trials of teaching yoga? You teach early weekend mornings and late weekday evenings, in gyms for as little as $35 per class, in hospital basements and office spaces where you have to first move boxes stuffed with annual reports against the wall to clear the floor. You do your own bookkeeping, line up and pay substitute teachers every time you leave town, and you’re out of luck if you rip up your knee and are out six weeks with a cast entombing your left leg. In January, classes are crammed with first-timers, fresh with New Year’s resolve; by July, the same classes are empty, and you are wincing because you can’t cover the rent.
It ain’t easy but as we all know nothing is easy. Like any other profession, teaching yoga calls for a particular set of skills, talent, and drive.
Do You Have the Right Stuff?
I graduated in 1996 from three years in a teacher-training program, and became a full-time yoga teacher in 1999. I teach eight classes per week in yoga studios, one at a health club, another at an office, and I volunteer-teach every other week at a federal women’s prison. Teaching yoga is the best job I have ever had, but it has required good contacts, luck, tenacity, and determination.Like most people, I did not start practicing yoga with the idea that I would teach. Yoga as a practice was challenge enough. I come from a family that values intellect, a child of Japanese immigrants who use the body to cart the brain from place to place. Yoga was a door to experiencing my body in ways I had only vaguely sensed before, both kinesthetically and intuitively. My first two years of yoga were an emotional roller-coaster, as I foundered among feelings I hardly understood, previously buried deep in my body. I fell into teaching when a classmate of mine from the Piedmont Yoga Studio Advanced Studies program in Oakland, California, asked me to substitute teach her yoga class for six weeks. I had a lot of fun doing it, the students in the class seemed really grateful—in fact they told me I was a good teacher—and this is what made me think maybe I had stumbled into something I wanted to keep doing.
But teaching has not come easy. To teach yoga, you must be true to your understanding of the practice. This requires maturity, honesty, and faith. In the beginning, I parroted instructions from my teacher. As I taught more, I grew more confident, and developed a voice of my own, conducting classes with distinct narratives and themes, ranging widely in tone—from fierce and fiery to fluid and gentle, laced with philosophy and poetry. Even now, however, I succumb to attacks of self-doubt. I go through changes in my own practice and thinking which affect my teaching. Ceaselessly, I ask myself: How do I most effectively communicate what I understand and see?
To teach yoga well, you must be passionately engaged in it as a personal practice. T.K.V. Desikachar writes in Health, Healing and Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya (Aperture, 1998), “A teacher of Yoga should live a life of Yoga—to practice what is taught.” And that, he says, is to engage in “continuous practice and self-study.” Teaching yoga is a form of tapas, a discipline that requires you to live with as much integrity and compassion as you can muster.
A love for yoga, and a commitment to the practice, is the first prerequisite for any yoga teacher. However, the fact that you love yoga does not mean that you should teach. A well-known yoga teacher once said to a small group of yoga students (one of whom was me) that the worst thing you could do to your yoga practice was to become a teacher. That was bad news, as I was already teaching. I believe she meant that teaching can hamper, possibly even undermine your development as a yogi. Richard Freeman, the well-known Boulder, Colorado-based Ashtanga Yoga teacher, speaks to those concerns when he states that receiving money and gaining devoted students and status can lead to the inflation of one’s ego. This, in turn “…can get in the way of your own practice, which is the greatest teaching tool you have. To be a good teacher you have to teach from your experience.”
Thankfully, you do not have to be enlightened—yet. Desikachar writes, “Like all individuals, teachers of Yoga will exhibit every conceivable kind of personality, temperament, and human problems. They experience failed marriages, personal suffering, and stress.” I teach as one person on this side of the veil speaking to another on this side of the veil.
One day, I taught class while still battered by the ill effects of having downed a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream for breakfast the day before. We started quietly. As my students lay on the floor, sensing their breathing, I told them about the binge: how driven I was by craving, how dull after indulging it—and how reassuring, even redemptive, it was to practice afterwards, in accordance with my body’s needs. “You start where you are,” I concluded, “The practice will meet you there.” In the subsequent weeks, two students separately mentioned that story; it heartened them to know that I, too, was subject to such runaway hungers.
If you do not think that you should be a yoga teacher because you are too old, fat, clumsy, or stiff, think again. Almost invariably, the best teachers are the ones who had the most difficulty learning. They have struggled with yoga, and have the compassion and empathy that enables them to most effectively help others who struggle, too. Raleigh Wills, a businessman-cum-yoga teacher in Oakland, began yoga at age 54, after being diagnosed with a severe arthritic condition. One of the most extraordinary moments of our training program was when Wills demonstrated a gorgeous Ardha Matsyendrasana, the seated twist, propped up high with blankets and blocks. In his stiff, dense, fire-plug body, you could see the twist unfurling, vertebra by vertebra. Now over 60, Wills teaches and inspires people who otherwise might not do yoga because they would be intimidated in a class filled with the young and flexible.
If you are fearful that you will not be able to teach because your area is chock-full of teachers, develop an area of specialty. The San Francisco Bay Area is teeming with good yoga teachers. When JoAnn Lyons elected to settle in the Bay Area, she began volunteering her time and skills to teach yoga to people with cerebral palsy. Now, four years later, she teaches four classes a week to people with disabilities and is training yoga teachers around the country to work with the disabled. Her decision to work with the disabled springs from a genuine interest and commitment and has led to economically viable work.
Teaching yoga, you learn to be many-eyed and multihanded, holding a class as one might hold a live garter snake, loose but sure, as it slips slithery-quick through your fingers. You work on several different levels simultaneously: following a sequence, plumbing a theme, focusing the students on the asana at hand, watching to prevent injury, instructing individuals specifically, and adjusting those whom touch helps. You learn to see limbs and joints through clothing, and to touch in a way that elicits and supports. Your mind becomes more facile, as it slides from the specific (”turn your left foot in, Peggy!”) to the global (a quote from the Yoga Sutra). You get creative, trying different methods to foster learning. On Monday, you start low to the ground, to drop them into a quiet, meditative space; on Tuesday, you launch class with the history and philosophical principles of yoga. You try visual aids: I bring in a model of a pelvis to show the students where the sacroiliac joint is and how the thigh bones rotate in the hip sockets. Demonstrating helps, because many people see far better than they hear.
If you fear that you can’t teach yoga because you are timid, know that shyness presents a challenge but is not insurmountable. Being reclusive is not really a problem either, as you can claim chunks of time for solitary practice. What is harder is if you are unreliable or disorganized, misanthropic, sexist, self-centered, emotionally volatile, dismissive, unobservant, inarticulate, or incapable of listening. Most people study yoga to gain insight and tools for self-care. If they feel slighted or unsafe in your class, they do not come back.
But teaching is a tapas—a fire that burns away impurities. It can burn away your impurities, particularly in the realm of relationships with others. You can no longer remain blind to how your attitudes prevent openness and trust. You learn to see, care for, and appreciate your students as individuals with struggles and questions not unlike your own. Teaching can help you become a better person.
