Yoga Is An Extremely Broad Term that covers many practices, from bhakti and japa yoga (prayer and mantra repetition) to karma yoga (selfless service) to hatha yoga (finding connection through yoga poses). With the acceptance of yoga in Western culture in the twentieth century came codification of different styles of hatha yoga. As these styles have crystallized, they have become recognizable brands with clear rules about how things are done. You could choose a training in Ashtanga Yoga, with set sequences to progress through. Or you could be studying Sivananda Yoga, or Baptiste Yoga—maybe even directly from Baron Baptiste—or Core Power Yoga, or Insert Any Name Here Yoga. In this chapter, we’ll explore how you can find the right path for you to start on, continue on, or change course toward, and how you can then pursue study, both in the context of yoga teacher training and in your own self-study, to deepen your understanding of yoga and your ability to serve others through teaching.
For context, consider dog breeding. (Bear with me!) Pedigreed dogs are bred to display a particular mix of physical attributes, service skills, and temperament. Done well, this breeding leads to a recognizable brand with discrete abilities. When you buy or adopt a German Shorthaired Pointer, for example, you can expect an athletic dog with high energy, sensitivity to birds, and a brown-and-white spotted shorthair coat. When you buy or adopt a pug, you’re expecting something different! Pedigree yields strengths—knowing what you’re getting—but it also brings weaknesses. For example, overbreeding can lead to all kinds of health issues, from breathing problems to hip dysplasia. Unscrupulous breeders can mistreat their animals and scam their customers.
On the other hand, nature yields many hybrid dogs. We affectionately call them mutts. These mixed-breed dogs can be stronger overall, as they draw from a broader gene pool and can thus pull strengths from the bloodlines of both parents. Then again, sometimes mutts can have a strange combination of temperament and size, or the legs of a short dog but the body of a long dog (we had one of these as a pet!), which can create structural problems with age.
As we see, there are strengths and weaknesses in both purebred and mixed-breed dogs. Similarly, there are strengths and weaknesses in being attached to one, and only one, lineage, and there are strengths and weaknesses in choosing to draw from many.
If you cast your lot with one particular style, you can expect clear rules about what is in the tradition and what is not, what is canon, and what is not. This can be deeply comforting, as there is usually a right way to do things—poses, meditations, breath exercises, even choosing your wardrobe—and a wrong way. Once you are clear on the right way, you can strive to do things right, and you’ll be able to measure your progress along the way. But this has a shadow side, in that such clear-cut traditions often amass power in the hands of a single charismatic leader or cabal of senior teachers or practitioners, and such power can then be abused. For more on the dynamics of high-demand groups and the history of abuse in yoga, see Matthew Remski’s book Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. In addition, subscribing to a single dogma excludes other approaches that might help both you and your students. Be careful that service to the fundamentals of a style does not become rigid fundamentalism.
Many of the styles of yoga that are spelled with capital letters—Ashtanga Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, Sivananda Yoga, Anusara Yoga—subscribe to a set of clearly delineated rules, and sometimes their physical practices follow clearly delineated sequences. In Ashtanga Yoga, for example, there are series of prescribed postures that each practitioner learns in order, beginning with the Primary Series. In Bikram Yoga, teachers lead the same twenty-six poses and two breath exercises using the same language (a memorized script of Bikram Choudhury leading the practice, grammatical quirks and all) every single time.
When you take a teacher training in a particular lineage, you’ll go deep rather than broad. You can expect to learn the key elements of the lineage, and you might be directed to more and more trainings at further levels to deepen your understanding. It’s like doing the Red Cross swim lessons: There’s a clear curriculum for each level, and you’ll be tested on the skills taught to pass one level and move to the next. Remember: You can also learn to swim in non–Red Cross programs, and some people learn to swim from their friends and family instead of a regulated program. To return to the dog-breeding analogy, in some of these lineages—Iyengar Yoga, for example—you’ll be tested on your ability to show the examiners just what they want to see. It’s a little like the judges at a dog show: They are looking for certain qualities representative of a breed. Not meeting them doesn’t mean the dog is a bad dog!
Research Lineages
While it’s useful to know the major lineages of yoga, they aren’t relevant to your personal development and teacher training if you can’t find a teacher or studio to study with. Thus you’ll either need access to these resources nearby or the money and time to travel for them.
Take a look at the offerings in your area, or in places you might reasonably visit. Look at the titles used to describe the classes and approaches. When you see a proper noun, do some research on the style. Look not only at the studio site and the style’s webpage but also the search results, to see if there’s a history of abuse or impropriety associated with the style. Unfortunately, this is all too common. If you discover that a certain style has a distasteful history, do more research and explore others that align better with your ethics. For styles that interest you, research potential classes you can take; list them and create a plan to visit them.
At Carolina Yoga Company, we embrace what we call “responsible eclecticism.” That means we value many different styles, as well as hybrid styles, and we believe the most balanced practice, and therefore the most useful one, involves moving beyond one single approach to include whatever best suits the student day to day, season to season.
Similarly, our yoga teacher training is responsibly eclectic. We go broad. We take our teacher trainees on a tour of the main styles of yoga practiced in America today, while keeping our eyes open about the potential downsides of clinging to one and only one approach. We bring in guest presenters who can speak with authority about the various styles of yoga, because they specialize. (We call this a “great books” approach, in which we go directly to the primary text, as it were.) Put together, these teachers generate a rich tapestry that includes an overview of the various paths up the mountain of yoga. As a result of this broad exposure, our teacher trainees emerge not as cookie-cutter instructors ready to teach the one sequence or the one style they learned but as unique teachers ready to serve their students in whatever way will work best.
If you choose a training that goes deep rather than broad, you may supplement it by taking field trips of your own design. Seek out teachers who offer styles different from what you were exposed to in your training. Research the style in advance: read about it online, watch videos of the style, learn about its key principles and teachers. If the situation allows, ask your teacher how they came to this style and what they find most helpful. This is a useful ongoing practice no matter how long you’ve been teaching. If you haven’t had an experience with hot yoga, aerial yoga, yoga nidra, yoga with weights, Buti Yoga, or whatever is popular in your area, go with an open mind and heart.
Supplement your primary teacher training by voraciously taking classes in a wide range of styles. This is one of the best ways to serve your own students. Knowing what’s out there in the wide world of yoga will help you when you have students whose background is limited to a particular style. You’ll be able to quickly explain the difference between their previous experience and what will happen in your class—that is, you’ll be able to manage student expectations so that you can then fulfill these expectations as you teach.
For example, if at the start of your flow class you meet a new student who’s had only hot yoga classes, you might say, “Super! A couple of things to consider: First, obviously, the room is not warm. Pay special attention to how the poses feel different, and don’t push the first round of any movement too far. We’ll spend ten minutes low to the ground, forty minutes moving, then we’ll come back down to the mat for slow unwinding. In that moving segment, there will be a decent amount of upper-body work, so please listen to your wrists, elbows, and shoulders, and feel free to hold plank or to take child’s pose instead of what you’ll hear me call out as vinyasa. We will finish with a led savasana of about eight minutes—I’ll guide you into it, then sit quietly before talking you out. I’ll check in after class and look forward to hearing about how the new experience felt!”
Since in many hot styles there is no vinyasa of chaturanga–up dog–down dog, this alerts the student to what’s coming and encourages self-care. Some schools of hot yoga end with the students encouraged to take savasana (and it’s pronounced differently, to boot, with an initial s instead of sh sound) for as long as they like, but the teacher leaves the room as they begin their rest. Students who are used to these protocols are going to be surprised to see how things go in the flow class. These few lines of explanation offer a road map so that your students can have a more satisfying experience.
If the beauty of subscribing to a particular lineage is clarity, the beauty—and the frustration—of being responsibly eclectic is running up against contradictions. You might, at the very same studio on the very same day, be taught triangle pose in two very different ways, each illuminating and useful. Teachers can make very persuasive arguments for why you might do a pose their way—it can be based on lineage, or their understanding of anatomy, or their own workarounds in coping with injuries. How can you then tell the right way to do triangle pose?
We’ll explore in the next chapter whether there is a right way to do yoga. When your previous understanding of the “right” way to do things butts up against a new approach, you’re put in a productive state of confusion. The way to resolve it is through practice and continued study. Talk to the teachers who offer conflicting approaches, and get to know how and why they have reached their conclusions. As you find yourself in states of dissonance, you have a chance to practice equanimity, finding center even in the face of shifting circumstance. This is an important skill for everyone, and especially for yoga teachers. The more you study and grow your knowledge, the more you’ll see how much you don’t know, and you’ll find ways to make peace with that.
As you continue to practice, study, and teach yoga, and especially as your body changes with age, you’ll necessarily hit pain points where your previous experience and beliefs no longer seem to apply. These are useful for self-study, and they may eventually prompt you to adapt your practice within a particular style or to cast your net wider. You may find yourself drawn to practicing or teaching yoga nidra, or yin yoga, or restorative yoga—or, conversely, to finding complementary practices like Pilates that balance your flexibility-focused yoga practice with strength-based exercise.
These moments of productive confusion are teachers. They may be what led you to pick up this book, and they should be what leads you to deeper study. This could be taking a yoga teacher training, further study in your current style or school, or a jump to a different approach as you seek to find new truths.
The Yoga Alliance (YA) Registered Yoga School (RYS) system is an attempt to guarantee a consistently high quality of teacher education—a noble and useful goal. It’s only one system, though, and you can still be a wonderful teacher without ever attending a formal yoga teacher training—or if you take one outside of the YA world. By the same token, graduating from a YA-registered school is no guarantee of a good teacher. Learning about the YA’s structure and its standards can help you make an informed choice about whether you will buy in.
The YA is a registry. That means that teachers pay to have their names added to the YA’s rolls and to use its registered symbols. It’s not a certifying body or a regulatory one, and it’s not designed to enforce any yoga rules. Instead, it sets standards of its own, and teachers and schools can align with them and pay to be registered.
As a teacher, you are certified by your school, and then you may choose to register with the YA. In order to keep your registration current, you are required to self-report the continuing education you have undergone (and, of course, pay another fee). Naturally, I encourage lots of continuing education, over and above the YA standards and whether you are inside the YA universe or not, because learning is a lifelong process and yoga is a living, changing system.
Ultimately, you will decide whether registering with the Yoga Alliance is right for you (more on this later). As you make your decision, remember this: Your students want to feel better after your class. They don’t care whether you hold a 200- or 500- or even a 1,000-hour certification. Your employers may care, especially if you are teaching at a gym, where management that doesn’t come from a yoga background will want to know you’re held to a national standard. At some studios, your pay rate will depend directly on how much yoga education you’ve had. Read on for more info on each of the certifications.
Most trainings in the West target the 200-hour model and the Yoga Alliance standards. Internationally, you will find different models, both shorter and longer. And there are some systems, such as YogaFit, that run shorter weekend trainings, often geared toward fitness professionals with previous group exercise experience. Somewhat confusingly, 200-hour trainings are not required to have 200 classroom hours—the Yoga Alliance now sets the classroom time at a minimum of 160 hours.
The Yoga Alliance’s core curriculum for a 200-hour program (Registered Yoga School 200) covers techniques, training, and practice; anatomy and physiology; yoga humanities; and professional essentials. Each training submits their curriculum for review and approval or revision. There’s some room for variety from program to program, but the intention is that the fundamentals be consistent across all Registered Yoga Schools (RYSs). Approval as an RYS is historically the last interaction between the school and the YA, apart from paying annual fees to maintain registry. Currently, there’s no system of site visits or continued oversight of yoga schools that would parallel accreditation of colleges, or of technical programs like massage therapy schools. This may be a good thing, as government regulation can open an entirely new can of worms, choking the yoga field with bureaucracy and siphoning its profits while consolidating power in the hands of the few well-funded businesses that can afford to play by the new system.
That said, 200 hours is not that long, even with the recent upgrades to the teacher training requirements. In fact, 200 hours is just long enough to get the sense of the enormity of what you don’t know. When you’re doing an ecumenical overview of several styles, you’ll sacrifice depth in service of breadth. By the end of our broad program at Carolina Yoga Company, for example, teachers have a sense of what they want to go on to study more deeply. In this way, a 200-hour teacher training is like the first two years of college. You’ll be exposed to several different approaches to the practice. Some will resonate, some will not. Knowing what’s out there and taking a good-faith survey of everything will guide you toward your major—toward the approach that makes the best sense for you, whether you develop and study it outside of formal education or move on to take an advanced studies teacher training.
At the end of your program, if you have met its requirements, you will graduate with a certificate from your school. If your teacher training was at a YA-affiliated school, you may be asked to evaluate how well the program met its stated goals—this is what the YA calls “social credentialing.” You can then choose whether to register with the Yoga Alliance as a Registered Yoga Teacher at the 200-hour level (RYT 200).
There are various reasons why you might want to register or not care to. First, if you intend to teach at a gym, your hiring manager may want to see your RYT designation, or even your number and card, to show that you have been professionally trained. Second, you’ll get guild rates on liability insurance, which we will discuss in chapter 5. Third, you’ll get some nice perks: discounts at clothing stores and on services you might like to use for your class, like YogiTunes, which provides a license and platform for streaming music in class (something we’ll discuss in chapter 7).
I have never been asked by a student for my Yoga Alliance registry number. And as a studio owner, I’ve never asked a teacher to prove affiliation with the Yoga Alliance. So should you register? It may not help you, but it isn’t going to hurt you beyond putting a slight dent in your wallet (and this is a legitimate business expense, as we will discuss below), so it’s worth trying. If you find it isn’t at all useful, you simply won’t renew.
Beyond the 200-hour level, YA-affiliated advanced studies programs can register as an RYS 300. After you complete the 300 or so hours of an advanced training from an RYS 300, you may add them to your previous 200-hour program and register as an RYT 500, denoting that you have had 500 hours of training.
If a 200-hour program is like the first two years of college, a 300-hour program is like the final years of college, when you’re working to complete your major, possibly considering a minor, or taking fun classes in other areas that interest you. An advanced studies program can take you deep into a style that calls to you, which makes it a good complement to a broad 200-hour program. Or an RYS 300 can help you sharpen your skills to teach content of any kind—that’s the way we structured our Carolina Yoga Company advanced studies program, which has modules on professionalism, classroom management, theming, language refinement, and much more.
How will you know when you are ready for an advanced studies program? When you’re eager to learn more, not simply because it exists! It’s useful to gain some teaching experience before undertaking your advanced training, especially if you’re choosing a program like ours. That way every discussion of classroom issues will map onto your lived experience instead of being hypothetical and only intellectual. Many of these programs are modular, as ours is, so you can take the courses that interest you whether or not you eventually enroll in the full program.
If 500 hours isn’t enough—and the deeper you go, the more 500 hours seems like a drop in the bucket—you can work toward a 1,000-hour training. These trainings are currently not affiliated with the Yoga Alliance, but they do provide some structure to your continuing education and might offer you a cohort of peers to grow with, one of the benefits of any teacher training. You’ll find them at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Yoga Medicine, Dharma Yoga Center, and elsewhere. If you are ambitious and like to study in a system with formal benchmarks, a 1,000-hour training may give you the impetus to keep up your continuing study. Or you may be better served by focusing on ways to expand your yoga knowledge with complementary study. Ultimately, your students will be your best teachers, so don’t let reaching for the next brass ring (1,000 hours! 1,500 hours!) keep you from doing the weekly work of showing up to teach the students who need you.
Assess Your YTT Options
Take a look around your area, as well as places you could feasibly travel to, and make notes about your options for your first or your next YTT. Compare their formats to the format you think will best suit your available time and learning style. These prompts can help:
▸ How many hours do you have available per week to dedicate to training? If you don’t have abundant free time, what will you need to let go of to make more time for training?
▸ Do you learn best by diving deep into material and working at it for several hours at a stretch? Or by letting yourself have time to digest what you’ve learned? Put another way: Do you like to binge-stream an entire season of a show, or would you rather space it out week by week?
▸ What financial resources do you have available for training?
▸ What logistical support do you have available, and what will you need to muster? This could be coverage at your day job, child or pet care, and the like.
For each program, list:
▸ Program name:
▸ Format (e.g., weekend, intensive) and dates:
▸ Program cost:
▸ Other costs, like travel or room and board:
Writing this out will probably show you that you are drawn toward a particular program. If you really feel you can’t make up your mind between two comparable options, flip a coin. Your reaction to the coin toss—not the result itself—might show you where your heart lies.
If you feel the calling, it’s better to choose a teacher training that meets most of your requirements rather than waiting for the “perfect” option. This is just the start of your education as a teacher, and waiting for the ideal conditions, schedule, or location may mean you never undertake the journey at all. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough. That said, you’ll want satisfying answers to these questions.
This is an important first step in your research. You need not want to teach like the lead teacher or teachers at the school, but being able to understand their communication styles is critical. Better still than taking a class is taking a workshop where the lead teacher explains not just what to do but also how and why, since how and why is a lot of the material that is taught in YTT. Do your research. If you can’t take a class in person with the lead teachers, ask if there’s video of them online. It’d be smart to have a quick chat before or after this class, or to set up a phone call so you can ask all your questions about the program.
Listen carefully to the answer to this question and compare it to what you personally expect to find difficult in the training. Consider how you would handle this challenge. Are you nervous speaking in front of a crowd? Your first practice teach might be tough. Do you anticipate trouble in a long day of asana practice? Ask the school representative how students have handled fatigue in the past.
New is not necessarily bad—trainers have extra enthusiasm for the first round or two of their training. Some trainings have been running for years like a well-oiled machine; others have recently been overhauled or have had a change of teacher. Be sure you feel that the format you’re considering is going to work for you.
Getting a sense of the schedule will help you determine whether it is the right environment for your learning style. It’s also useful to know what proportion of the day is spent on asana, lecture, chanting, and other activities. If some or all of the program is online, how much engagement and attention do students get? You will not grow as a teacher unless you get specific feedback.
Some programs want incoming students to be able to press to wheel pose and do a handstand away from the wall. If this turns you off, that’s not the program for you! Many other programs are happy to work with physical limitations. I always tell our prospective students that they will be more sympathetic and empathetic teachers by needing to work around their own personal issues in asana. We’ve had students from fifteen to seventy-something in our training, and in each group there’s someone with a reason to sit and watch a given asana practice instead of participating. It’s not a problem. Sometimes watching is a better teacher than doing.
They may audition for the studio that hosts the training or for other studios, be encouraged to join the work-study program, or be upsold to a new training. Listen for an honest answer and ask yourself whether it meshes with your vision for your career.
We ask prospective teacher trainees to come to a class with me, where there is usually at least one current YTT student as well as alumni. I love connecting them, so the prospective student can get a recent graduate’s take on the program.
Our trainees also lead a $5 community class to gain practice teaching, and we encourage those who are considering our program to attend one or more of these, so that they can get a sense both of what our students do well and also of where their own teaching skills might be during or just after YTT.
Look through the studio’s teacher biographies to find those who graduated from the program, and plan to attend their classes and ask questions about their path and their experience in the program.
You’ll have to make it up, and different programs approach this differently. In a weekend program, there is often someone who can’t bow out of, say, a family wedding; in a weekday program, parents may find themselves suddenly stuck at home with a sick child. Many programs charge an hourly rate for makeups, because to meet the Yoga Alliance standards—if your targeted training does—you must hit the minimum number of contact hours.
This should be clearly stated on the training’s website; if not, be sure to ask. Teacher training costs a lot for the student and is an important part of a studio’s revenue, so they may not offer refunds but instead give you credit toward a future training. And there are some circumstances where a student is asked to leave a training, so it might be good to ask if this has been an issue and on what grounds students are expelled. (This should be a reassuring discussion, not a terrifying one.)
Take Scouting Visit Notes
Make notes on the answers you get to these questions from your prospective schools.
▸ Can I take a class from the lead teacher(s)?
▸ What do students find the most challenging part of training?
▸ How long has this program and this particular format been offered?
▸ What does any given day in YTT look like?
▸ How do you handle physical limitations?
▸ What is a typical next step for your graduates?
▸ Can I talk to some recent graduates? Can I see them teach?
▸ What if I have to miss time?
▸ What is your refund policy?
Your very best training will come from your students. You’ll see whether and how your cues land with them. They’ll surprise you with special needs that you’ll have to scramble to meet, which will make you better prepared the next time something similar happens. The stranger the places you teach, the fewer the props, and the more constraints your students have, the more you will learn. Go out and teach!
At the same time, you must continue to take classes. Look for a balance of consistency and variety here. Choose one or two teachers with whom you’ll study regularly—at least once a month, and maybe once a week—so that you may further your understanding of that teacher’s approach. This gives you depth. But also choose a wide range of teachers you’ll study with occasionally, so that your understanding of yoga is not just deep but also broad. Every teacher has something to offer you. Sometimes it’s a turn of phrase, or a new approach to a familiar shape. Sometimes it’s a lesson in what not to do. The teachers that most push your buttons may have the most to teach you about what you value in a class and in an instructor.
Every trip to a new place is a new opportunity to start afresh as a student. Find a local studio and observe how easy or difficult it is to navigate their website to choose a class. Watch the process as you park, walk in, pay for the class, and get centered. How does the teacher welcome you? How do their cues land? How is the transition out of class? In every experience, you’ll find a rose and some thorns, and taking careful note of the negatives will help you find ways to enhance your students’ experience. Keep a journal or a notes file and write down what you learn in each class you go to.
If you always only practice on your own, you are like a terminal pond: There is no incoming source of fresh water to refill you. Remaining a student keeps you from being a closed system. Regular infusion of fresh teaching, poses, transitions, language, and music will keep you developing as a teacher.
In addition to your own regular class attendance and ongoing self-study, it’s good to take workshops that expand your understanding of yoga and mindfulness. If you already do this, it’s good to reflect on what you’ve been learning. If you’ve been drawn exclusively to workshops that confirm what you already believe, try to find some that will challenge you. What are the weaker spots in your knowledge, and how can you shore them up with continuing study?
If you have been trained in a power or flow style of yoga, you might seek training in alignment-based styles; or in yin, restorative, or gentle yoga; or in therapeutics; or in the subtle body. If you’ve been flummoxed by how to handle older students with limited mobility, seek a training on yoga for healthy aging or yoga for seniors. If you feel like your sequencing has hit a rut, look for trainings to freshen it. And at any point, deepening your understanding of anatomy and kinesiology will make you a better teacher.
Depending on where you live, you may have a host of workshops to choose from locally or regionally. Or maybe you’ll make a point to travel occasionally to a yoga center like Kripalu in western Massachusetts, or the 1440 Multiversity in Santa Cruz, California. Increasingly, you can take wonderful trainings online in a multitude of disciplines. Ask your colleagues and your mentors what has been useful to them.
Challenge yourself with your choices. If a workshop is simply affirming your beliefs, it’s wasting your time and isn’t teaching you anything. There has to be a stretch for you to integrate new information. This might lead you to a new specialization.
Yoga is for everyone, and specialty training in how to work with various populations will both help you serve students and make you stand out as a professional.
The Yoga Alliance recognizes two specialties with acronyms of their own: prenatal yoga and children’s yoga. To become a Registered Prenatal Yoga Teacher (RPYT), you’d complete a 200-hour training and an 85-hour prenatal training that is registered with the Yoga Alliance (look for the acronym RPYS, Registered Prenatal Yoga School), then document 30 hours of experience after the specialty training. Similarly, for children’s yoga, the acronyms are RCYT and RCYS, and the RCYS program must last 95 hours on top of your 200-hour training. But you need not follow this system to be a good prenatal yoga or kids’ yoga teacher—you are likely to find several alternative trainings that equip you with the basics.
At the other end of the life span spectrum is yoga for seniors. Carol Krucoff and Kimberly Carson’s program at Duke Integrative Medicine is an especially well-researched one based on updated scientific evidence; see yoga4seniors.com. You could also explore chair yoga, yoga for cancer patients and survivors, yoga for various conditions like arthritis or multiple sclerosis—your students and your interests can guide you toward the trainings that will suit you best.
Beyond these age-specific specialties sanctioned by the Yoga Alliance, there is a wide world of wonderful resources to explore after your initial yoga teacher training. Many will help you specialize in a particular group of students or a particular style of yoga, as we’ve seen. Some will offer you a particular way to help whoever is in your class. Here are some approaches that offer you a lens you can apply to any open class.
▸ Bigger bodies: Anna Guest-Jelley’s Curvy Yoga program, curvyyoga.com
▸ Social justice: Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s Skill in Action and Dismantling Racism trainings; see michellecjohnson.com
▸ Trauma: David Emerson’s work, traumasensitiveyoga.com
You can also seek out programs for teaching yoga to veterans or to the differently abled—any population that you feel you can help. Here’s where you can truly live your yoga, bringing its benefits beyond the studio walls and into your community.
Teachers can also confer certifications of their own design, as I do with my Sage Yoga for Athletes program. Who granted me the power to certify others? Well: I did! I set the standards, I work directly with students to be sure they display mastery of the material, and I certify them. What does that mean? Simply that they have my seal of approval. This can matter for gyms or teams, and it offers my international students a chance to say they are the only certified Sage Yoga for Athletes teacher in their home country, if the country is small enough. I choose my workshop assistants from these certified teachers, and I always connect them with opportunities when I can, such as pointing journalists seeking a quote their way.
If you are drawn to a training that offers a certificate, don’t be shy to ask about the authority behind that certificate and what doors the certificate might open for you. And always ask for references—any good trainer will be happy to connect you to other students who have gone through the program.
Just like people go back to school and change careers, people can and do take multiple teacher trainings. My two closest collaborators have done just that. Alexandra DeSiato, who has cowritten two books with me, took a wonderful Prana Vinyasa Flow teacher training, in which she dove deep into this particular style, originated by Shiva Rea. Then she went through the Carolina Yoga Company 200-hour program, which offers a broader perspective. The combination of the two gave her both a wide and a deep view of the practice and how to teach.
Jenni Tarma, who co-teaches yoga teacher trainings with me, has completed two advanced teacher trainings. One is the Yoga Medicine program developed by Tiffany Cruikshank, which has a very strong focus on anatomy. The other is the advanced studies program led by Jules Mitchell, a biomechanist. These complementary programs have made Jenni an expert on anatomy, and she has enhanced this awareness by adding coaching certifications from the Road Runners Club of America and CrossFit.
Learning is a lifelong process. If you’re reading this book as an experienced teacher feeling stale, or looking to reach the next level in your career, consider jumping off your current track and onto another one. Would a fresh training give you a new viewpoint? If you were taught in an alignment-based school, would you benefit from studying flow yoga, and vice versa? (I think so!) Or would picking up study in a specialty, like yin or restorative or yoga for seniors, juice you up anew for your teaching?
To keep your movement practice fresh and avoid yoga burnout, make a point of trying other modalities, like Pilates, Gyrotonics, Feldenkrais, and so on. Or study martial arts: Karate, Krav Maga, Judo. These modalities will take a different path up the mountain of body awareness and mindful movement, and studying them will inform your yoga practice and keep your teaching fresh.
To learn more about the body, and to deepen your expertise in hands-on assists, take an introductory course in massage—or a full massage training. In addition to owning Carolina Yoga Company, my business partner and I own a massage school, Carolina Massage Institute. Several of our graduates have completed yoga teacher training and actively teach, and some of our yoga teacher trainees have completed the massage program.
Thai Yoga Massage, sometimes called Thai Partner Yoga or Thai Assisted Stretching, is another good arrow to have in your quiver. You’ll be an expert at savasana assists with that certification under your belt. Depending on state licensure rules, you may or may not be able to use the word “massage” when promoting this work, but regardless of the rules around the nomenclature, it’s a great technique to bring into your yoga classroom and private lessons.
Further, take a cadaver dissection course or anatomy class at your local community college. There are several offerings of cadaver dissection for body workers and movement teachers. I did a six-day lab with Gil Hedley; several of my colleagues have completed a lab with Tiffany Cruikshank’s Yoga Medicine program. These programs are awesome in the original sense of the word: They will put you in awe of the human form, the gift of the donors, and the profound learning that occurs with a deep exploration of the body. While there are nice virtual-reality programs for the squeamish, there is nothing like being able to dissect a cadaver using your own hands and eyes.
The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is a battery of tests that personal trainers, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches use to identify imbalances in their athletes. Taking a one-day training or the online course (functionalmovement.com) in how to administer the tests will give you a language for talking to trainers and coaches. Better yet, it will give you an assessment to use at the start of private lessons, so that you can begin by shoring up your clients’ weak spots. I highly recommend that you look into this training or similar ones. While you might not wind up using the tests in the screen as is, they will get you thinking about how to assess your students’ bodies so that they can find better balance through yoga.
In a different vein, try classes in stand-up comedy, improvisational theater, storytelling, cooking, sewing, brewing, conversational Mandarin—anything that puts you into a student’s mind and presents you with a learning curve. All of these will make you a more present, sympathetic, and empathetic teacher. And all of them will guide you toward better self-awareness, the goal of yoga. Let’s explore your self-awareness and begin to articulate a vision for your career, whatever stage it’s in.