Introduction

Yoga Teacher Trainings have proliferated in America and around the world in the last decade, with only nominal oversight and inconsistent standards from one to the next. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars and lots of your energy on a teacher training, you probably want to be sure it’s worth your time and money. This laxity of oversight may soon change with the imposition of new standards for the Yoga Alliance, but many trainings don’t operate under this umbrella, some for good reason and while maintaining their own high standards.

Many teachers graduate with little or no understanding of the true state of the profession—what people are paid, how studios are run, how to manage student behavior—or how to find their first teaching job and to do it well. The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook will guide you to the highest level of professionalism, benefiting students, teachers, and studios alike. If you are in the early stages of your career or feeling like it’s time to get back to basics or learn a new approach, I’ll walk you through finding a good fit in a teacher training and what questions to ask as you consider enrolling.

Perhaps you’ve already done one or more trainings but still have many questions about your teaching. In my work with teachers at all levels, from day one teacher trainees to those with decades of experience, I hear the same concerns: How can I best help my students? How can I keep my teaching fresh? How can I make smart choices about my schedule, my money, and my next steps in this career?

Or maybe you don’t want to be a yoga teacher, but instead aim to or already do teach Pilates, Gyrokinesis, Barre, or some other movement modality. You’ll still get lots from this book! Since our focus is on the container of your career and class rather than prescribing any particular contents, you’ll be able to apply what we cover to your work both immediately and in the long term in various in-person and online settings.

Part 1 takes a look at the big picture. We look at the scope of yoga as it is practiced in the West today, so that you can begin to see how your work as a teacher fits into the landscape. Then I’ll challenge you to chart a course and set goals for your service to students, so that you can create reasonable expectations and devise clear next steps to grow as a teacher.

Part 2 narrows the focus to you and your career, offering steps from getting your first job to managing your schedule, money, and energy. Along the way, I’ll offer both the studio owner’s and studio manager’s views on how you can be a positive addition to any studio and every yoga community, as well as the best practices I’ve developed and witnessed from my decades of teaching.

In part 3, we drill down even more, to look at the individual class. We start by thinking through what you need to do outside the classroom to ensure that each class is a good one. Then we investigate how the choices you make in the room itself, or in producing video, affect student experience. You’ll learn ways to improve your teaching after every class, so that the next one is even better.

In part 4, we go even further, exploring ways that you might grow toward your goal, whether it is becoming a full-time teacher, creating online content, owning a studio, developing and leading yoga teacher trainings—or all of the above. We finish with a timeline to keep you on track as you work on your career daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and across the years.

As you see, this book is less a what-to-teach manual than a how-to-teach handbook. If you’re interested in just what to teach in any given class, I have several resources for you.

For content—poses and sequences to teach in class—please see my books The Athlete’s Pocket Guide to Yoga, Everyday Yoga, and Lifelong Yoga, this last one cowritten with Alexandra DeSiato. For my take on alignment, please see The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga and The Runner’s Guide to Yoga, but most of all, please develop and trust your own experience with each asana in your body and those of your students. The best way to learn to teach the poses is to take a wide range of classes from different teachers with a variety of backgrounds, then to practice teaching them to a very broad range of people, paying very close attention to your students.

Complement this survey by reading extensively. One of my favorite yoga books is Yoga Anatomy by Leslie Kaminoff and Amy Matthews, which you are likely to pick up first for the gorgeous illustrations but which offers a profound and easily digestible discussion of the concepts of effort and ease in relation to the breath and the cell. Erich Schiffmann’s Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness similarly posits a clear view of the principles and practice of yoga in a way that’s easy to understand immediately yet still feels rich when you return to it after years of practice. Donna Farhi’s Teaching Yoga is a clearly written exploration of the ethics of the teacher-student relationship; read it as a complement to chapter 9 of this book. Then, for deeper information on how to find your voice as a yoga teacher and for how to incorporate themes in your classes, please see my Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses, cowritten with Alexandra DeSiato.

Instead of telling you what to teach, this book will guide you to your own answers by prompting you to ask what your students need to learn. It will help you figure out the best way to present what your students need to know, in a manner that will be easy on you while giving them exactly what they need from you, week in and week out.

As you discover your own answers, you’ll find numerous prompts to encourage you to articulate your principles, vision, and plans. These reflections can be handwritten in a journal or typed into a document or your notes program. Please do whatever feels most natural, whatever best suits your learning and teaching styles. Visit yogateacherhandbook.com to download a companion document that collects all the prompts together. You can also connect with me there and let me know how you are growing. I look forward to hearing from you!