Yoga Teacher Education: Can it be Saved?

Yoga teacher education is fragmented, over-priced, and failing to prepare graduates for the real world. Here’s how we should fix this mess.

To become a doctor you have to go to medical school, do an internship, and sit for exams, all governed by a medical board. To become a therapist you have to get at least a Master’s degree, do an internship and again sit for exams that governed by a board. To become a physical therapist you have to again complete many years of schooling, pass difficult tests, and make sure you meet the requirements to properly work with the human body.

And while teaching yoga doesn’t fall on quite the same scale as being a doctor, a therapist, or a physical therapist — yoga teachers do work with bodies in very real ways and quite often influence and affect people physically, mentally, and emotionally through their work. However, to become a yoga teacher you just have to go through a two-hundred hour training and pass based on whoever was training you through this course.

You don’t have to pass my tests, you don’t have to do an internship, and after you’re given your certificate there is no governing board that oversees your work to make sure you’re staying up to date with your learning, and that what you’re putting into the world with your teaching isn’t injuring anyone or causing anyone harm. Not only does this system produce inconsistency among yoga teachers, but it also allows for stagnation among teachers in the continuation of their learning, and it can produce teachers who just know the bare minimum and really shouldn’t be working with the human body in such a multidimensional way.

Standards for Two Hundred Hour Trainings

Let’s first look at what makes up a two hundred hour yoga teacher training and the ways that two different trainings can produce profoundly different teachers depending on how many contact hours they had, where the training teachers chose to focus their hours, and other important factors. According to Yoga Alliance, who is the current governing board over most trainings in the world, to have successfully completed a two hundred hour yoga teacher training one must have completed the following components:

• 100 hours of Techniques, Training, and Practice
• 25 hours of Teaching Methodology
• 20 hours of Anatomy and Physiology
• 30 hours of Yoga Philosophy, Lifestyle, and Ethics
• 10 hours of Practicum
• 15 hours of Electives

This list makes up the two hundred hours, and while the manuals for teacher trainings and their plans must be approved by Yoga Alliance before they become a yoga school, there is still plenty of room for training teacher’s discretion in this course.

Additionally out of these two hundred hours, only one hundred and eighty hours actually have to be contact hours which I believe is not nearly enough. I personally don’t think that even two hundred contact hours with a master teacher are enough to begin to know the amount of information that should be required to teach yoga, so the fact that certain trainings are only using one hundred and eighty hours in contact with their students and then allowing them to go out into the world as certified teachers is a bit ridiculous to me. While you may think that twenty hours isn’t much of a difference, just think about how much you could learn from a master of their craft in twenty hours. How beneficial that would be for you and how much you could take away from each additional hour you had with them…

Inconsistency in Trainings

While there are some incredible yoga teacher trainings out there that are taking the job of training teachers incredibly seriously and making sure that they don’t certify just anyone to work as a yoga teacher, there are equally as many awful trainings. I have seen advertisement for trainings that are only sixteen days long for instance, pushing all the contact hours together, jumbling up all the information into quick lectures with hardly any time for their students to process, and then congratulating then with a certification at the end of it. These trainings focus more on being a business — they are all about bringing people in, working the system they have created, taking the three to four grand that people pay, and then giving them what they want — a certificate to legally be a yoga teacher.

These trainings do a disservice to the whole industry of yoga. They eliminate some of the processes that are crucial to learning and I believe they take a lot of the heart out of yoga teaching. Sure these trainings meet the guidelines that Yoga Alliance requires, and some students with a large base of knowledge already and a great sense of intuition might come out of these trainings with the skills to teach yoga — but I’m going to argue that most of the time these trainings produce teachers that don’t have the skills to stand in front of a class with real confidence, and don’t offer them anywhere to turn if they want to gain those skills and be able to provide real, authentic movement and lessons to their future students. This is less about the people that choose these type of trainings, and more about the companies that put them on and the lack of a real governing board for yoga teachers and trainings that currently exists.

What We Need to Change

I wish that everyone who went through a training was given amazing information, great hands on learning, and expert knowledge from a master teacher, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. It’s hard to know what’s a good training from a bad one these days, and the really good trainings are often more expensive and therefore less accessible to everyone. For these reasons and many others we need to fix the system, not just for people that want to be yoga teachers and need to choose trainings and probably aren’t aware of the huge range of quality within teacher trainings, but also for the current yoga teachers who want to keep learning and growing but are having trouble accessing and affording help from mentors and knowledge that will allow them to be great and help more people.

I personally struggle with this as someone who has been teaching for a little over three years. I have done two different two hundred hour trainings and have been lucky enough to have had great knowledge and skills passed down to me, but I struggle to continue growing and learning as I don’t have a mentor or a way to pay for new trainings every couple of months — even though I know I would greatly benefit from them. As yoga teachers we don’t typically make a lot of money and therefore I believe it would benefit the yoga community if we could figure out a way to still pay our teachers enough but make the price of trainings and continuing education more accessible to all.

Creating Solutions and Higher Standards

So how do we rectify this situation — as yoga teachers, as potential future mentors of the next generation of yogis, and just as general practitioners of yoga and lover of all that yoga has done for our own lives?

1. I think we need to create a stronger, more official governing board for teachers and teacher trainings. I think everyone in the yoga community would benefit from their being a governing board that more closely oversaw trainings, made sure current teachers were keeping up with trainings, and just overall kept the quality of yoga studios, teachers, workshops, and other events at a high level. There is a lot of leeway that can occur in all of these areas because there really is no organization that helps oversee what is going on. Granted I think a lot of us hold ourselves and our work to a very high standard — and that is amazing — but I still think we could all benefit from some external standards as well.
2. I think we need to all work together to create stronger guidelines and a larger degree of clarity around what needs to be taught in yoga teacher trainings so that every training is high quality. It is not just up to a governing board, or Yoga Alliance, but it is also up to each and every one of us teachers to get together and speak out about how there is such a variance among trainings and keep the discussion going to create action and momentum so that changes. I would love for all trainings to be created equal so that all teachers feel more confident, with a large basis of knowledge and skill to draw upon. I don’t mean that each training shouldn’t be unique and creative, just as each teacher should be, but I think we can maintain that while also providing more quality trainings across the board.
3. I think we should make future trainings, workshops, and continuing education events more accessible and affordable. This one is near and dear to my heart as someone who wants to further her knowledge, study with master teachers and just generally improve and grow but simply doesn’t have the budget to do so. I think a lot of yoga teachers feel this same way, especially those trying to live off of only teaching yoga. I think we need to work with the current system so that we can offer more affordable trainings for those that want to continue their education, not only for their own good, but for the good of the yoga community as a whole.

I know that some of these thoughts might be controversial and not everyone will agree with me, but I hope we can all agreed that we need to keep standards high when it comes to our teaching and our offerings so that we can help as many people as possible through the movement practice and the life that is yoga.