Two weeks ago, in episode 107, I made the positive case for teaching core. This week is the other half of the conversation: the five misunderstandings that stop teachers from ever starting, and the honest objections underneath them. Every one is costing your students something real, and most of them dissolve the moment you look at them directly.

Core means abs

It doesn’t, or rather, abs are one wall of a much bigger room. Your core is a cylinder: the diaphragm forms the roof, the pelvic floor forms the floor, and the deep abdominal and back muscles wrap all the way around, 360 degrees. That’s why breath belongs at the center of any honest core conversation. The roof of the container moves with every inhale.

A student breathing steadily through a slow, supported side bend is doing more genuine core work than someone grinding out 50 crunches with a clenched jaw and a held breath. Core is a function, and functions don’t photograph well, which is precisely why the fitness industry sold us a look instead. Once you see the cylinder, you stop looking for the six-pack and start looking for the steadiness, and steadiness is everywhere in a yoga class.

Teaching core means importing crunches

You don’t need to import anything, because the work is already latent in the practice you teach. Holding a lunge steady against gravity is core work. Lowering to the floor with control is core work. Standing on one leg while the other one moves is core work. What most classes are missing is the intention, tempo, and cueing that surface the strength work already hiding inside the shapes.

When you learn to teach core, your class doesn’t start looking like a boot camp. It starts working like one, while still looking and feeling like yoga. In the language of the 6–4–2 framework I use for sequencing (six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions), the two core actions are already on the checklist for a balanced class. The question is whether you’re teaching them on purpose.

Core is the intensity garnish

You know the move: the designated boat-pose minute wedged in before the wind-down. When core work lives only in a segment, students learn to dread a segment. When it’s woven through the class as a capacity, a pause here, a slow transition there, students build strength without ever bracing for the hard part.

I spent a good part of episode 107 on exactly where core lives in a class, so I’ll keep it short here: the transitions are the curriculum. The step from downward-facing dog to a lunge, the lowering from plank to the floor, the rise from a forward fold to standing. Slow any one of them down and you have a core class that no one in the room will call a core class.

Students with sensitive backs should sit it out

This one comes from a good heart, and it backfires. When we exempt the student with the cranky back from every ounce of effort, we guarantee that the person who would benefit most from a stronger trunk is the only one in the room not building it.

A sensitive back needs a smarter on-ramp: gentler loads, better positions, slower progressions, and a teacher who knows the difference between pain and effort. Building on-ramps is a completely teachable skill. I promise it is, because I teach it.

You need another certification first

This is the big one: the belief that you need a personal-training credential or a physio degree before you’re allowed to teach strength. You already hold the raw material: the poses, the room, the students’ trust, and more anatomy than you give yourself credit for. What’s actually missing for most yoga teachers is method, which progression to teach in which order, which version to offer which body, which words make effort feel welcome rather than scary. That gap is real. It’s also far narrower than the certification-collecting instinct believes.

What you might be thinking, and how I’d answer

“My students come to me to relax, and core work will scare them off.” In my experience, students come to yoga to feel better in their bodies and their lives; relaxation is one route to that, capability is another, and the magic of our discipline is that we can offer both in the same hour. Strength delivered the yoga way, with breath, with attention, with rest built in, reads to students as care. And strength gives students something savasana alone cannot: progress they can feel. The student who couldn’t lower to the floor with control in September and can in November tells her friends about your class. Attendance follows usefulness.

“I can piece this together myself from free videos.” You genuinely can find infinite core content for free, including plenty of mine, and I’d never pretend otherwise. But knowledge was never the bottleneck. If information alone built competence, every teacher with a YouTube Premium account would already have this handled. What free content cannot give you is a method: the sequence to learn things in, the progressions and regressions sitting side by side so you can serve the 70-year-old and the triathlete in the same room, the cueing language tested on real classes, the complete class plans you can teach this week. A course buys you structure and a finish line. The scattered-tabs approach buys you a fifth of ten different systems and mastery of none.

“I don’t have time for a course this fall.” Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength is self-paced and built to be applied as you go. You fold what you learn into the classes you’re already teaching, starting with your very next one, rather than studying for months before you’re allowed to begin. Lifetime access means the pace is yours.

“It’s an investment.” It is, and I’ll give you two frames for it. Through Saturday, it’s 20% off, and that’s the best the price will ever be, because I offer a launch discount on my courses once only. And a single reasonably filled core workshop, the kind the course teaches you to build and lead, can repay the whole cost. Core interest doesn’t go out of season. This is a competence you’ll still be offering in five years.

What to do this week

If this month of core episodes, and the new core videos dripping out on my YouTube channel, has been building toward a yes for you, if you recognized your own students in the sensitive-back story or your own hesitation in the certification myth, this is the week to decide. Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength gives you the complete method for teaching core in a yoga context: the lectures, the core-as-a-box model, the master recipe for sequencing core classes, the cueing, progressions and regressions (spicier and sweeter versions for the real bodies in your real classes), the Core Strength Sequence Planner, and three lesson plans with my feedback. The course is on sale now, 20% off through Saturday, October 31.

And if the answer is no, or not yet, that’s a fine answer too. Audit your class plans for the two core actions, slow one transition down on purpose, and watch what happens in your room. Your students get stronger either way, and that was always the point. I walk through all five misunderstandings and all four objections on episode 109 of Yoga Teacher Confidential.

Recorded classes: give them high production values

A recorded class competes with everything else on a student’s screen, and it will be watched again and again, so it’s worth the extra effort to make it look and sound great.

Schedule a dedicated shoot instead of recording a regular class. Teaching students in the room while you film for viewers at home means serving two groups at once, and neither one gets all of you. If you need people demonstrating, ask a few teacher colleagues or regular students to model in exchange for the class. If you can, have a friend, or a camera and sound person, handle the equipment so your attention stays on teaching.

Then build the set. Shoot in landscape (horizontal) mode on a tripod, with your phone’s rear-facing camera at its highest setting or an SLR camera, and check your storage before you start. Lighting makes the difference between something mediocre and something really good: put your key light just behind the camera at about head height, angled at your face, or let a window do that job with the camera’s back to it. Add a fill light from the side, or a reflector, a white wall, or even a white sheet, to soften the shadows. Use an external microphone (even wireless earbuds with a mic can work) rather than the camera’s built-in one. And plan to edit: I use Descript for my videos, because editing the transcript is as simple as editing a document. (That’s my affiliate link; I earn a small commission if you sign up through it.) I walk through my whole setup, from a phone and a $20 microphone to the studio upgrades, in my video How to Record Yoga Videos at Home (Budget to Pro).

Finally, package each class the same way. A consistent title card or short intro tells viewers what they’re about to do, and it’s the right place for a short disclaimer that they practice at their own risk. At the end, suggest one next step, such as another class or a tutorial.

Live online classes: connection over polish

A live class doesn’t need studio lighting, but it does need you to be present and the technology to stay out of the way. A recent phone usually gives you better video than a laptop’s built-in camera, and you can join the call from your computer at the same time so you can see your students. Here’s a setup that works well: put the phone on a tripod off the wide edge of your mat, recording in landscape, so students see your whole body from the side, and set the computer off the short edge of the mat, where a glance at the screen shows you the students. Right before class, turn off every other device on your Wi-Fi network for the strongest signal.

Log in early, test your microphone, and check the battery. As students arrive, greet them by name, the same way you would at the studio door, and let them know whether you’d like microphones muted and whether cameras on or off is up to them. Before the first pose, tell them what to do if the connection drops or they need to step away. That small welcome turns a grid of names into a class.

Tell students before you go silent. Silence is one of the best teaching tools you have, but on a live stream a long pause can make students wonder whether the video has frozen. Preface it (“We’ll hold this pose for three minutes, and I’ll get quiet except for a few check-ins”), and then every 20 or 30 seconds, offer a short line like “Where could you relax more?” or “We’re still here.” There’s more on why saying less works in Silence Is Golden.

Open and close the same way every week, too. There’s no walk into the studio or back to the car to mark the beginning and end of class, so a consistent opening and an orderly sequence out of savasana do that job. My posts on how to start your yoga class with confidence and how to end your yoga class so students remember you cover both ends.

In both formats: the lens, left and right, and the demo

Look at the lens. On video, the camera lens is your students’ eyes, and looking straight into it, with a smile, is the eye contact you’d make in person. In a live class it’s tempting to watch the screen of student faces instead, which on their end looks like you’re looking down and away. Glance at the screen to check on students, then bring your gaze back to the lens when you’re speaking to them.

Make left and right easy. Mirroring, saying “right” while you move your left side so students can follow you like a reflection, is worth building for video, and it takes practice. (I’m still working on it after more than two decades.) Until it’s second nature, turn sideways for lunges and other staggered stances so your right is their right, or use landmarks instead of directions: “Step toward the window” works for everyone, including those of us who get left and right confused even on good days! You can also put an R and an L on the wall behind the camera, or stickers on the edges of your mat.

Demonstrate more and say a little less. In a studio, I mostly lead and watch. On video, most classes go better when the teacher practices along, because students rely on seeing you to know what comes next. That makes it even more important to keep your words lean: one clear action at a time, with refinements saved for the second side. For more on when demonstrating helps and when it gets in the way, here’s my post on when to demo and when to observe.

Cover the professional details

Every online class, recorded or live, should carry a short disclaimer that viewers practice at their own risk, on the page that hosts the class and, for recordings, in the title card. Run the wording past your attorney and your insurance agent. Check that your liability insurance covers online teaching, too, since not every policy does.

See both formats from the student’s side

The fastest way to learn what holds attention online is to take online classes as a student and notice what keeps you there. Prep Station members get both: a library of recorded follow-along sequences, and my live online classes, most Mondays at 6 p.m. Eastern (the next one on the calendar is in Live Online Classes). Take a look at the Prep Station.

If you lead yoga teacher trainings and want help bringing that work online, the Training Delivery Playbook shows you how to turn a lecture you already give into video, transcript, private podcast, workbook, and ebook formats, so trainees can learn in whichever format suits them. It’s nine lessons, with 10 Yoga Alliance CEUs.

A 200-hour yoga teacher training is not two hundred hours of yoga class. If it were, it would be a very expensive gym membership. I’ve been training yoga teachers since 2011, and applications for the next cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training are open now, so this is a good moment to open the doors and show you where the hours go.

The day you’re accepted

The curriculum opens the day you enroll, on purpose. Enroll in November, and you have November, December, and January to work through the self-paced material on your own clock and arrive at the February calls already warmed up. The lectures come in three formats (video, written transcript, and a private podcast feed), the reading comes from five books I wrote or co-wrote, and a workbook carries prompts for every lesson.

Honest arithmetic: the program is two hundred hours, about thirty-five of them live and roughly 165 self-paced. Start about three months before the live calls and finish at graduation, and that’s about twenty-six weeks, or three to six hours a week. Wait until the live calls begin to start the self-paced work, and you’ll squeeze the same hours into twelve weeks—closer to six to twelve hours a week, on top of the calls. Both are possible. Both are doable. One is a lot more pleasant.

The first thing you do isn’t anatomy or sequencing. It’s Module 1, Intention Setting and Mission, where you write a deliberately imperfect mission statement that you’ll reread at the very end. Then the modules run: Finding Your Voice; Energy Management for Yoga Teachers; thirty hours of anatomy and physiology built for cueing rather than memorization; planning a class; the sequencing method, which is the biggest block of hours in the program; the craft of teaching; theming; thirty hours of philosophy, built so that by the end you can place your teaching in the tradition and talk about it without either apologizing for it or performing it at your students; and the profession itself. The body comes fourth. What ends most teaching careers early is running on empty by year two, so we put the fuel gauge in before the engine.

A normal week once the live calls start

This fall the cohort meets Tuesday evenings from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Eastern; the next cohort sets its own slot together once everyone’s enrolled. One live video call a week, never longer than ninety minutes, for twelve weeks. On the call we take a lesson and do the parts that best suit our live presence: the discussion prompts, partner exercises, and time for questions and answers.

The room is a grid of faces, and this fall three of my eight students have joined calls with their children in their laps. The kids are welcome exactly as they are, and it has been one of my favorite parts of the training. There’s a mute button for the moments a parent wants one, and nothing more is needed. I built this training for adults with full lives, and full lives come to the call.

Here’s a week a student with a job and a household could actually keep. Monday, forty minutes: the week’s lecture on the private podcast feed while you walk the dog, fold the laundry, or drive to work. You don’t even have to take notes; just let it wash over you once. Monday night, come to the live online yoga class (it runs every Monday during the live cohort, shared with my Prep Station and sequencing mentorship members) and be a student. Tuesday evening, ninety minutes: the live call, though that slot floats depending on what works for each cohort. Wednesday, forty-five minutes: one chapter, with a pencil in your hand, and the two or three workbook prompts that go with it. Thursday, forty-five minutes: your buddy session, thirty minutes on video and fifteen for keep, drop, add. Friday: nothing, and I mean that—downtime is critical for your integration. Saturday morning, an hour: twenty minutes of your own practice, following the sequence you’ll teach so you experience it in your body before you ask anyone else to, then forty minutes back in the workbook, rewatching a lecture, or reading the transcript. Sunday off. That’s about five and a half hours, which lands you at graduation with the hours done and your weekends mostly intact. Start in February or October instead, when the cohort begins, and you’ll double this, and maybe you take back Friday. It’s still possible.

And the off days are the ones people are tempted to skip. A training you can only survive by white-knuckling it teaches you to white-knuckle it, a horrible habit that you might then carry into your first year of teaching. A day off inside the training is practice for a day off inside your teaching career. I hope you’ll take it.

The piece that makes you a yoga teacher

Early in the cohort you’re paired with another trainee, and each week you meet on video and one of you teaches the other. You record it, at least four times over the training, and the sessions get longer and more real as you go. There is no faster education in cueing than watching another human try to follow your words.

Every session uses the same feedback protocol, Keep/Drop/Add: before anyone speaks, your partner writes one thing to keep, one to drop, one to add. Specific and kind, in that order, in writing. It prevents the two things that ruin feedback between new teachers, piling on and the vague “that was great!”

My second class ever was a sub I hadn’t planned on: I showed up to take the class, the teacher had car trouble, and I wound up saying, “I can teach this class.” I hadn’t been announced, so the students walked in expecting Bryan, their regular teacher, and got me, and I spent the entire hour apologizing for not being Bryan. The next day two of them, both schoolteachers, found me at the gym and told me gently, “We have a little feedback for you. We could see that you weren’t Bryan. You didn’t need to apologize for not being Bryan.” That is a keep, drop, add. Keep: you showed up and taught, and we had a class. Drop: the apologizing. Add: your own name, your own spin, out loud, at the start. Nobody had a protocol for telling me that back then. My students get it every week.

Alongside the buddy sessions there’s community teaching—real people, friends, family, a lunchtime group at work—with a log, at least five hours of it, plus five hours observing experienced yoga teachers, with notes: fifteen practicum hours against the ten Yoga Alliance requires, and the extra five are deliberate. This is where the Fraud Feeling gets its first real workout, and where you discover that you do know what you’re doing, in pieces, and the pieces are what you build from.

Week seven

Around the seventh week of a twelve-week cohort nearly everybody hits a dip: the novelty’s worn off, the reading has stacked up, graduation is still several weeks away. I tell every cohort about it in advance, because a wall you can see coming is a wall you can climb. Don’t binge the lectures to catch up. Work in thirty-to-sixty-minute sessions. Pick up where you left off rather than doubling up. Come to the call even if you’re behind, especially then, because the other faces in the grid are in it too.

How you’re assessed

There’s no written exam. In the last weeks you record a twenty-minute segment of class and write your own Keep/Drop/Add on it. The self-assessment matters more than the video, because a yoga teacher who can accurately see their own teaching is ready to keep growing without me. Before you write it, you reread the mission statement from week one. Twelve weeks later it reads differently, and that difference is the training, made visible.

After graduation

The first year of teaching is harder than the training; I say so in the training itself, in the module on managing your energy, because it’s better to hear it from me early than to discover it alone a month into your first teaching job. So graduation isn’t the end of the container. You’re a member of the Prep Station, my membership for working yoga teachers, from the day you enroll through October 31, 2027, so the six months after graduation are covered: a library of ready-to-teach sequences, a planning tool, a monthly live call, and a room full of working teachers to ask while you teach your first real classes. The training teaches you to cook. The Prep Station is a stocked kitchen for the first six months you’re cooking for other people.

If you want in

Applications for the February 2027 cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training are open through Sunday, January 31. Early-bird tuition is $2,997, paid in full, through Sunday, December 13; after that it’s $3,500 or four payments of $875. The application asks real questions, and I read every one myself.

If you’d like to see the training first, come to the live open house on Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. You can also take Unit 2 of the curriculum for free: it’s a mini-course called Find Your Teaching Voice. If you’d rather talk it through one to one, book a free thirty-minute call with me. And if you’re still deciding whether teaching is your path, start with how much experience you need before teacher training, how to choose an online yoga teacher training, or what happens inside my 200-hour.

Which part sounds hardest to you: the live calls, the buddy sessions, or the final teaching video? Tell me in the comments. The answer is usually the part that turns out best.

If you’re a yoga teacher, you very likely hold more qualification to teach core than you think, and you don’t need another certification to begin. Your 200-hour training already covered the raw material (asana, breath, sequencing, cueing), and teaching core well comes down to organizing that material around a few physiological principles, which anyone can study and learn.

So where does the certification worry come from? I think it comes from two places, and both deserve a real answer.

Scope of practice: pathology is not your problem

The first worry is scope. Yoga teachers feel the weight of their students’ backs and necks and diastasis recti questions, and they conclude that core work belongs to someone with more letters after their name. I teach one distinction in every training I run: pathology is not your problem. You aren’t diagnosing, treating, or rehabilitating anyone. That belongs to physical therapists and physicians, and when a student brings you a medical question, the professional answer is a warm referral out.

Your job is what you already do in every class: offering well-structured movement with choices, teaching students to tell sensation from strain, and inviting them to take the version of an exercise where they can keep breathing. That’s teaching yoga. A plank with options is no further outside your scope than a warrior pose with options.

Does core belong to Pilates?

The second worry is fuzzier: the sense that core belongs to Pilates or to the fitness industry, and that borrowing from those worlds makes you an impostor. Joseph Pilates built a systematic mat repertoire, with precise exercises, a deliberate order, and clear breath patterns. Yoga gives us something different, an enormous vocabulary of shapes plus the frame that turns strength work into practice.

Two Sanskrit ideas sort out the borrowing. Kriya is the set piece: the ab series, the bridge series, a discrete chunk of content. Krama is the staging: the order, the context, and the presentation. You can borrow a kriya from the Pilates tradition and stage it with yoga’s krama, breath-led and choice-rich. Give credit out loud: tell your students, “This one comes from the Pilates tradition,” which is a generous and accurate thing to say. A teacher who borrows with credit is a well-read cook working from more than one shelf of cookbooks.

More like cooking than medicine

Teaching core well is much more like cooking than like medicine. Feeding people well takes a reliable recipe, an understanding of your ingredients, and the habit of tasting as you go, and very little of that knowledge is exotic.

Bodies adapt to the demands you place on them when those demands come in the right dose, which is most of the science of strength. The principle of specificity says students get better at exactly what they practice, so a core-focused class needs both stabilization (holding the center steady while the limbs move, as in plank, bird dog, and dead bug) and articulation (moving the spine segment by segment, as in cat-cow, roll-downs, and gentle twists). The principle of progressive overload says to ask a little more than last time and then let the body absorb the work, which is why rest positions inside class aren’t filler: they’re where the adaptation starts to land. I spent a decade coaching endurance athletes on exactly that build, push, recover cycle, and it governs a Tuesday-morning core class just as surely as it governs a marathon build.

One model organizes all of it for me: the core is a box. The diaphragm sits on top, the pelvic floor below, the abdominals wrap the front and sides like a corset, and the low-back muscles sit behind. A box is only as strong as its weakest panel, so a student can crunch every day for a year and still have a wobbly box, because crunches address one panel out of six. Plan with the box and you have a checklist instead of a mystery: have I touched the front, the sides, the back, the top, and the bottom? If you’ve spent time with my 6–4–2 Framework (six moves of the spine, four lines of the legs, two core actions, a checklist for balanced movement), that thinking will sound familiar, because the two core actions in the framework are the same two jobs. You already know half of this material, if not more.

Study, yes; retraining, no

Study still matters. There’s a real difference between random ab blasts tacked onto a yoga class and thoughtfully structured core teaching, and students feel that difference. Waiting on a credential you don’t need usually means another season of three rounds of bicycle crunches at the end of an unrelated class, or changing the subject when someone asks. The gap between you and confident core teaching is measured in hours of structured study, not years of retraining.

Continuing education, absolutely: that’s how professionals sharpen their craft, and it’s how you earn the CEUs you need anyway. A new certification just so you feel allowed to begin is the fitness industry’s anxiety talking, and you don’t have to inherit it, my friend.

One caveat: if you want to teach in a specialized setting (clinical work, pre- and postnatal populations, one-on-one sessions with people managing injuries), seek the specific training that setting deserves. For the weekly group class, where sooner or later a student stops you on the way out the door to ask, “Can we do some more core?” you have permission, and you’ve had it all along.

If the missing piece is structured study

I built the short course I wish someone had handed me at the beginning of my teaching career. Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength is twenty hours of Yoga Alliance continuing education covering the physiology, the core-as-a-box model, a master recipe for sequencing core classes of any length, cueing that respects real bodies, and three complete lesson plans you’ll build with my feedback. Its launch sale opens Monday, October 26: 20 percent off through Saturday, October 31, and everyone who enrolls that week also gets a 15-minute planning call with me.

If you’d like more on the territory first, read how learning to teach core makes you a more useful yoga teacher and how to plan your yoga class in 15 minutes.

Somewhere around minute 30 of that scroll, a voice crept in. Everyone else just walks in and teaches. What’s wrong with me? I’ve been doing this for years and I still can’t plan a class without a meltdown. That’s the second arrow. And if you’re being honest with yourself . . . it hurts a lot more than the blank page ever did.

The two arrows of suffering is one of the most useful concepts in all of yoga philosophy, and one of the most useful for your life as a yoga teacher. It comes from the Buddhist tradition, and Alexandra DeSiato and I explore it through the Sanskrit concept of dukha in Yoga Off the Mat. The struggle is real. The story you tell yourself about the struggle is where the real damage happens.

I first looked at the two arrows back in episode 86, right as Yoga Off the Mat was headed to preorder. The book is out now, so this time I’m going deeper, with real quotes from the chapter, the kleshas connection fleshed out further, and a few practices straight from the book’s ACTIONS box.

Dukha means bad axle space

The etymology is genuinely useful for your teaching. Dukha is usually translated as “suffering,” but the literal meaning is more specific: “bad axle space.” Du is bad. Kha is the space in the center of a wheel where the axle sits. Picture a wagon wheel. When the axle hole is well fitted, smooth and round, the ride is smooth. That’s sukha, good axle space: ease, the pleasant hum of things working as they should. When the hole is off-center and rough, every single rotation grinds. That’s dukha, the persistent, wearing wobble that makes everything harder than it needs to be.

As we write in the book, “dukha stems from being out of alignment—with your values, with reality, and with the truth of the present moment. You come back into alignment by ceasing resistance to the now.” For a yoga teacher, dukha isn’t the class that went badly. It’s the low-grade friction that accumulates: the hours spent planning, the confidence that never quite arrives, the comparison to every other teacher on your feed, the Sunday-night dread that settles in like clockwork. That wobble. That grind.

The first arrow and the second

The Buddha described two arrows. The first arrow is the thing that happens to you: the blank page, the student who leaves your class early, the workshop that doesn’t fill, the feedback that stings. You can’t dodge the first arrow. It’s part of being alive, and it’s definitely part of being a yoga teacher. The book opens this chapter with a promise from the Yoga Sutras that sounds almost too good: suffering that has not yet arisen may be avoided. “We cannot avoid all suffering, nor should we,” we write. “Suffering is an innate part of life, and it is an experience that connects us all in our shared humanity.” The sutra’s promise applies to the second arrow alone. The suffering we manufacture ourselves is the suffering we can decline.

The second arrow is what you do after the first arrow hits: the story, the rumination, the catastrophizing, the self-blame, the anxious projection into the future. And the second arrow almost always hurts more than the first, because the first arrow lands once. The second arrow you can keep shooting at yourself for hours, days, years.

A student walks out of your class. That’s the first arrow. People have places to be. But by the time you get to your car, you’ve decided you’re losing your touch, your classes are getting stale, the studio is going to replace you, and you should probably go back to your day job. That is the second arrow: the feature-length film about failure that your mind produced from a single person leaving a room.

This is not “get over it”

Before going further, a caution, because this teaching can be weaponized. “Your suffering is optional” can easily become “Get over it” or “You’re choosing to be miserable.” That is not what this is about.

The first arrow is real. The struggles of building a teaching career are real. The time drain of class planning is real; I’ve heard from hundreds of you, and “it takes forever to plan” is the single most common thing yoga teachers tell me. The confidence gap is real. The financial pressure is real. Yoga philosophy is not asking you to pretend those things don’t exist. That would be spiritual bypassing, and we address it directly in the book.

The book draws the distinction with a story from my coauthor. Alexandra hated shots and needles as a child, for no real reason, since they barely hurt and were over in seconds. “The suffering of a momentary vaccine was far overshadowed by the suffering caused by the irrational fear that Alexandra felt at the prospect of getting a shot. That sort of unnecessary suffering is exactly what we want to (and can) avoid.” The needle is real, and the needle is quick. The dread is optional, and the dread is endless. What the two-arrows teaching offers is a diagnostic tool: a way to see the difference between what’s actually happening and what you’re adding to what’s happening.

Three flavors of the second arrow

In 20 years of working with yoga teachers, I’ve noticed the second arrow shows up in three flavors.

The first is the story of meaning. Something happens, and within seconds your mind has assigned it cosmic significance. A student leaves early, and it isn’t “they had somewhere to be,” it’s “I’m losing my touch.” Someone doesn’t sign up for your workshop, and “the timing didn’t work” becomes “nobody wants what I’m offering.” I asked 144 yoga teachers to tell me their biggest struggle, and what came up more than anything was “I don’t feel confident,” “I second-guess myself,” “I’ve been on the sidelines, thinking I wasn’t ready.” Y’all, those are all second arrows. The first arrow is that teaching is genuinely hard and nobody prepared you for the real work of planning and leading class, week after week, for real humans. That’s legitimate. The second arrow is the story that you specifically can’t do it, that everyone else has it figured out and you’re the only one faking it. You’re not. I promise you, you’re not.

The second flavor is the projection forward. One thing goes wrong and your mind fast-forwards to catastrophe. You stumble over a cue, and within minutes you’re imagining the negative review and the studio owner pulling your slot. You spend three hours planning a class, and the second arrow whispers: if it takes this long now, it’ll always take this long. The book describes the mechanism precisely: “Our anxiety is prone to overestimating how bad things will be and underestimating our ability to handle whatever comes to pass—and this leads to unneeded suffering.” Overestimate the circumstance, underestimate your resilience. That’s the second arrow’s entire operating manual.

The third flavor is the retrospective edit. Something difficult happens now, and you go excavating the past for evidence that it was always going to be this way. You get tongue-tied in a mixed-level class and suddenly it’s “I’ve never been good under pressure. My training didn’t prepare me. I should have picked a different career.” The first arrow was today. The second arrow rewrote your entire history to match today’s pain.

How the kleshas load the bow

If you were with me for episode 106, or all the way back at episode 91, you already know the kleshas, the five obstacles that create suffering. Dukha doesn’t exist in isolation; the kleshas are what load the second arrow. Avidya, wrong-seeing, is the root: you’re comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. Asmita, ego, adds the “I”: this isn’t just a thing that happened, it happened to me, and it means something about me as a teacher. Raga and dvesha, craving and aversion, create the pull: you want the confidence to arrive now and the planning to be effortless already. Abhinivesha, fear of the unknown, keeps you gripping: better to keep worrying than to find out what’s on the other side of letting go. When you can see the kleshas loading the bow, you start to have a choice about whether to release.

The practice for you

The next time you notice suffering, especially the kind that lives in your teaching life, pause and ask: “Is this the first arrow or the second?” You don’t have to do anything with the answer. Asking the question requires you to step into the witness position, from being inside the suffering to observing it, and that tiny shift is pratyahara, the fifth limb of yoga: a sliver of space between stimulus and response.

Say you’re planning this week’s classes. It’s been an hour and you’re not happy with what you’ve got, and the second arrow is warming up: I should be faster at this by now. Pause, take a deep breath, and spot it: “That’s the second arrow.” The first arrow, the real thing, is that class planning is a skill, and skills take time to develop. The fact that it takes you an hour right now isn’t a character flaw. It’s where you are in the process. In 20 years of teaching I can tell you the planning gets simpler, faster, and more intuitive, not because you skip it but because you practice it.

A few more practices, most from the ACTIONS box in chapter 22. The three-breath pause: when the first arrow hits, take three conscious breaths before you respond, out loud or to yourself. The label: when you catch the second arrow, say “second arrow” internally, the way a meteorologist labels a storm, not to stop it but to track it. The journal prompt: at the end of each teaching day, write down one first arrow and one second arrow, and over a week you’ll see which situations reliably trigger you and which kleshas are doing the loading. The reality check: before something you’re fretting about, like a hard conversation with a student or a studio owner, write down the very worst case your mind insists on, then compare afterward. As we write, “This literal reality check strengthens your mindfulness of what is truly real, and it keeps you from piercing yourself with that second arrow and piling on avoidable suffering.” And the cold plunge, trendy and murky science aside: a few minutes in genuinely cold water “can help you discern between uncomfortable sensation and actual suffering.” And, like running a marathon, it feels so good when it’s over. If you came to yoga from endurance sport, as I did, you already know this territory. A controlled dose of discomfort, taken on purpose, builds your capacity to meet the uncontrolled doses without nocking a second arrow.

Teaching the two arrows in class

This is one of the most teachable concepts in the entire book, and you don’t need to say dukha to teach it. In a physical practice, the two arrows are happening constantly. The first arrow is the sensation: the stretch, the effort, the wobble, the shaking quad. That’s real; that’s information. The second arrow is the story about the sensation: I’m not flexible enough. Everyone else can do this. My body is broken. I’m a wimp.

You can cue it simply: “Notice if you’re adding a story to the sensation.” That’s the two arrows in one sentence, and your students will feel it immediately, because they’re already doing it. They just didn’t have the language. Or try: “The wobble in your standing balance? That’s the first arrow. The frustration about the wobble? That’s the second one. See if you can stay with the wobble and let the frustration go.” That’s philosophy embodied in your class, with no lecture required.

You can’t avoid the first arrow. Teaching is hard, planning takes time, and some weeks you’ll stare at that blank notebook and wonder what you’re doing. That’s part of the craft. The second arrow, the story that says you’re failing and everyone else has it figured out, is yours, and you get to decide how long you hold the bow. In 20 years of teaching, I still shoot second arrows all the time. The difference is that now I notice, and noticing is the beginning of yoga.

Chapter 22 of Yoga Off the Mat lays out the full framework, with a week’s worth of practices in its ACTIONS box. If weaving philosophy into your classes so it actually lands, building dharma talks from concepts your students can feel, is the work you want to go deeper in, that’s what we do together in Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, my six-month mentorship. And I walk through all of this, axle and arrows and kleshas, on episode 108 of Yoga Teacher Confidential.

The whole replay is below, and the 10-minute practice starts at 36:51.

Why the words come in the order they do

I’ve written about the map underneath every session before, so here’s the short version. Yoga nidra (yogic sleep) walks students down through the koshas, the five layers of the self, from the physical body to the bliss body at the center, and then back out again. I teach those five layers as a recipe with five ingredients: body, breath, brain, belly, bliss. Before them comes a little prep (settling in, turning attention away from the outside world, and setting a short intention, or sankalpa), and after them you guide students back out through their senses in reverse, so the full recipe has eight steps with the five B’s at its heart.

What I spent more time on this month is how the cues change along the way. They start out specific, like “notice your ankles,” and grow more general as you go deeper, until by the bliss layer you ask one open question (where in your body do you feel most at ease?) and then stop talking. I call that the specific-to-general dial, and it sets two more dials for you. Your pace runs steady and fairly brisk through the body, then slows as you go in. Your volume is most present at the start, softer toward the center, and rises again as you guide students out. If you ever lose your place mid-session, ask yourself where you are on the dial, and it will tell you how much to say.

Four mistakes new yoga nidra teachers make

Almost every new nidra teacher makes the same four, and each one has a simple fix.

1. Rushing

Nerves speed you up, especially when you’re reading. Go slower than feels natural, and when you think you’ve paused long enough, take a breath and wait a few seconds more. You’ll almost never overdo silence in yoga nidra, but you’ll often underdo it.

2. Filling the silence

I spent six years as a public radio announcer, where dead air is the kiss of death. In yoga nidra the silence is the point: the practice happens in the gaps, and a constant stream of words never lets students make that deeper inner connection. If you teach online, a long quiet stretch can feel to students like the stream froze, so tell them at the start that the silences are on purpose, and every so often say, “I’m still here.”

3. The yoga voice

You know the one: breathy, sing-songy, with every S drawn out. Students register it as fake. Your nidra voice can be your real voice, the one you’d use over coffee with a friend, turned down one notch (not ten notches), so it gets a little slower and a little softer.

4. Commands instead of choices

“Close your eyes” and “close your eyes if you like, or let your gaze go soft” differ by only a few words, and those words hand students the choice. Lying still with your eyes closed among strangers isn’t restful for everyone, so make every instruction an invitation, and tell students up front that they can open their eyes, shift, or step away whenever they need to.

That last fix is the quickest of the four, so we practiced it live in the chat. “Relax your shoulders” became “see if your shoulders would like to soften,” and “close your eyes” became “gently close your eyes or soften your gaze.” Permission-based language like this belongs in trauma-informed teaching everywhere, not only in yoga nidra.

Yes, you can read from a script

The workshop description promised you’d be able to guide nidra without a script, and you will, but for your first few sessions, read. Nobody is watching a demonstration, so nobody will know or care that the words are on a page, and a student who did notice would most likely be glad their teacher came prepared. (The same goes for bringing notes into an asana class, by the way.)

Then shrink the page. Write the five B’s on an index card and keep it next to you as a security blanket. After you’ve guided the same session five or six times, a glance at the card will remind you what comes next, and the words in between will be your own.

While you’re still reading, two habits make a script sound less like one. First, record yourself, which is my best advice for any yoga teacher: when you listen back, you’ll hear exactly where your voice turns artificial, and almost certainly where you rush. Second, write categories instead of specifics. In the stage where you pair opposites, write “large animal, small animal” instead of “whale, ladybug,” so you have to choose in the moment, and maybe this week it comes out as an elephant and an ant. You keep the structure and lose the word-for-word reading.

As for inflection, aim somewhere between a computer reading a list and a dramatic reading. The closer you get to the voice students heard from you when you checked them in, the better.

When students fall asleep (or snore)

Some will, and that’s fine. Yoga nidra aims for the edge between waking and sleep, and if a student slips off that edge, the worst case is a nap, which may be exactly what their body needed. Compare that to the edge we play with in an asana class, the edge of intensity, where going over the line is how people get hurt.

Snoring is different, because it affects everyone else. Tell students before you begin that if you hear snoring, you’ll let it go a few rounds and then come squeeze their feet or ankles, which is their cue to roll onto a side. Go to the feet rather than anywhere near the face, so nobody wakes up startled. If you’d rather stay hands-off, an occasional “remember you are here” or “bring your attention back to now” helps students stay on the waking side of the edge.

And if you’re thinking about offering yoga nidra as its own class, an hour is plenty: about 15 minutes of gentle movement and 40–45 minutes of nidra. Evenings work beautifully, since students get to ease off into the night afterward, and so do weekend afternoons.

Three things to try this week

1. Download my free 5-Minute Yoga Nidra Script and read it aloud, to your class in savasana, to a friend, or to your phone’s voice recorder. Then listen back.
2. Make your five-word index card (body, breath, brain, belly, bliss) and tuck it in with your teaching notes.
3. Take the three cues you give most often as students settle into savasana, and rewrite each one as a choice.

Keep going

• How to Teach Yoga Nidra: What to Say for 20 Minutes
• The Koshas: The Ancient Map You’re Already Using Every Time You Teach Yoga
• Do You Need a Certification to Teach Yoga Nidra?

One hour gives you the map. What it can’t give you is how long each stage should run, how to adjust for a 10-minute session versus a 45-minute one, or how to write your opposites and images and guide into the bliss body when you’re staring at a blank page. That’s all in Fundamentals of Teaching Yoga Nidra: 15 short video lectures, the master recipe annotated step by step, an ingredient bank of images, my own scripts to adapt, and a workshop planning guide, for 20 Yoga Alliance CEUs at your own pace.

Your students are tired, and now you have what you need to help them rest.

I’ve been teaching yoga since 2003 and training yoga teachers since 2011, and sooner or later, someone deciding whether to train asks me this question. I touched on it at the end of my post about whether to become a yoga teacher. Here I’ll go underneath it: where it comes from, what to put in its place, and what to do with it this week.

Why does “Who am I to be a yoga teacher?” feel so loud?

It feels loud because yoga matters to you. People who don’t care much about the practice rarely lie awake wondering whether they deserve to teach it, so the worry often shows how much the practice has given you. Add a steady scroll of yoga teachers who all seem young, bendy, and photographed on a beach, and it’s easy to decide you don’t fit the mold: too old, too heavy, too stiff, too injured, too new to all of it.

That mold is mostly a picture, and the students who will actually come to your class don’t look like it either. They come in after work, after an injury, after a doctor said “you should try yoga,” and they’re hoping the person at the front understands where they’re starting from.

What’s underneath the question?

Underneath “Who am I to be a yoga teacher?” is the ego asking “Am I good enough?” In yoga philosophy, ego (asmita, the sense of a separate, self-important “I”) is one of the kleshas, the causes of suffering, and it has a habit of putting you in the center of a picture where your students belong. If you imagine teaching and feel dread, look at who’s in that picture: usually it’s you, being judged, rather than the students, being helped.

Craft asks a different question: how can I serve this student? That one has answers you can practice. You can learn how to build a balanced class, how to give a clear cue, and how to offer a variation to the person who needs one, and you get a little better at each of them every time you teach.

Is your life experience a qualification or a disqualifier?

It’s material. Think of everything you’ve lived through as the pantry you’ll cook from as a yoga teacher, and know that the ingredients you’re most worried about are often the ones your students will need most.

• If you came to yoga later in life, you remember what it felt like to walk into a first class without knowing where to put your mat, and you’ll make that easier for the next person.
• If you live with an injury or chronic pain, you already know how to look for a version of a pose that works, which is exactly what many students need from a yoga teacher.
• If your body doesn’t look like the ones in the yoga feed, the students who look like you will see someone at the front of class who could be them.
• If you’ve spent years in another line of work—teaching school, nursing, managing a team, raising kids—you’ve been practicing patience and clear directions the whole time.

In The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook I wrote that needing to work around your own limits in practice makes you a more sympathetic and empathetic teacher, and I still tell prospective trainees exactly that. Your limitations can make you a better yoga teacher for people with similar challenges, and even a day when you sit out a pose and watch is a day of learning (sometimes watching teaches more than doing, which suits anyone with a cranky knee).

What do students actually want from a yoga teacher?

They want to feel better when they leave than when they came in. In more than twenty years of teaching, no student has ever asked me for my Yoga Alliance registry number, and none has asked how far I can fold forward. They want a class that’s balanced, useful, and repeatable, led by someone who’s paying attention to them.

That’s a relief, because it moves the job off your résumé and onto your students’ experience, and their experience depends on skills you can learn: how to put a class together, how to say what you mean, how to see who’s in front of you and adjust.

How do you get from “Who am I?” to “Here’s what I can offer”?

You get there with repetition, the same way a new line cook gets comfortable on a busy night: by learning a reliable recipe and cooking it again and again until your hands know it. Nobody can talk you into relaxing (telling someone to relax usually has the opposite effect), but a clear structure and a lot of practice will get you there at your own pace.

A good teacher training is where the pantry becomes a kitchen. You learn a structure for a balanced class that works for whoever shows up, you cook it for real people while someone experienced watches, and you hear specifically what to keep and what to adjust, so the next class is a little better than the last. Your life experience stays the main ingredient the whole time; the training gives you the methods to serve it.

The question may never vanish completely, and that’s OK! Plenty of experienced yoga teachers still feel a flicker of it before a new class. What changes is that it stops running the show, because you have something more useful to think about: the students who just walked in.

What’s a good first next step if the question is still loud?

Start with what you’d teach before you worry about how. Find Your Teaching Voice is a free short course inside the Zone, my free community for yoga teachers, and its lesson “Find Your Teaching Message” helps you work out what your own life has given you to say. It’s a low-stakes way to open the pantry and see what’s already on the shelves.

If that sparks something, see the dates for the next cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training. The spring cohort meets live on video call February–April 2027, and applications are open through January 31, 2027. If you’d like to talk the question through with me first, you’re welcome to book a free 30-minute call. And for the whole path, from first class to first job, start with how to become a yoga instructor.

Frequently asked questions

Choose in-person yoga teacher training if you learn best surrounded by other bodies, a strong program is within reach, and its schedule fits your life. Choose an online training with a live cohort if you need the training to fit around work and family, you like to rewatch lectures, and you want detailed feedback on your practice teaching. Either format can make you a good yoga teacher, as long as it includes real practice teaching and someone skilled watching you do it.

I’ve worked on both sides. I direct the in-person yoga teacher trainings at Carolina Yoga Company, and I built the online Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training. I’ve been training yoga teachers since 2011, so I know where each format works well and where it falls short, my own included.

Is online yoga teacher training as good as in-person?

It can be, and the format matters less than two things inside it: live interaction with your trainers, and practice teaching with feedback. A well-built online training that has both will prepare you better than an in-person weekend that skips them, and a strong in-person program with both is a wonderful way to learn.

Yoga Alliance treats the two as legitimate options. In a July 19, 2023 announcement, it made distance learning a permanent option for Registered Yoga Schools, and its current RYS standards say schools may offer programs that are 100% in person, 100% distance learning, or a mix of both. Online programs must deliver at least 15% of their hours synchronously, meaning trainers and trainees meeting at the same time, in real time. If registration matters to you, read up on what Yoga Alliance registration actually means before you choose.

What does in-person yoga teacher training do better?

In-person training puts you in a studio with real bodies. You see how a cue lands on many different students at once, you practice hands-on assists on real people with your trainer right beside you, and you pick up the small things, like where to stand so everyone can see you, by doing them in an actual studio.

It also gives you immersion. Leaving home for a weekend or a residential month takes you away from the laundry and the inbox, and being physically together builds a cohort fast. Having to show up in person keeps you accountable, too.

The limits are mostly logistics. You’re choosing among programs within driving distance, or paying for travel and lodging on top of tuition. Schedules are fixed, so a missed weekend can be hard to make up. And weekend-intensive formats can feel like drinking from a fire hose: you hear a complex sequencing lecture once, at 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday, with no rewind button.

What does online yoga teacher training do better?

Online training fits a full life. Lectures, reading, and practice can happen at 6:00 in the morning or after the kids are asleep, which matters for every adult who can’t step away from work and family for a month. (If that’s you, I’ve written about doing yoga teacher training with a job and kids.) You aren’t limited by geography, either, so you can learn from the trainer whose approach fits you best, wherever they live.

You can also rewatch. When a physiology lecture or a sequencing concept doesn’t click the first time, you can play it again, slow it down, or read along, and that’s a real advantage for learning something this detailed.

Practice teaching on video is the advantage people don’t expect. When you record yourself teaching, you get to watch your own class from your students’ point of view, which is humbling and very useful, and your reviewer can pause, rewind, and comment on a specific moment rather than working from memory. In my training, I review each trainee’s practice-teaching videos personally.

Online has its limits, too. A purely self-paced program with no live component can leave you learning in a vacuum, with no cohort and nobody watching you teach. Self-discipline becomes the deciding factor. And online, you can learn to cue an adjustment verbally, but you won’t practice hands-on assists on a body in front of you.

What about hybrid yoga teacher training?

Hybrid programs combine the two, and they come in a few shapes. Some pair online lectures with in-person weekends for practice teaching and assists. Others, like mine, are fully online but pair self-paced lectures with a live cohort that meets on video call every week. Either version tries to give you the flexibility of online learning and the accountability of meeting with people on a schedule, so ask any hybrid program exactly which parts are live, which parts are in person, and how often.

Online vs. in-person yoga teacher training: a side-by-side comparison

How do you decide between online and in-person training?

Start with how you learn and the life you have, then check the program. In-person is likely the better fit if you learn best physically, a program near you looks strong, and its schedule and total cost (travel included) work for you. An online program with a live cohort is likely the better fit if you need flexibility, you want to rewatch, and you’d value close feedback on recorded practice teaching. Self-paced online makes the most sense when you’re supplementing other study and are ready to arrange your own practice teaching.

Whatever the format, ask every program the same questions: How often will I practice teach, and who gives me feedback? How many hours are live? Who is the lead trainer, and do they still teach regular classes? What does a normal week look like? My guide to how to choose an online yoga teacher training goes deeper on evaluating any program, and Is online yoga teacher training worth it? covers the value question.

If online fits, here’s how mine works. The Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training meets live each week for a 90-minute call plus a separate one-hour live practice, about two and a half hours in all, and everything else is self-paced. Your curriculum access begins the day you enroll, and the spring cohort meets live February–April 2027. You can see the dates for the next cohort on the training page or book a free 30-minute call to talk it through. If you’d like a taste of how I teach online first, try Find Your Teaching Voice, a free mini-course in the Zone, my free community.

For the full path beyond this one decision, see my guide to how to become a yoga instructor. Pick the format where you’ll actually do the work, because your future students will feel the practice teaching you put in, wherever you did it.

Frequently asked questions

For most people, the training isn’t the hard part of becoming a yoga instructor. A 200-hour yoga teacher training is built to be finished by people who show up, do the reading, and practice teaching, and the poses you can’t do yet matter far less than you’d think.

The hard parts come in three other places: learning to watch and serve the students in front of you instead of performing for them, finding a teaching voice that sounds like you, and getting through the first months of actually landing classes. I’ve been teaching yoga since 2003 and training yoga teachers since 2011, and all three are skills, which means all three can be learned.

Is yoga teacher training hard to get through?

Usually not, if you can give it the time. Most 200-hour trainings ask you to attend the sessions, keep up with reading and lectures, complete practice teaching, and show that you can plan and lead a basic class, and they’re designed so that people who do that work finish. If you’re worried about the exam side of things, my post Can you fail yoga teacher training? walks through how assessment usually works.

The real demand is time. Two hundred hours spread across a few months means steady weekly effort alongside the rest of your life, so it’s worth asking a program what a normal week looks like. You also don’t need an advanced practice to start; here’s how much yoga experience you need first.

What’s actually hard about becoming a yoga instructor?

Three things, and none of them is a pose. Each one shows up after you’re already standing at the front of class.

Watching your students instead of performing

New yoga teachers spend most of their attention on themselves at first: remembering what comes next, wondering how their voice sounds, demonstrating every pose so nobody gets lost. That’s normal, and it’s also the habit that makes teaching feel hard, because the students in front of you need you looking at them. I know the pull well: early on, I spent hours planning a single class.

A line cook who knows the recipe cold can watch the plate instead of the cookbook, and teaching works the same way. When you have a repeatable class structure and you’ve practiced the sequence in your own body, the plan takes care of itself and your eyes are free for the actual people on the mats. You start to notice the student who needs a block, the one who’s holding their breath, and the one whose blank expression means they’ve turned inward (a good thing, it turns out, and not a review of your teaching).

Finding your teaching voice

Most new yoga teachers borrow phrases from their favorite teachers, and that’s a fine place to start. The harder work is sounding like yourself: cueing clearly, in your own words, at a pace students can follow, and trusting silence when you don’t need to fill it. In The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook I put it this way: “You aren’t being paid by the word.” Leaving space for students to feel a pose is a skill, and it takes practice to get comfortable with it.

This is one of the five skills a 200-hour training often skips, so it’s worth starting early. My free mini-course, Find Your Teaching Voice, lives inside the Zone, my free community, and includes a lesson on finding your teaching message, the thing you most want students to take with them. You can work through it before, during, or after any training.

Getting your first classes

The first months after certification are where many new yoga teachers stall, mostly because studios often want experience and you can’t get experience without classes. Good news: there are on-ramps. Gyms and YMCAs are a good training ground, because they often need yoga teachers and can give you a regular slot to grow into. Subbing, community classes, and workplace classes add reps, too. When you’re ready to talk to a studio, here’s how to approach a studio for your first teaching job in a way that gets you hired.

I jumped into teaching quickly after I certified, and you’re welcome to do the same, because reps are what make the second hard part easier. It also helps to have clear expectations about money: it’s worth knowing what yoga teachers earn before you plan around it. If you’re wondering how you’ll know you’re ready to teach, that post walks through it.

What’s easier than people expect?

Several worries that stop people turn out to be smaller than they look. You don’t need to be flexible or able to do advanced poses; yoga teachers guide students, and your own limitations often make you better at teaching people who share them. You don’t need to memorize every muscle, either. A working grasp of exercise physiology, how bodies adapt and get stronger, helps you sequence more than a list of anatomy terms, and here’s how much anatomy you need to teach well.

Age isn’t the barrier people fear, and if you’re wondering whether you’re too old, you’re probably not. Nerves ease with reps, too, which is one more reason to start teaching soon after you train.

How can you make the hard parts easier?

Practice teaching with real feedback is the biggest help. Teaching friends, family, or fellow trainees and then hearing what a skilled observer saw shortens the learning curve more than anything else I know. Repetition helps almost as much: teaching the same base class for a few weeks, with small changes each week, gives you a polished recipe instead of a first draft every time, and it frees your attention for your students.

It helps to choose a training that builds those two things in. In the Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training, I review each trainee’s practice-teaching videos personally, and the curriculum is curated so you’re not sorting through a pile of material to figure out what matters. I’ve done that decision-making for you, so you can spend your time learning to teach. The spring cohort meets live February–April 2027, with about two and a half hours a week on video call and the rest self-paced. You can see the dates for the next cohort on the training page, or book a free 30-minute call if you’d like to talk it through.

Wherever you train, the full path is laid out in my guide to how to become a yoga instructor. Whichever training you choose, the first skill worth practicing is looking up from the plan to see your students.

Frequently asked questions

Yes, you can take a 200-hour yoga teacher training purely for your own practice, and plenty of people do. Whether it’s the right choice for you comes down to how you feel about the part of the training that’s about teaching other people, because that part is most of it.

I’ve been training yoga teachers since 2011, and “I just want to deepen my practice” comes up in almost every conversation I have with someone considering a training. (Some seasons it feels like the official password.) Below you’ll find what a training gives a practitioner, what else might serve you better, and how to tell which way you’re actually leaning.

Can you do yoga teacher training just for yourself?

Yes. No training asks you to promise you’ll teach, and most 200-hour programs welcome dedicated students who want to understand their practice from the inside. You’ll come out knowing why a class is built the way it is, how breath and movement fit together, and what the poses are for, and that knowledge changes how you practice for good.

Go in with clear eyes about the design, though. A yoga teacher training is built to produce yoga teachers, so much of the curriculum covers cueing, sequencing for bodies that aren’t yours, guiding a group, and practice teaching. If you never plan to lead students, a large share of your hours goes to skills you won’t use directly. Those hours aren’t wasted (explaining something out loud is the fastest way I know to find out whether you understand it), but in a teacher training the teaching is the main course.

What do you get from a 200-hour training if you never teach?

You get a working model of how a balanced practice is built, enough anatomy and physiology to make sense of what your body is doing, and a cohort of people who care about the same questions you do and who will happily spend an evening arguing about hamstrings.

You also get a look behind the curtain. Once you’ve planned a sequence yourself, you start to notice why your favorite yoga teacher puts the hip openers where they do and why class ends the way it does, and your own practice starts to make more sense. That’s a real benefit, and it’s usually what people mean when they say “deepen.” Many trainings also include philosophy and meditation, which some practitioners end up loving most of all.

What are the alternatives to yoga teacher training?

If teaching isn’t on your list, you have good ways to go deeper that cost less time and money and are designed for practitioners rather than future yoga teachers.

A workshop gives you two or three focused hours on one topic you’re curious about, whether that’s backbends, pranayama (breathing practices), or yoga for runners. You can stack a few across a year and build exactly the depth you want, in the order you want it.

An immersion, offered by some studios, covers much of the practice and philosophy content of a training over several weeks without the teaching component. Ask whether practice teaching is included; for you, the answer you want is no.

A regular class with a yoga teacher you trust might be the most underrated option. Practicing weekly with one skilled teacher for a year deepens a practice more than most people expect, because you get to progress on a familiar base instead of starting over every time. Stay after class with your questions, too. Most yoga teachers love them.

A retreat or residential program gives you a weekend or a week away, with practice twice a day and nobody asking you what’s for dinner. I’ve been on the faculty at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health for more than 15 years, and a program at a retreat center like that is a fine way to go deep on a topic without signing up to teach it.

Books count, too. Yoga Off the Mat, which I wrote with Alexandra DeSiato, is about taking what yoga does to your attention on the mat and letting it shape the rest of your life, and you’ll find it on the book’s page.

How do you know if “deepen my practice” really means “I might want to teach”?

Picture yourself leading and notice what happens. For a lot of people, “I want to deepen my practice” is the safe answer, the one nobody will question, standing in for “I think I might want to teach, but saying so out loud feels presumptuous.” If you imagine guiding a group of students through a practice and something lights up, even underneath the nerves, pay attention to that. If you picture it and feel only relief that it isn’t real, you have your answer, and that’s a perfectly good answer.

A few other clues point toward teaching. Maybe you catch yourself watching how your teacher greets the first-timer or handles a late arrival, instead of only following along, or friends ask you to show them a stretch and you enjoy figuring out how to explain it. You might also feel a little disappointed to finish a training and never share any of it with another person.

Many people who sign up “just for me” end up teaching. A training has a way of showing people they can do something they’d assumed was for other people, and once you’ve led a few practice classes, the idea stops feeling presumptuous. You don’t need to decide that today; it’s enough to let the possibility stay on the table. If you’re still on the bigger question, my post Should I become a yoga teacher? walks through five questions to ask first.

When is a full yoga teacher training the right call anyway?

A full training is the right call when you want depth with structure, you have room in your life and budget, and you’re at least curious about the teaching part. It also makes sense if you’d rather do one long, coherent program with a cohort and a mentor than piece together separate workshops, or if you’d like a credential in your pocket in case the curiosity grows. If that last one matters to you, read up on what Yoga Alliance registration actually means before you choose a program.

A 200-hour training runs for months, and tuition is a meaningful investment, so look at what yoga teacher training costs and weigh whether yoga teacher training is worth it for your situation. If the full picture appeals to you, my guide to how to become a yoga instructor lays out the whole path, step by step.

How can you try teaching before you commit?

Start with something free and small. Find Your Teaching Voice is a free mini-course inside the Zone, my free community for yoga teachers and people thinking about becoming one. It includes a lesson called “Find Your Teaching Message,” where you work out what you’d want to offer students if you taught. It’s a low-stakes way to try the teaching side of things, and you’ll learn something about your own practice either way.

If you find you want the whole training, the Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training meets live February–April 2027, with about two and a half hours of live time a week on video call and everything else self-paced. You’ll find tuition and the dates for the next cohort on the training page, and if you’d like to talk it through, you’re welcome to book a free 30-minute call with me. There’s also a second short video on this exact question, Should You Do Yoga Teacher Training If You Just Want to Deepen Your Practice?, if you’d like to hear it from another angle.

Frequently asked questions