The Pulse

• Any institution that sets out to find a universal standard for teaching yoga will always be accused of trying to regulate and define yoga as a whole.
• But if we think of the skills that we need to teach as a kind of data, a different way forward starts to become clear.
• It turns out we don’t have to standardize our training courses to the lowest common denominator to improve standards.

‍

Back in 2018, one of the largest yoga teachers’ organizations in the world – Yoga Alliance – published a ‘Standards and Practices Review’, and the most vocal dissent I have ever seen from yoga teachers erupted across America and beyond (Wildcroft 2024). Two years before, the British Wheel of Yoga provoked a similar controversy when they tried to help establish a UK-wide ‘National Occupational Standard’ for yoga teachers (YogaAllianceUK 2016).

Despite the fact that in most jurisdictions, the status of ‘yoga teacher’ is not legally protected, licensed or sanctioned in any meaningful way, attempts to ‘improve’ the teaching of yoga through regulation have a long history, and an equally long history of dissent. 

Attempts to regulate yoga teaching by official bodies are often linked to the use of yoga as an educational intervention or adjunct therapy. As interest in both of these uses has grown over recent decades, so the ethics and efficacy of yoga teaching have come under growing scrutiny. In mid-20^th Century Britain for example, the national Iyengar Yoga organization adapted its teacher training curriculum for London educational authorities, who funded adult education classes in yoga (Newcombe 2019). And when Richard Miller first developed his version of yoga nidra for use with veterans in the US, he called it i-Rest to make it more palatable to military authorities (Miller and Schoomaker 2015).

State institutions look to yoga teacher organizations to affirm the quality of the yoga classes that they are providing. Meanwhile, potential yoga students and teacher trainees seek to navigate a bewildering range of yoga classes and courses. Training providers work hard to get our courses accredited by this or that bureaucratic organization, hoping that this will assure students of our legitimacy. And yet students themselves have little idea whether the organisations themselves are reputable.

Besides this, few yoga teachers have any confidence in existing organizations to properly accredit their trainings. A friend of mine recently bemoaned the hundreds of hours and many pages of documentation required to achieve accreditation by one UK yoga teachers’ association, while acknowledging that – beyond the paperwork – no-one actually knew what she was teaching, or how well her trainees were doing.

And so a third push for regulation comes from yoga teachers ourselves, as we seek group solidarity in a precarious industry that seems to have no boundaries, and in recognition of our exacting and sometimes lonely devotion to our practice. We hunger to have serious conversations about the past, the present and the future of the practice with like-minded people who are invested in yoga as we are.

But our shared desire for recognizable markers of authenticity and authority often sits side by side with a fear of competition, and a distrust of any governing body at all.

So how can we turn this around?

What if the issue isn’t with trying to regulate yoga? What if our problem lies in the assumption that to do so, we need to standardize it?

Standardization makes all kinds of data management easy. If every one of your students stands in a row attempting the perfect platonic trikonasana, you can look down the line and easily see if someone is – quite literally – out of line. 

In fact, nearly two decades ago, when I did my own teacher training, that is exactly how we were taught to lead a group yoga class. I’m embarrassed to say how many years it took us to question the ‘one-size-fits-all’ method of teaching yoga, and today, hopefully we all know that yoga bodies come in all sizes, shapes and abilities. 

Teaching to the individual is, arguably, harder, but much more effective. 

Yoga teaching bureaucracies didn’t set out to reduce us all to the lowest common denominator either, but mostly they are run by people who aren’t natural data managers. Let’s be honest, very few of us have the kind of minds that understand both meditation and network analysis. So current organizations try and get their members to agree on a common standard – the skills and knowledge that all yoga teachers should have. And the results annoy pretty much everyone, as Yoga Alliance and the British Wheel of Yoga found out.

I’d argue that this dissent is natural. Reducing our yoga teaching to the lowest common denominator of one-size-fits-all brings obvious harm, but arguably the same is true of yoga teacher training. Not all yoga teachers, or yoga schools and styles, are the same. The skills and experience needed by a teacher of hot vinyasa flow, and a teacher of adaptive yoga for hospital patients, or even the philosophy teacher on a yoga teachers’ retreat, have some overlap, but that overlapping area of expertise isn’t enough to make any one of them a good teacher alone. 

Specialist skills and knowledge are, arguably, vital to almost any style or context for teaching yoga. 

Personally, the thought of teaching an upbeat vinyasa class these days just makes me tired – but I want the teachers that do teach them to do it really well. I want yoga nidra teachers to be confident in their understanding of trance states. I want hot yoga teachers to know the signs of heat exhaustion. I want philosophy teachers to know some basic Sanskrit, and I want them to have read widely.

And yet, when it comes to accrediting our trainings, we make the same mistake all over again – we try to agree on a single common standard for what a yoga teacher should know, and know how to do. One standard fits all, and the only difference between us is how many hours of training we have done.

To do otherwise, surely, would make our accreditation systems unwieldy to administer?

Maybe not.

Any institution that sets out to find a universal standard for teaching yoga will always be accused of trying to regulate and define yoga as a whole – its practice, its industry, its cultures, histories and communities. But if we think of standards as a different kind of data, a different way forward starts to become clear. 

Teaching specific practices in specific contexts needs specific competencies. Competencies are shared by some, but not all specialisms. Groups of competencies combine to form an overall picture of what a specific teacher or teacher trainer is able to teach, and in which context. Some basic skills will be common to all, but they form only the simplest foundation of what it means to be a yoga teacher or teacher-trainer. 

A good data management system can do all of this, and evolve with its membership. And a good data management system can make all of this transparent and clear – to other yoga teachers, to potential students and trainees, and to the state organizations that seek to fund and employ us.

Standards really aren’t the same thing as standardization. And when we start to recognize that, we can start to be truly valued for the unique skills and knowledge we bring to this diverse and evolving practice.

‍

REFERENCES

• Miller, Richard, and Eric Schoomaker. 2015. The iRest program for healing PTSD : a proven-effective approach to using Yoga nidra meditation and deep relaxation techniques to overcome trauma. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.
• Newcombe, Suzanne. 2019. Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis: Equinox.
• Wildcroft, Theodora. 2024. "‘The Yoga Police Are Real’: Recent Reforms in the Institutionalization of Yoga Teaching."  Religions of South Asia 18 (1-2):215-238.
• YogaAllianceUK. 2016. "Our VIEW – National Occupational Standards for Yoga." Yoga Alliance Professionals, accessed 28/11/2016. https://yogaalliance.co.uk/2016/10/28/our-view-national-occupational-standards-for-yoga/.

Image by Freepik