We often hear about what we can learn from practicing yoga, but how often do we hear about what there is to learn from teaching yoga? After just three years of teaching yoga I feel like I’ve learned enough to fill hundreds of pages. Instead, I am writing this blog. If you have ever considered teaching yoga, I highly recommend it. Why? Because these are just a few of the many, many things you will learn from teaching yoga:
Teaching yoga teaches you how to read bodies
I remember after my yoga teacher training I got in the habit of following people down the street. Not in a creepy way. I just liked to mimic their gait and see what I could learn about them from the way they walk. I know it sounds weird, but when you spend hours every day working with other people’s bodies you start to learn what these bodies are trying to tell us. There is so much hidden wisdom in the body and when we open our eyes to the complexity of the body we discover a whole world of knowledge we were previously blind to. When you teach yoga you study anatomy and learn a lot about the inner workings of the body. Slowly, the body starts to reveal its secrets to you and soon you start to see things everyone’s bodies are trying to say, including your own.
Helping people with their practice can deepen your own
Part of teaching yoga is helping people dive into their practice and discover their relationship with yoga. When you do this, you have an opportunity to deepen your own practice along the way. You’ve probably heard the old saying that the best way to learn something backwards and forwards is to be able to teach it. The same goes for yoga. The more you talk to people about what yoga can do for them, discuss the powerful subtle energy involved in yoga, and dive into the philosophy and history of yoga, the better you learn these things for yourself. Teaching yoga is one of the best ways to understand yoga for all it is and can be.
When you are teaching yoga, you learn how complex yoga really is
When most of us think of yoga we think of a few asanas and connecting to our bodies. Teaching yoga taught me that yoga is so, so, so much more than just moving your body. Sometimes I would sit for hours in a lively conversation with one of my students and I would think to myself, “This. This is yoga.” Yoga literally means union and this union can show up in so many different shapes and forms. Teaching yoga helps you discover and unpack all the different things yoga can mean to you.
There is so much to discover inside the yoga teacher community
It wasn’t until I became a yoga teacher that people started talking about crystal healing and spirit guides around me. We all have to find our own limits and decide which ideas to keep and which to contemplate then set aside, but teaching yoga allows us to find a lot more of these ideas. The yoga teacher community can be a wonderful community full of lively individuals with a vast array of world views. The longer you spend in this community, the more you get to learn about things that you may have never known about if you weren’t teaching yoga.
Teaching yoga has taught me more than I ever expected
All in all, I am beyond grateful that I opted to do my yoga teacher training. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I definitely was not expecting to learn this much. One of the most powerful experiences I have had teaching yoga was when I led a yoga retreat, but every time I step into a class I leave with a new lesson. I have been teaching for a few years and plan to keep teaching for years to come, but not so much because I love the process of teaching yoga, but because I love all the things I learn when teaching yoga.
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