Room to Grow as a Yoga Teacher: Thoughts on Maturing

I have been teaching Yoga for a long time now.  My teaching has evolved through many incarnations and expressions over the years, and no doubt, these incarnations have had an influence on others.  I was scrolling through IG recently and ran across a post from a former student of over a decade ago, gently alluding to some advice I gave her then that turned out to be totally bogus, and which it seems, might have played a roll in her uphill climb of finding herself (in a less than fulfilling way).  Though it was not pointed out directly that the advice came from me, the timeframe and the advice itself was spot on for what I was teaching at the time.  

It got me thinking, how do we grow and mature as teachers when our past selves, lives, beliefs are thought to be fixed in time?  Over ten years ago, I was an idealistic student of an idealistic teacher.  Gravitating to the ideas that we create our own reality, and if only we can refine our intentions (Sankalpa) enough, we can transcend our suffering.  Kelly Golden circa 2021 thinks this is TOTAL BULLSHIT, but ten years ago, it was exactly what I needed to cling to in order to buoy myself into responsibility for the life I had chosen.  It wasn’t wrong exactly, though even the teacher that taught it has now fallen off his self-created transcendence into the messy reality of power dynamics and abuse, but it wasn’t an accurate understanding of what it takes to have a mature and stable spiritual life. There was truth to be discovered in this approach, but it was far from the idyllic picture that I was attached to.  But, I anchored to the idea even as I lived it’s failure over and over again.  In doing so, I found that though intention is essential, it is not transcendent.  Intention is a compass arrow of our awareness.  To exist in true intention, we are required to SEE ourselves, our shadows, our immature patterns, and our successes clearly and without embellishment. 

Alas, these lessons were not how I was teaching it at the time. I was convinced that the power of Sankalpa was a way out (or more precisely above) the fray. And I was wrong. I was hopeful, but radically inaccurate. And now, from where I sit years later,  I wonder how to share my discoveries, lessons, and perspective. Does the modern paradigm of Yoga allow space for change, growth, and maturation in its students and teachers? Is there space for our beliefs to evolve and is there acceptance that who we were might not be an accurate representation of who we are now?  Is YOGA perpetuating a paradigm of perfection by expecting everyone to have fixed understanding and to have already gotten it from the start?  Is there space for growth and maturation for both teachers and students?

The Yoga industry gives a lot of lip service to the “journey” rather than the destination. The modern teaching script forgives our shortcomings and encourages celebration of our successes and accolades, but often denies our direct experience in lieu of an ideal end point.  When we find our experience to be different than what our teachers say, we often move directly toward disregard of the teacher rather than mine the lesson from the teaching. Scroll through social media on any given day and see how others are positioning themselves as victims of their teachers, systems, and the world.  Somewhere along the way, we have collectively fallen into cognitive dissonance. We struggle to see that EVERYONE is just learning; trying on their current belief systems, putting them into play, experimenting with them, learning, adapting, shifting, changing--including the students and the teachers who are still on the path of putting their lessons into practice.  Including me, and including you too. 

I’m not sure the issue is the information, rather it seems to be the expectation that the information and the informer who provides it will fix, solve, soothe, correct, control, or otherwise create a fixed and dependable outcome.  In my example of Sankalpa, the issue isn’t that it’s wrong that right intention is needed to create a life you love, the issue is that right intention is not salvation. The practice is not: if I just get it right enough, everything will be perfect and I won’t struggle. Of course that’s not true!  The maturation comes when we realized that disappointment and frustration are part of the path too. And when we welcome it all in, we grow and change. We are shaped by it all, and no information is complete without putting it into practice. God knows, that continues to be my personal path of discovery as I learn to own the information through a wider lens of experience rather than the binary categories of good/bad, right/wrong, success/failure. To realize that my interpretation of what I have been taught is my responsibility, and how I use it is my choice.

One of our collective human struggles is to own our interpretations as our own, rather than the blame others for leading us astray.  Myself included.  It’s an ongoing climb straight up.  I hear, and I interpret through the lens of my own wants, desires and longings and experiences.  I teach, and I do so through the lens of my own wants, desires, longings, and experiences. I struggle to extrapolate truth outside of my personal perspective. I feel disappointed when someone else’s teachings don’t pan out as true for me. I struggle when my experience differs from what I’ve been told. I scrape and claw at tiny glimpses of the perspectives of others, then cringe when I see that my own perspective may be askew. In so many ways, it’s easier to put our innocent trust in the teachings of others, than to do the dirty work of maturing into our own beliefs.

The power dynamics between student and teacher are extremely complex, and made all the more so when it is perceived that the teacher is infallible, wise, or full of answers. My role as a teacher over the years has evolved to strongly stating that I have no answers, trying to be an honest practitioner, and lead by sitting alongside the students that choose to learn with me, all the while being the screen onto which students project their disappointments, criticisms, and failures.  No matter how many times I use my words to say, I am not an expert nor am I perfect, students create expectations of me, and hold my words in as a fixed representation of who I am. And, part of my job is to accept this as true, to learn how not to take it personally, to see the kernels of truth in the criticisms that are hurled my way, and to keep doing my work.  For years I have wondered about how to teach this to others, but I have never found a way to do it.  How do we ALL elevate our levels of self responsibility in our relationships (personal, professional, or otherwise), in a way that EVERYONE is allowed to be human and have space to grow, change and mature? This question is at the heart of the teaching of Adhikara—qualification, and it one to explore rather than answer.

The truth is ten years ago, I was teaching what I wanted to believe.  Now, I teach what I have discovered from my direct experience, and neither one of these approaches is wrong if our students take responsibility to explore information for themselves. If we must wait to teach until that bar of omniscience has been reached, then what is the realistic timeline for qualified teachers? Do we have to be in our 40s, 50s, or even 60s?  Or, could we recognize that we are all responsible for interpreting the teachings of others through our own lens? Then, like me, young teachers can cut their teeth on hope, inspiration, idealism, and mature into a full set of healthy, digested experiences.  If we expect our teachers to be perfect, we will never mature. When we are “harmed” by the imperfections of others, then we remain entangled in a system of salvation where we are not responsible for ourselves, and where we demand that others have the right answers for us.  If we expect our teachers to have all the answers, then the oxygen needed to grow and mature is sucked out of the room. If we demand that everyone refrains from speaking about how they are feeling, hoping, working in any given moment, until all their lessons are learned, then we will have a world absent of any creative juice, and definitely of any maturity.  We learn best by failing, which requires that we risk trying, and we embrace our lessons.  We polish our beliefs through our willingness to put them under constant review, which requires sharing them, experimenting with them, BELIEVING IN THEM until we don’t anymore.  

The context of my student’s call out was one in which she was celebrating her own path to knowing better than the advice she received.  I too celebrate that path of learning to stretch beyond the ideas she was offered, and into the lessons those ideas led her to discover for herself.  It is precisely this path of self growth and discovery that leads to maturity as students and teachers alike.  Inquiry, experimentation, and review IS the essence of Yoga, and where it leads us is toward increasing growth and self responsibility.  Though I am no longer an idealist, I retain the hope that we can all learn to stand upon the lessons we learned from the past and propel ourselves into even greater understanding in the future.  I trust that Yoga gives us all the space to grow and mature into integrity with ourselves and the courage to share that with others.