Flutterby™! : Why Yoga can be irritating 2011-08-25 23:55:18.26131+00

Why Yoga can be irritating

2011-08-25 23:55:18.26131+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

For Eric: Why Yoga Can Be So Irritating (Although You Should Go Anyway!):

In addition to being somewhat crazy—a shrink once diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, which I thought was a bit of a stretch until I realized that, like everyone else, he just wanted to have sex with me—I am a yoga teacher. I don’t know what your idea of a yoga teacher is, but should you, recoiling in horror as you read along here, find yourself asking, "But how does someone like this become a yoga teacher?"—the short answer is that I gave a man with a beard and his hot wife $3,200 dollars. ...

Hat tip to Tom.

Substitute "distributor" for "teacher" and you've got your average run-of-the-mill MLM operation.

Asha and I had a discussion about "teacher trainings" again last night. The current trend for studios to cover their budgets (class sizes have been small since the yoga boom of the early oughts...) is to offer "teacher training" programs.

There's an organization set up to "register" teachers, The Yoga Alliance. Like so many certification/licensure organizations, The Yoga Alliance charges people to be a Registered Yoga Teacher® at different levels corresponding to some level of training (200 hour or 500 hour). The Yoga Alliance also provides a syllabus for each level of training. And, of course, most of the training has to be provided by a Registered Yoga Teacher® and the studio has to be a Registered Yoga School® and have a Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher® (e-RYT) on staff. Obviously, the registration fees go up with each higher level attained.

Because there is now enough competition among studios offering the training, they are having to lower prices to keep up the head count. In order to lower prices, they have to hire instructors at lower and lower rates.

Asha, who has a Doctorate in Physical Therapy as well as over 20 years experience teaching yoga in many forms, regularly gets calls about teaching the anatomy portion of the curriculum. She is very good that teaching anatomy and yoga. She holds regular workshops that are well attended. But she also has a minimum expectation for how much she gets paid to teach. She recently offered to come down on her minimum for a local yoga studio because they initially offered less than half her normal rate. She offered to teach at the middle point between what the studio was offering and what she normally required. The studio director balked.

The future yoga teachers in that teacher training will receive an anatomy education commensurate with someone who charges a third what Asha does. Chance are, that education will be less than a third as good.

And chances are the teacher they hire for the anatomy portion will be a Registered Yoga Teacher®. Which will look better for the students applying to be Registered Yoga Teachers®.

Asha is not a Registered Yoga Teacher®. She does teach the anatomy portion of a teacher training held by a yoga teacher who was one of the first Westerners to practice with Patabhi Jois in Mysore, India. People come from all over the world to the studio for this teacher training. Neither this widely respected teacher nor his studio are "Registered®" and the teacher training does not meet the requirements of The Yoga Alliance at any level. Oh, and Asha gets paid her expected rate for teaching there.

But there are plenty of other reasons people find yoga irritating. Mostly it starts with having to be still and feel your body. Very irritating indeed!