“Everyone is a Yoga Teacher Nowadays.”

Recently I was lamenting to a friend how much the yoga scene has changed in Hawaii since I left for New York City in 2010 and returned a few years ago.

My friend responded, “Yeah, everyone is a yoga teacher nowadays and no one is a student.”

That’s not exactly what I meant. I was thinking about how beloved studios like Open Space Yoga (my former teaching home), Yoga Hawaii, Purple Yoga — bastions of traditional practice — are all gone, replaced by more corporate, exercise-focused studios. But my friend’s response was like a punch to my Manipura chakra. She was right.

I’m not sure when the shift occurred, when the ultimate goal in the yoga community was to get your RYT and proclaim yourself a teacher rather than be a practitioner first.

In part I blame the proliferation of yoga teacher training programs. I blame Yoga Alliance and the 200-hour/300-hour training model, quite honestly. It has turned the path of yoga into collecting hours, rather than wisdom. It has shifted the focus from personal evolution to spirituality as product. The yoga world has become a bit like a multi-level marketing scheme, really. It goes something like this: Man discovers yoga. Man loves yoga and wants to teach yoga. Man takes teacher training program. Man discovers there is no money in teaching group yoga classes. Man sees the real money is in offering teacher trainings. Man starts his own teacher training program. The cycle continues.

This wasn’t exactly how yoga was practiced traditionally. There was no Yoga Alliance. Gurus didn’t have websites. They didn’t have studios that relied on selling training programs (a lot of times really crappy ones) to less-than-ready students in order to keep the doors open and the lights on. In fact, the real gurus were hard to find. If you were a spiritual seeker, you had to search far and wide for a master who was further along the path than you. And if you found one, you had to hope he was willing to guide you and wouldn’t turn you away for not having the right constitutional makeup for yoga. You clung close to your guru for many years, receiving prescribed practices when your teacher deemed you ready for them. Yoga wasn’t synonymous with asana. Asana was asana. Yoga was meditation, particularly japa mantra.

I stopped teaching more than a decade ago. Largely for non-yoga related reasons, like my own struggles with pain from Ankylosing Spondylitis. But there was also a part of me that felt disappointed teaching public classes. I witnessed how the teachers offering hardcore, sweaty, Rajasic physical classes were the most popular. Meanwhile, few were interested in those of us trying to move students toward Sattwa and steadiness through mindful asana and a strong emphasis on pranayama and meditation. I guess you could say I was a bit jaded. And that was and still is my issue to work out internally, no one else’s.

If I’m being honest, I was a little too eager in my earlier days to teach. Maybe what I’m noticing in others — the premature rush to be a teacher — is a mirror held to my own hastiness. I wish I could go back to 2007-2008 and say, slow down, you’re of no use to anyone if the teachings have yet to fully flower in you, if you haven’t yet worked out your own psychological and spiritual shortcomings. Germinate. Sprout. Bathe in the nectar first. Then share from that reservoir of wisdom. Don’t don the mantle of teacher because it strokes your ego.

So here I am. I don’t teach public classes anymore. Probably never will again. Instead, my vow, my work is to be a student first. I am leaning into my primary teacher Yogarupa Rod Stryker and his guidance. I am taking my seat each day on the meditation cushion and doing my unglamorous, silent work. I’m practicing vichara and clearing out the psychological cobwebs, the decades of dysfunctional samskaras that still have a tendency to disrupt my life. I’m in no rush to share what I’m learning — I’m leaving it to others with more skill than I have to illuminate the teachings of the tradition. Instead, I am committed to being an excellent practitioner first and foremost, growing along the path toward living a more fulfilled and joyful life.

Like the practitioners of old, I’ll be hidden away in this meditation cave of mine, dwelling in the light of the heart. Should a lost seeker knock at the door and ask for guidance, I’m here as a mitra — a friend on the path — but not a teacher. That’s a title I am not worthy of.