“When I started teaching, my self-doubt seemed to grow exponentially overnight. Not because there was more of it, but because I thought doing yoga meant self-doubt was supposed to disappear.”
About a week into being a yoga teacher, I had a new sensation. It happened whenever I stood in front of the room in an Anusara studio and had a passel of faces turned toward me like hungry baby birds. It has been more or less constant ever since then.
“I am so full of shit," was the thought.
Self-doubt is human. It's deeply uncomfortable. It's an in-the-moment sensation of inadequacy and insecurity. Human beings will do lots of strange things when we feel insecure. We'll go to bizarre levels of self-delusion, denial, and performance in order to hide it.
We fake it. We say shit we can't back up. We use exoticism or the sacred or the mystical to feel legitimate. We pose. We self-deprecate ourselves out of boundaries or erect such rigid ones of fakeness (yoga teacher armor, says Tori) that actual vulnerability is kept at bay. I think this is true of artists, and educators, and intimate relationships as well as yoga teaching.
Tori brilliantly discusses praxis - don't confuse that with yoga practice - as something vitally missing from ytts and yoga spaces and our own development. Praxis is a thing she carried over from the best practices of her former life as a social worker, forgot about when she started teaching yoga, and then reclaimed. She talks about the verging of teaching into manipulation, the pressures and frauds of gurudom, the cliff of “Authenticity”. As well as the old but still deeply troubling issues of spiritual bypassing, cultural appropriation, and market forces.
“Transparency doesn't require that we tell people everything about ourselves, just that we don't hide behind our yoga teacher armor or a fake persona. It is a way of protecting everyone involved from manipulation because it makes us clarify and account for ourselves as teachers.”
Wisdom isn't bought, Tori points out: it's earned. As in, we have to actually do a heck of a lot more personal practice, and have some boundaries and understanding around the difference between our practice (inner work) and professionalization or what we do in front of a room full of others, social media, and on and on.
As I've been saying, ad nauseam and in all sorts of different contexts: at some point our own practices have to get real. We have to, anyway, we if want to offer anything real to yoga students. We have to go into our own shit. I think we have to ask some seriously difficult questions about why we practice, why we teach, and who we are.
I don't always feel like I'm full of shit. In fact I generally feel confident, at ease, and like my teaching is the bulwark of my integrity, not an erosion of it.
But in certain contexts, many of them so ‘essential’ to the yoga world it's hard to avoid them, it's instantaneous and predicable (and helpful. I trust the warning signal, now.)
As always, this conversation is open to anybody (these issues are not unique to yoga teaching, just exacerbated. And yoga students who have no desire to teach need conversations about ethical teaching, the long twisted road of practice, the query of praxis, too).
