The proliferation of 200-hour yoga teacher trainings may be good for business, but is it keeping the practice safe and true to tradition?
In 2015, Mandy Unanski Enright decided this was the year she’d become a yoga teacher. The practice had helped the nutritionist and fitness instructor maintain peace of mind for years, and more recently it had helped her recover from ACL surgery. She asked the yoga teachers at her local studio on the New Jersey Shore where to go for teacher training. They all recommended a well-known NYC studio.
Enright read the studio’s 200-hour yoga teacher training (YTT) curriculum and talked to graduates and some one on staff. She felt confident in the recommendations and that having a high-profile teacher training on her résumé would help her stand out among the thousands of other YTT grads looking for work. (A 200-hour YTT is often the baseline requirement for teaching jobs at studios and gyms.) So she plunked down $4,000 and showed up for her first day, ready to learn how to teach yoga. But things didn’t go according to plan.
“It was an amazing retreat experience, with hours and hours of practice, but the ‘teacher training’ part was a big, expensive joke,” says Enright. “We learned two specific sequences and were expected to emulate the teacher’s voice, down to his inflection. We learned very little about anatomy and adjustments, and even less about what it means to be a teacher.” When her 200 hours were complete, Enright says she had no idea how to hold a safe space for students or cue asana outside of the two sequences she’d learned. She was terrified of adjusting students for fear of making them uncomfortable. So she decided not to teach.
Enright is one of 100,000-plus yogis worldwide investing an average of $3,000 each in 200-hour YTTs a year, according to 2016 estimates from Andrew Tanner, a spokesperson for Yoga Alliance (YA)—the yoga community’s primary advocacy organization and yoga school and teacher registry, as well as the creator of the most commonly used 200-hour YTT standards. While some students go into training simply to deepen their own practice, many expect to teach upon graduation. Trainee yoga teachers sometimes reach the end of their 200 hours training without feeling like they’ve cultivated the skills to develop and lead classes, read bodies, and help students instead of confusing, disappointing, or, even worse, injuring them.
Yoga is a complex practice with thousands of years of history and the ability to transform lives. Yet many of today’s YTT programs suggest that after just 200 hours of training— the equivalent of 10 to 12 weekends—you’ll be able to transmit this ancient wisdom to a roomful of strangers suffering from any number of diverse issues, including knee pain, trauma, and depression, some unable to touch their toes while others twist like pretzels, all with varying levels of experience on the mat. For instance, a search on marketing material from YA-registered 200-hour YTT programs turned up promises like graduates will learn pose modifications that are “safe and effective for every body,” will learn how to “heal ourselves, our students, and the culture at large,” and will be able to “register with Yoga Alliance and teach anywhere in the world,” with “no further training required.”
Broad declarations like these, along with the recent proliferation of YTT programs, have fueled a growing concern among teachers with decades of experience that yoga is losing its integrity. So how did 200 hours become the widely adhered-to standard for what qualifies someone to teach yoga? And is it enough?
Yoga Teacher Training: From 0 to 200
Most master teachers in the West—yogis with 30-plus years experience you’d seek out for advanced training, such as Richard Freeman, Mary Taylor, Gary Kraftsow, and Patricia Walden—became teachers the old-fashioned way: by studying for years with a mentor or guru. They didn’t keep a timesheet or checklist of anatomy training hours. Nor did they abandon a topic like philosophy after fulfilling the requisite hours of study. Rather, many devoted themselves to the practice month after month, absorbing all they could before their teachers deemed them ready to take over a class. “You had to really want to learn,” says Taylor, who was introduced to yoga 35 years ago and practiced daily for years before her teacher, K. Pattabhi Jois, said she was ready to teach. She believes the old way allowed enough time to experience the ups and equally important downs of yoga. “You used to have time to mature in the practice and the opportunity to cultivate compassion through the process,” says Taylor.
This generation of teachers witnessed the start of the fitness craze in the ‘80s, followed by yoga’s ascendance in the West in the ‘90s. More physical practices from the Ashtanga vinyasa tradition began to pop up in classes at gyms in major US cities, along with YTTs that graduated teachers from weekend programs. Around that same time, yoga as an alternative health care modality was gaining traction.
Dean Ornish, MD—a student of Swami Satchidananda and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco—released a peer-reviewed study showing heart disease could be reversed through diet, meditation, group support, aerobic exercise, and yoga. His work caught the attention of hospitals, and a few started implementing his yoga programs. All of this created the perfect storm: skyrocketing demand for teachers, and the ability to become one in just days.
Longtime teachers and practitioners began to worry: What if gyms, hospitals, insurance companies, or government entities tried to impose their own, misinformed teacher standards on this ancient tradition? “We wanted to be the ones who came up with the standards,” says Leslie Kaminoff, founder of the Breathing Project, and a student of the Sivananda lineage and T.K.V. Desikachar. Kaminoff was at the table when discussions about standards started bubbling to the surface in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s at Unity in Yoga, a nonprofit whose primary mission was to organize yoga conferences. “We had an intense desire to make yoga all-inclusive and put standards in place that wouldn’t prefer one style over another,” says Kaminoff.
By 1998, that conversation had resurfaced, and about a dozen old-school yogis from various lineages came together to discuss it, calling themselves the “Ad Hoc Yoga Alliance.” They delivered a presentation on yoga teacher standards to a receptive crowd at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park, Colorado. Shortly thereafter, Unity in Yoga decided to hand over its nonprofit status to the Ad Hoc Yoga Alliance, which changed its name to Yoga Alliance. After months of deliberating, negotiating, and compromising, in 1999 YA members reached consensus on the minimum amount of time it takes a would-be teacher to keep students safe: 200 hours, based, in part, on month-long residency programs that had existed at ashrams for decades. Those 200 hours were earmarked for various aspects of study and haven’t changed much since: 100 hours of training, techniques, and practice; 20 (now 25) hours of teaching methodology; 20 hours of anatomy and physiology; 20 (now 30) hours of yoga philosophy, lifestyle, and ethics; a 10-hour practicum; and 30 (now 15) additional hours spread across the above categories. “The parameters seemed broad and flexible enough that everyone could say, ‘OK,’ even if no one could say, ‘Yes, this is the way I want it done,’” says Nayaswami Gyandev McCord, director of Ananda Yoga and an original Ad Hoc member who still sits on YA’s board of directors.
Under the new standards and the leadership of Swami Nirmalananda Saraswati, the founder of Svaroopa Yoga, YA started its official registry of yoga schools and teachers. It required schools seeking registration to submit paperwork showing they met the requirements, and to pay a $200 annual fee; students seeking registered-teacher status had to show a certificate of graduation and pay around $55 (now there is an application fee for both, too).
Today, there are more than 5,500 YA-registered yoga schools and more than 60,000 YA-registered yoga teachers. “The 200-hour standard essentially created an entire industry,” says YA’s Tanner. YTT programs generally aren’t subject to government oversight—a fact that’s become a point of contention both within and outside the yoga community. Take Sandy Kline, a yoga teacher in Denver, who was alarmed by advanced yoga trainings taught by instructors she believes are unqualified. In late 2014, she reported more than 80 yoga schools to the Colorado Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS) for not being approved to operate by the state. This division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education had been mandated by law to regulate all private occupational training schools, including yoga schools, since 1981. But out of dozens of YTT schools in the state, only 13 had applied and paid a $1,750 licensing fee.
“When it comes to yoga-teaching programs, there are a lot of well-intentioned people who don’t always do the best job,” says Kline. She argues that YA standards have no teeth; they aren’t enough to keep practitioners safe. But as Tanner points out, YA has never claimed to be a licensing, accreditation, certification, or regulatory body (although many schools claim to be certified or accredited by Yoga Alliance as a marketing hook). Rather, YA’s mission all along has been “to promote and support the integrity and diversity of the teaching of yoga,” says Tanner. “Yoga is about relationships; we don’t want to get between teachers and students. And there are too many different styles. How do you compare Kundalini to vinyasa?
From: Yoga Journal