What no one tells you about life as a yoga teacher

There are many things teachers don’t tell you about the side effects of teaching yoga: the sudden and alarming accumulation of yoga mats in gradations of thickness, a sneaking suspicion – against your better judgment – that crystals might just bring you good health, and the realisation that you now find panpipes tolerable. But what caught me by surprise the most was the simple fact that it's incredibly difficult just to get into a studio to teach in the first place.

Roughly speaking, there are 1,000,000 yoga teachers in London alone and only 100,000 studios (don't quote me on those statistics). As a result, there simply aren’t enough prime time teaching spots in top paying studios to go around, and most of the good ones have minimum experience requirements that count you out of the game for several years (cue ‘massaging’ your CV and breaking your first yoga ethic, ‘satya’ – Sanskrit for honesty).

At the start – and this proved to be Stage One of my new yoga-dependent teaching life – I travelled to poorly paid studios at opposite ends of London, just to get clients and afford the rent/travel/daily organic matcha latte to keep me alive. Within weeks I was exhausted and scratching my enlightened head as to why I ever thought this was a good idea. Bang went my yogi ethic of ‘ahimsa’, meaning causing no harm, in this case to myself.

Like many teachers, I also set up and ran my own classes. Turning back the clock to the 1980s, I discovered there are still such things as ‘church halls’ and that you can still rent them. I then discovered that it is quite hard to get people to come to church halls, because so few people believe they still exist.

Having reached yoga burn-out within weeks I realised the self-class stuff was a bit uphill, and the running around London was a bit much. So, Stage Two, I dropped a few classes, and replaced them with a fairly decently paid slot at a gym.

This is not an environment anyone trained for in IndiaThailandPeckhamland. There we had silence in which to gong singing bowls and chant opening invocations. Here I was surrounded by deafening beats from the DJ on the gym floor and students with a freeform interpretation of start and finish times, who seemed to flow in and out of class on a whim. However, as far as ‘getting experience’ goes, once you’ve figured out how to teach a built beefcake who can’t lift his arms above his pecs to do a down dog, you can teach anybody.

Around this time I also became a ‘Karma Yogi’, a scheme through which you give a few hours of your life each week to cleaning mats in exchange for free yoga, thus learning how to clean mats. This is good news if you want to develop a relationship with a studio, bad news if you don’t like tea tree oil.

It took me a while – picking up a lot of cover teaching, a number of gyms and an inconceivable number of tea tree scented mats – but eventually I had broken my way into the inner sanctum, to the shiny bubble that is Yoga Land. I had regular classes and they paid me fairly well. This was Stage Three, when it really gets real.

Yoga Land is a shiny, bendy, but sometimes narrow place. On the one hand it is full of passionate people doing what they love, on the other, it is full of passionate people doing only what they love. If you do, teach or practise anything for that much of your day, every day, the breadth and depth of your world can easily shrink. I found it took a shockingly short time for the most pressing of my concerns to become whether to square the hips in warrior 1, and whether goji berries have too high a sugar content to be in my breakfast smoothie.

After several baffling months of being firmly sealed inside my yoga bubble, I realised I had to widen my horizon. This was Stage Four: reintegration. You have to connect with the outside world, talk, read or experience something other than yoga from time to time, otherwise you become the person everyone avoids at a party (if I still went to parties, which I don’t, because I’d have to wear something other than yoga pants, which are now the only things I own).

Suddenly I realised you don’t even have to leave the yoga studio to do this – I had my students. Diverse, interesting not-100pc-yoga students, many of whom had starkly different lives, careers and opinions to my own, which is exactly what I needed to challenge me. In yoga and outside of it.

And so we come to the slightly gooey centre of my yoga life. Connecting with and being constantly challenged by the people who sit their ass-ana on the mats in my class. Now, don’t get me wrong: if a yoga teacher suggests I “connect” with my neighbours at the start of class when I’m practicing, I feel the deep urge to poke out my own eyes. But yoga is about connection. Connection to the body and mind, and to other people and their ideas, especially those that encourage you to re-examine your own.

So if you can get through the burn-out stage (using your “tapas”, your discipline), if you can have the patience (your “santosha”) to build yourself and your teaching up, if you can embrace ideas that challenge your own (“swadhyaya”, self study), and be ready to let go of things you were taught, or things you decided were “true” in the face of new evidence or new ideas (“ishvara pranidhana”, surrender), then not only have  you gained back the ethics you thought had dropped off along the way, but you’ve become a yogi, and hopefully a better human being.

Greed, Sex, Intention: living like a yogi in the 21st century by Hannah Whittingham and Marcus Veda is available from Amazon