200 Hours is Not Enough

Over the last decade I have seen a LOT of yoga burst on to the scene. I’ve also seen a big shift in how yoga is presented to the world. Never in my time did I imagine that you could become a fully qualified yoga teacher online. But, that’s a reality now. 

I recently spent 4 weeks of my maternity time taking an online 200hr training. This was something that I wanted to do so that I could understand how it felt to learn to teach yoga this way. While the training was great, it did not embody as much of the full spectrum of yoga as I would like. 

There was no talk of equity, no time to really interact with our peers and teachers outside of set lessons and very little in the way of teaching people how to be respectful, non-harming yoga facilitators. 

In the spirit of transparency, I have a 500 hour teaching qualification. This was taken 7 years ago under the Late Conrad Paul, a direct student of the Sivananda lineage. He was an openly gay man who swam instead of practicing Asana, and he worked at a university hospital teaching yoga to cancer patients. I was hugely privileged to have such a beautiful, wise teacher. Before my teacher training I had practiced yoga for 8 years. 

Coming out of that training, I was a little wet behind the ears, much like we all are. Yet, I was not underprepared to facilitate. I’d been given a solid grounding in physical anatomy (this was a separate, mandatory qualification alongside my teacher training), I understood the ethics of what I was doing, I could draw upon my understanding of subtle energies, I could guide a solid meditation in a non-harmful way, and I could string together some asana. 

I cannot see how this could be the case for a lot of people coming out of an online 200 hour training. It was clear that a lot of the people who wanted to teach, hadn’t really done that much yoga before. 

That’s ok, I get it. Maybe you just want to teach in a gym. Maybe it’s useful to have on your CV. But, if you really want to help people through yoga, and do no harm along the way. It’s going to take a little more discovering. I’d like to help you with that. 

As I return from my maternity leave my work is to make yoga more equitable, accessible and healing for everyone. I am going to start creating some resources that I hope will help new and established yoga teachers to understand all facets of the yoga practice better, and hopefully this will lead to us creating less exclusive classes. 

Yoga is supposed to be a lifelong journey and it would be impossible to cram all of the information that you need into one training, post or workshop. I know that my learning journey with yoga has been going on for 15 years and will continue for much longer than that. 

I hope that the resources I share here will help you to expand your understanding of yoga as a holistic practice and help you to see that even people who can’t access asana, can benefit from the many wonderful practices of yoga.