As people begin considering a yoga teacher training, I often notice the mind (manas) becoming very busy. It starts comparing. Assessing. Judging. Creating stories. Some of the most common stories sound something like this….
Myth #1: My practice isn’t good enough
“My practice isn’t good enough.”
Which can quickly become:
“I’m not flexible enough.” “I’m not strong enough.” “I can’t do handstands.” “I can’t bind.” “Everyone else will be more advanced than me.”
Over the years, I’ve come to realise that our understanding of what makes a “good” yoga practitioner can sometimes become distorted.
Many people imagine the intermediate or advanced yogi to be the person at the front of the room effortlessly moving through arm balances, deep backbends, and complex binds.
Yet I have come to see it very differently.
To me, the intermediate yogi may well be the person in the middle of the room who is the only one unable to access a particular posture and remains completely at ease with that reality.
Not because they have given up. Not because they don’t care.
But because they are no longer defining themselves by what their body can or cannot do on a particular day.
They are willing to meet themselves honestly. They are willing to listen. They are willing to learn. They are willing to respond.
And if your intention is to teach one day, it is worth asking yourself another question:
Who are your future students likely to learn the most from?
The practitioner to whom everything has come easily? Or the practitioner who has found themselves in the mud of discomfort time and time again, who has met frustration, self-doubt, limitation, comparison, and challenge, and through those experiences learned how to navigate a way forward?
Often it is through our challenges, rather than our achievements, that we develop the qualities that allow us to truly support others.
Compassion. Patience. Humility. Understanding. Not because we have studied them, but because we have lived them.
A teacher who has struggled, adapted, questioned, and grown often has a depth that cannot be learned from a textbook. They don’t just know the map, they’ve walked the terrain.
Yoga, in many ways, is the practice of consciously placing ourselves in relationship with discomfort and becoming curious about what arises there.
For one person, discomfort may be attempting a challenging posture.
For another, it may be sitting in stillness.
For someone with a strong physical practice, the invitation may be to soften, surrender, and rest.
For someone else, it may be to step forward, take up space, and be seen.
The posture itself is rarely the point.
The response is. The training is. The awareness is.
As we learn to witness our habitual reactions with curiosity rather than judgement, something begins to soften. Gradually we become less controlled by our conditioning and more available to life as it unfolds.
In the yogic traditions, this increasing freedom is often referred to as moksha or mukti, not freedom because everything is perfect, but freedom because we are no longer so bound by our automatic patterns of resistance, attachment, comparison, and fear.
This is one of the reasons the Embodied Awareness Teacher Training is not built around physical achievement.
Of course we will study asana. We will explore alignment, sequencing, cueing, anatomy, and intelligent movement. But far more important to me is your willingness to inquire.
To become curious. To develop a relationship with yourself that is honest, compassionate, and deeply aware.
You do not need the perfect practice to begin.
You simply need to be willing to meet the practice that is already here.
Myth #2: I’m not good enough
So if you’ve ever considered a yoga teacher training, or have even considered stepping into something outside of your comfort zone there’s a good chance you’ve encountered this thought at some point:
“I’m not good enough.”
This might arrive in different forms:
“I don’t know enough.”
“I’m not spiritual enough.”
“I don’t have enough experience.”
“Who am I to teach?”
I know this voice well because it accompanied me for many years
I remember being around three years into my yoga studies, having completed my second teacher training. By that point, I’d spent countless hours practising, studying, sitting with teachers, attending workshops, reading books, and immersing myself in the teachings.
Yet despite all of that, I often felt like an imposter. I felt like a fraud.
I kept waiting for the day when I would finally feel “ready.”
Back then, enlightenment was often spoken about as something distant, something to strive for, something to attain if only you worked hard enough. “Love and light” was everywhere, and I found myself looking at teachers who appeared endlessly calm, serene, and somehow untouched by the messiness of being human. I would look at them and think “I’m never going to make the grade.”
The truth is, I was trying to wear a pair of shoes that didn’t fit. I was measuring myself against an idea of what I thought a yoga teacher was or should be rather than discovering what it truly meant to be myself.
Years later, when I began studying Tantra with Paul Muller-Ortega, something began to shift. For the first time, I encountered teachings that didn’t ask me to transcend my humanity, but to include it.
Teachings that didn’t suggest awakening lived somewhere beyond ordinary life, but invited me to recognise the sacredness already present within it.
The moments of joy.
The moments of grief.
The moments of confusion.
The moments of peace.
The moments when I felt expansive.
The moments when I felt contracted.
All of it.
Not as evidence that I was failing, but as part of the path itself. Looking back now, I can see that the feeling of not being good enough wasn’t actually asking me to become more. It was asking me to stop measuring. To stop comparing. To stop trying to fit into someone else’s version of what a yoga teacher should be.
One of the beautiful things about non-dual Tantra is that it begins from a radically different place. Not from deficiency. Not from the assumption that something is missing, but from the possibility that what you are seeking may already be here, waiting to be recognised. This doesn’t mean we stop learning, far from it, the path of study, practice, and inquiry is lifelong.
But there is a profound difference between learning from a place of lack and learning from a place of curiosity. One is driven by the belief that we must fix ourselves before we are worthy, the other is inspired by the wonder of discovering what is already possible.
So if the thought “I’m not good enough” has been visiting you lately, perhaps hold it gently.
Perhaps listen to what sits beneath it and perhaps consider the possibility that you don’t need to become someone else before beginning.
You simply need to listen to whether there is a genuine calling to do this work and then the willingness to take the next step.
Myth #3: I have to be spiritual to teach yoga
It’s such an interesting question and perhaps underneath it is another question.
“Who do I have to become in order to be a yoga teacher?”
Do I need to believe certain things? Chant certain words? Understand Hinduism? Meditate every morning? Have a guru? Call myself spiritual?
My answer is no.
Instead what if we were to become curious about everything we already are?
Your Training will meet you where you are
When I began immersing myself more deeply in yoga, people would sometimes ask me “So are you Hindu now?” Or “Are you Buddhist?” And I remember thinking
“No. But do I have to be?”
We live in a world where religious identity has, at times, become a source of enormous division and suffering. Personally, rather than feeling a need to put myself firmly on one side, I love discovering and honouring the beauty and wisdom that can be found within many different religions and spiritual traditions. One of the things I loved when studying Bhakti yoga with Nikki Slade was learning another way of understanding the deities of the yogic traditions.
The ancient Rishis were exploring something enormous. ‘How do we help human beings recognise the vast, multifaceted nature of consciousness?’
One way was through these beautiful deities forms and stories that allow us to contemplate particular qualities of consciousness. So perhaps I am seeking courage, strength and fearlessness, and I chant the name of Durga.
Perhaps I am contemplating abundance through Lakshmi, creativity, wisdom and expression through Saraswati. Rather than feeling that I am worshipping something separate from myself, I can experience the practice as an invitation to awaken and honour those possibilities within consciousness and within myself.
For me, that is incredibly beautiful and something I feel passionate about sharing.
Rather than teaching spirituality, I see my role as yoga teacher to abolish the anti chaos, disconnect and separation that is so rife in our world right now. Years ago, I was sharing yoga in a small village called Kartong in The Gambia. I had taken my harmonium with me and would chant mantra at the beginning and end of the sessions. I explained that, for me, this was an act of reverence, honouring the Rishis, sages, my teachers and all of the teachers who had come before them.
But word soon travelled around the village, apparently, I was trying to convert everybody to Hinduism! There was suspicion about what I was doing and, understandably, people were protective of their beliefs and community.
So rather than trying to convince anybody that they had misunderstood me, I decided to meet them where they were. I arranged some sessions at the local school. We practised yoga postures and we chanted, Only this time, instead of chanting the name Shiva, I used the name Allah.
Aarti Allah, Aarti Allah,
Jaya Jaya Aarti Allah.
We sang in reverence to Allah, to the Divine understood through the language that was already held within their hearts and they sang with their whole hearts.
I also taught them the meaning I wanted to convey when using the word Namaste, an acknowledgement of the sacredness, light and humanity within another.
That evening, the children went home and told their parents about their experience, by the following morning, everything had changed. People who had been deeply suspicious of me were waving & calling my name across the street. People greeted me with Namaste. There was warmth, laughter and connection.
What a turnaround and what a lesson. The practice didn’t need everybody to use my language. It needed me to find a language through which we could meet.
So do you need to be spiritual?
No. You don’t need to decide that you’re spiritual. You don’t need to adopt another religion.. And you certainly don’t need to manufacture beliefs because you think they’re part of the yoga-teacher uniform.
What I believe matters far more is your willingness to immerse yourself in practice.
Explore asana, dynamic, strong, slow, soft.
Explore somatic movement and other practices that move your body.
Explore breathwork that enlivens you and breathwork that settles and reassures you.
Meditate. Guided or unguided. Esoteric or grounded in science.
Explore sound, gong, crystal bowls, kirtan, tabla drones, drumming, or the piece of music that somehow allows your busy brain to become still.
Read ancient wisdom.
Read neuroscience.
Explore nutrition, philosophy, anatomy, nature, ritual, silence, movement.
And notice; what am I being called towards? What feels true for me right now? Not because somebody has told you that this is what a yoga teacher should do. But because something in you is genuinely curious.
You don’t have to decide who you are. Perhaps this is the part I most want trainee teachers to understand.
You do not need to make a conscious decision about whether you are “spiritual”
Keep practising, keep experiencing, keep questioning, keep feeling. Things will reveal themselves in their own time and what feels true for you today may not feel true ten years from now or even next Tuesday that’s okay, everything changes.
We don’t have to rush to turn our experiences into fixed beliefs or another identity to defend and when it comes to teaching, share from lived experience.
Share what you have felt, share what you have explored, share what fascinates you, share what has genuinely changed something in you, share with wholehearted honesty about what lights you up, because when you speak from that place of knowing, rather than trying to sound like somebody’s idea of a yoga teacher something happens. Your authenticity gives somebody else permission to explore their own and perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things we can offer as teachers.
Not “Come and believe what I believe.”
But
“Come and explore. See what you discover for yourself.”
Stay tuned for more myth-busting about Yoga Teacher Training!
Feel like you are ready to take the next step? Explore the next 200h YTT Course and request a prospectus online.