What I Wish I Knew About Yoga Teacher Training
by Helene Trager Kusman
In Fall 2019, a few months after I had my first baby, I saw an email announcing Spring Yoga Teacher Training. I had wanted to get back into a yoga routine postpartum, but had been struggling with anxiety which made it hard for me to be motivated the way I wanted to. Without giving myself time to turn back, I sent in an application and returned back to the grind of new baby life. It wasn’t until I was officially accepted into Yoga Baum’s 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training that a million doubts and fears started to creep into my mind. What if this was too much to balance with all my other obligations? Would my postpartum body be able to keep up with these likely very fit and experienced yogis? Why would I even do this if I had no plans to necessarily teach yoga?
There is so much I wish I knew then, that would have helped me feel confident and reassured about teacher training. These are some of the doubts and fears I had before teacher training. I was afraid of my inexperience and lack of knowledge preventing me from being the right fit for a teacher training program. Here are some things I wish I knew that would have made me feel better about my doubts and worries.
1. You don’t have to know sanskrit
I was embarrassed that I didn’t know the Sanskrit words for many yoga poses. Sure, I knew that savasana was the final resting pose and chatarunga was a push-up done in a vinyasa, but there was a zero percent chance I knew what I figured most teacher trainees must know. I decided I would just have to learn quickly during training and take a “fake it till you make it” approach, trying to hang in there with what I did know. Then something interesting happened. During training, I discovered that it was non-essential to cue sanskrit names of poses. And in fact, it could even prove to be alienating to only cue or rely heavily on Sanskrit as a teacher. This took the pressure off immensely. I was able to learn the names of most typical yoga poses in Sanskrit during training, but there was no real need to be able to teach an entire class without relying on English descriptions and pose names.
2. You don’t have to know how to do every yoga pose
Another fear I had was what would happen when the teachers and rest of the trainees discovered I couldn’t do many arm balances or inversions, like handstand, on my own. Surely, I thought, I would be incapable of teaching yoga until I could master these challenging poses. I figured it had to be some sort of rite of passage to execute them and just prayed there was some magic conditioning that would occur during the program to help me get there.
Wrong again. It was completely nonessential to be able to do these poses independently. I learned that it could actually help me be a stronger teacher to be working on them right along with my students. After all, most of my students would be working on these poses and want to be guided through using props like the wall and blocks to be successful. I also learned very quickly that directing others on how to enter a pose was even more challenging than doing it myself. This is where my focus and energy went. I let the pressure of being a perfect yogi slip away and directed my attention on how to accurately and succinctly guide others to enter the postures. This was and is the most important skill I’ve had to learn to become a yoga teacher.
3. You don’t have to be very flexible
If you look at my high school yearbook you will see me wearing an embarrassingly short cheerleading skort and bloomers doing near split jumps in the air. As my hand hovered over the keyboard debating pulling the trigger on signing up for yoga teacher training, I wished I could make that flexible younger self reappear or at least have time to have her whip me back into that kind of shape before training would start. I was 4 months postpartum when I applied and my body still felt tight and awkward in places it never had before.
Once again, I just hoped that this training would entail some sort of situation reminiscent of our cheer clinics so I could impress my future students with the type of flexibility that seemed to be required from the yoga photos that showed up on my social media feeds. Wrong again. Demonstrating poses can be important as a yoga teacher, but it is not essential to enter the deepest variation of a pose to be a good teacher. In fact, it can sometimes be unhelpful to have a teacher who can easily pretzel themselves into each pose without understanding how to break down the step by step of easing in.
4. You don’t have to look or feel a certain way
Like I mentioned, I was 4 months postpartum at the time of my application and had really lost a lot of the former upper body strength I had. I was nervous that my chatarungas and attempts at crow pose would be weak and unacceptable for a prospective yoga teacher. During training I learned so much about anatomy and alignment. This helped me activate different muscles and understand not only how to coach my students, but myself into properly working at poses that challenged my strength.
I saw that myself and the other yoga teachers in training had our strengths and weaknesses. There were things the others could do that I couldn’t have done, and also things I could do that others struggled with. Each of us was unique in both our reason for being there, as well as our strengths and challenges. Plus, it was a very non-competitive culture.
If you’re thinking about signing up for teacher training, but questioning if it’s right for you, I hope these hesitations I had can normalize some of your doubts and empower you to make a decision. Know that every teacher training program is different, and this is what I discovered after going through and now helping lead the Yoga Baum 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training.