My Top 5 Tips for New Yoga Teachers

Happy Lionsgate 8/8! 🦁
Every year around this time I go through a type of ascension process during the Lionsgate Portal that’s celebrated on the 8th of August. The year I gave birth in 2021, I got a bad case of Covid that taught me a lot of things on a molecular level. In 2022 I got certified to teach yoga and taught my very first studio class on 8/8! This year in 2023 I am celebrating 1 year of teaching! I am getting over a weird cold right now too, but I guess for me, that’s a part of the process!

I LOVEE teaching yoga and I love being a yoga teacher, but I didn’t always want to teach yoga! One of the main reasons why I didn’t want to be a yoga teacher was simply because I didn’t want to talk. I fell in love with yoga, but I didn’t know I would fall in love with teaching yoga as my calling. As a teacher, it’s important to find your sankalpa, your inner purpose. My sankalpa is FREEDOM, and through teaching yoga I hope to guide others on how to find FREEDOM in their expression, their mind, and their body.

Here’s some tips for new yoga teachers that I wanna share with ya’ll:

1. Keep Momentum. - I got certified with and started teaching at Corepower Yoga, a corporation that has a high volume of members that come to practice. During my first year of teaching, I’ve probably had 3 days out of the entire year where I had zero students come to my class. With teaching at high volume studio like this, I was able to keep up my teaching momentum to help me quickly get rid of any nerves or fear of public speaking. My suggestion as a new teacher is to teach as many classes as you can to strengthen the muscle memory of teaching yoga. The more time you take in between teaching classes, your teaching muscle can atrophy. The sweet spot for teaching classes in my opinion, is 4 classes a week. That is enough classes to be consistent and have enough room to breathe in between classes. Be aware that teaching too many classes can lead to burn out. While you may love yoga and love teaching it right now, you can quickly and easily begin to loathe teaching if you teach tooo much.

2. Listen to and Find Your Authentic Voice. - I didn’t want to teach yoga because I didn’t want to use my voice. Not realizing that my vishuddha was blocked, teaching yoga helped to open up my expression and my throat chakra! Even if we are not teachers, our voice vibrations are so important. It’s so important to begin tuning your own voice because authenticity can be heard and felt in the voice. You can tell if someone is scared, nervous, confident, irritated, or even afraid by the tone of their voice. As a yoga teacher, your students will attune to your voice. They don’t even have to be highly sensitive to pick up on it, it’s something that just happens. The more you teach (tip number 1, momentum), the more you will start to tune your authentic voice.
   Often times, new yoga teachers will use that “yoga teacher voice” in order to sound authentic. You know what voice I’m talking about! You don’t need to use that voice in order to teach a good class, though it may take a while for you to find your authentic voice. My suggestion is to speak loudly, clearly, and directly. I also suggest finding a teacher that really helps you to feel present in your body and emulate their voice, which leads me to my next tip!

3. Copy your Favorite Teachers! - There was this one artist I knew, when making new music, would refuse to listen to any other music than theirs! When I asked why, they said it was because they didn’t want to be influenced by others’ sound! While it may have sounded brilliant and practical to them, I immediately felt like that was such a limiting belief! We’re all influenced by outside events, experiences, etc. How difficult is must be to create from an island. There’s this book called, “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon that confirmed this for me. Even your biggest inspiration is inspired by someone else, by SOMETHING else. This goes into the importance of having teachers and mentors to guide, direct, and oversee you, as they can help you point out weaknesses and blockages that you cannot see on your own.
   Find a teacher that you LOVE and copy them! The coolest thing about yoga is that no two classes are EVER the same. EVER! You could teach the same yoga sequence everyday for the rest of your life and each class will be different from the next. This is because yoga, as an experience, varies with each breath and each moment. Each time you take or teach a class, your energy will be different from yesterday, your body will be different from yesterday. It’s an amazing phenomenon that I have yet to experience in any other modality. So while you are emulating a teacher that you love, your class will NEVER be identical to theirs because you are not them! They can never be you and you can never be them. Of course, when it comes to emulating any features from a teacher or class of theirs that you may like, it’s always important to practice asteya or Non-Stealing, which is one of the Yamas or virtues of yoga. This can look like simply crediting a teacher that inspires you or letting your teacher know that they inspire you. A great way to practice asteya if you’re not in the position to speak with the teacher that inspires you is to always always always add your own flair to what you’re doing. This is your own authentic energy signature that separates your vibration from others. Everyone has theirs and you know what yours is! Use it, even if you’re teaching in a studio that a certain script or guidelines that you have to abide by, your energetic signature will be felt.

4. Keep up your Daily Practice. - In yoga, your sadhana is your daily spiritual practice. This is an important step you cannot slack on when you make the commitment to yoga, especially when making the commitment to teach yoga. Keeping up your daily practice will allow you fine tune yourself and help you remember why you came to yoga in first place. This also goes back to my first tip of keeping the number of classes you teach to a manageable amount in order for you to make space around your daily practice. I’ve been there where I’ve taught too many classes in a week and was too burnt out to even be in tune with my own personal practice and what yoga is supposed to feel like. Also when it comes to teaching a sequence, you must feel what the sequence feels like in your own body before teaching it to others. This is a part of our responsibility as yoga teachers to keep people energetically, spiritually, and physically safe. A lack of a daily practice can really lead to a disconnection between what you’re teaching and how you want your class to feel. Again, no two classes are ever the same, and that also goes for your personal practice. You could do the same asana everyday in your personal practice, but the experience will always be different. Being in tune with your personal practice will allow you to be able to communicate what your students are supposed to feel. Also keeping up your sadhana or daily spiritual practice can really be a form of self-care that surpasses any other form of reward that you can get from teaching. You feel me?

5. Community. - Once you begin teaching, you want to build up your community of people who support your role as a yoga teacher. This can be other teachers, or your friends who regularly take your classes. Your community can be there for you when need some feedback, or they can be there to just “see you”. Because Corepower Yoga is such a “fast-paced” corporate yoga studio, it was hard for me to feel any connection coming from my students. I often felt like I was doing something wrong. Having friends around really showed me that it’s not me, it’s just the nature of the “corporation”. There’s a certain whiteness in yoga that can be very strong in corporate studios, and it can be really off-putting if you’re a teacher of color like me. Kimberly Ann Johnson confirmed this for me in Episode 110 of her podcast you can listen to here. It can often leave you feeling isolated and lonely if unaddressed. This is why it’s important to find a yoga community that you can relate to, whether that’s in person or online! You can find yoga community by going to other people’s class and studios for personal practice, enrolling in a continuing education workshop or certification, or finding a yoga group you can turn up with! That’s one of the most magical things about yoga is that as a group energy practice, it can be a really magical experience, versus other workouts or modalities that you might do solo like meditation or going to the gym.

Those are all of my tips for new yoga teachers! I enjoyed writing this so I’m going to be spending more time writing some articles about teaching yoga that I feel will be very helpful for the community moving forward.
Thank you and have a great LionsGate 8/8! Celebrate by doing something courageous, especially if you’re not feeling sick or going through it like me! Love you!