After twenty years of providing yoga teacher training at premium-priced 200, 300, or 500-hour increments, the yoga profession is beginning to reckon with the unintended consequences of relying so heavily on this deeply flawed economic instrument. The initial boom that heralded the expansion of yoga teacher certification has subsided. If we can muster enough courage, we might escape the entrenchment that undermines our purpose.

Yoga has long since become also a business but yoga teachers are still catching up. Probably because those inclined to dedicate their lives to the subtle art of self-inquiry rarely ever get into it with money in mind. Only later, having fallen into a profession without a strategy, does knowing your numbers become imperative. If there is to be yoga in business then we will need to overcome the emotional blocks and shuck industry pressures.

Over the last twenty-five years, my yoga practice has served different purposes. But if I were to boil down the primary role it has come to play in my adult life then it most certainly is a means of lessening my pain. To many, that means that I have become a “restorative” or “gentle” practitioner. However, the notion that doing poses correctly is the key to unlocking yoga’s pain-relieving boon often becomes the obstacle to a more subtle process.

I suppose it’s a natural impulse to want to feel relevant, to feel that the efforts I make are worthwhile and that something I produce will outlive this fleeting body. This last year I poured a lot of myself into a weekly podcast not just because I find it a fulfilling process of learning but out of a genuine hope that others might also benefit from listening. I have attempted to ride a delicate line between self-inquiry and promotion.

The charismatic CEO of the Yoga Alliance, David Lipsius, hired to overhaul the failed industry standards for yoga teacher training just over a year ago, has departed his position right at the very moment his master plan is set to be implemented. Lipsius’ unexpected farewell aside, the proverbial writing has surreptitiously appeared on the wall: The organization is planning to assert new power, but whose interests are being served is not clear.

I’ve had a particularly hard time bringing myself to write. That’s unusual. Two other articles on various topics have already been penned but both feel so entirely inadequate to the moment that I can’t bring myself to publish either. Looking for insights into humanity through an examination of what is happening in the yoga industry has its limitations, and my usual sort of musings seem a trifling contribution given the larger shifts taking place.

Having grown up in the eighties, I have no memories of fresh produce at our dinner table, much less anything organic. Often, my whole family sat around watching tv with individual fold-out trays in front of us, eating Chun King frozen Chinese hors d’oeuvres that were heated in a microwave oven and served in the plastic container we bought them in. Back then, convenience and economy were valued over nutrition….

Nothing exemplifies the false narratives perpetuated by the yoga industrial complex more than a recent Yoga Journal headline that read: “How to Make $5 Classes Sustainable.” These stories, often well-intentioned, are the product of outdated modes of thinking that turn earnest people into unwitting hypocrites. Challenging the status quo by returning to an earlier stage in the evolution of yoga transmission might be the best way forward.

Generally speaking, when someone sets out to learn a new skill there is a natural human impulse to want to get it right. Being able to do a yoga pose in a certain way often becomes an extrapolated question of safety. Doing it right means safety. Doing it wrong means injury. Unfortunately, anyone who has engaged in a deep inquiry of yoga knows that looking for rights and wrongs to follow when it comes to practice is not a unhelpful context.

There is a convenient irony to the way the yoga-related industry effectively exploits the weaknesses in people that yoga purports to address. As teachers come clean with themselves on what they are actually doing, and make choices truer to their evolving understanding of yoga, they often find their class sizes begin to wane. Fostering the beneficial purpose of yoga teachings in our society will require us to better navigate trade-offs...

We’ve all heard about the amazing things that yoga can do for us, but try explaining exactly what it is and how it works and you quickly find yourself on shaky ground. There is an innate something at the heart of the matter that simply cannot be measured, only felt. As unsatisfying as this may be, the highly subjective perception of our own experience is the only real basis for any understanding, and the very thing that makes yoga so vital.