What I Learned In Yoga Teacher Training

The first yoga class I ever took wasn't in a gym or a studio; it was in front of my parents' TV one afternoon when I was in high school on summer break. Between flipping through MTV and The Food Network, I had landed on a show called Breathing Space Yoga, a televised yoga series recorded in King City, Ont., and hosted by Diane Bruni, a founder of Downward Dog Yoga Centre in Toronto and of the first accredited ashtanga teachers in Canada.

I didn't know any of this at the time, though. I was 16 and bored and thought I'd give the TV class a try. From that first 30-minute sequence—a gentle series of sun salutations—I was hooked. I'd never been one for team sports or high-impact exercise, but the pace and feeling of a flow class spoke directly how I wanted to move: fluidly, as gentle or high-impact as I'd like, depending on the style of yoga or the environment. In years of casually taking classes in studios across the GTA since, I've rarely come out of a yoga class not feeling better than when I first walked in.

Over those years, I'd sometimes toy with the idea of signing up for a teacher training program. Not so much to become a teacher myself, but to get a better understanding of the historical and philosophical roots of this practice I've participated in for so long; to wrap my head around the science of what makes it so effective; and maybe finally master an arm balance or two. Until recently, it always seemed like an impossible time commitment: most programs require taking consecutive weeks off work, and many can be prohibitively expensive.

Last summer, I found a close-to-home studio with a training program I could complete on weekends, with teachers I already enjoyed taking classes with. I signed up immediately. It's been an interesting six months of juggling weekend intensives and evening classes around my day job and home life with two small kids—but it's also been among the most rewarding learning experiences of my life.

Have I learned to set up a chaturanga dandasana properly and tweaked my sun salutation form? Yes, but aside from actual poses (and a whole lot of anatomy memorization!), some of the best lessons so far have been big-picture takeaways. Here are the top four.

Poses are always function over form

Despite hearing different versions of this in classes over the years, it took a training program to help me really get over my hangups about whether my downward dogs or forward folds looked "right"—or if I'm being honest with myself, looked aesthetically pleasing.

This is a bigger issue in the online yoga world generally. You'll find plenty of fitness influencers demonstrating intense poses and crazy sequencing on Instagram or TikTok that prioritize aesthetics or visual complexity over functionally useful movement. The latter may not look as beautiful and may even require props and and modifications to get your body into a pose—but it's the type of exercise you personally are going to benefit from. A viral video doesn't know if you're hypermobile, have a joint injury or are pregnant.

There's also a huge difference between keeping your body in alignment for a pose so that you don't give yourself a repetitive stress injury, and forcing your body into a pose it isn't designed for or isn't ready to do yet (and sometimes injuring yourself in the process). A modification or accommodation to make a pose accessible isn't giving up: it's taking the necessary steps for your body to get what it needs out of any given pose.

Yoga doesn’t have to be expensive

This might sound a little rich coming from someone who's invested time and money in a six-month training program, but it's true.

You can practice yoga in sweatpants and a ratty t-shirt, so long as it's comfortable. A decent yoga mat or set of blocks doesn't have to cost more than $40—and if you'd like something fancier, the options on Facebook Marketplace are endless (you'll often even find brand-new ones still in their packaging). Other props, such as straps and weights, can be replaced with belts and a heavy can of tomatoes.

There are thousands of teachers that offer free recorded classes on YouTube (Yoga with Adrienne is an excellent go-to), and if you'd like to practice among other people, there are options outside of paying for a studio membership (though I do get a lot of mileage out of mine). If you already have a gym membership, chances are they offer some kind of weekly yoga class; community centres also often offer them on the cheap. Most yoga studios themselves will offer donation-based karma classes that can be attended on a drop-in basis. And here in Toronto, Right2Yoga, an initiative I really admire, sets community organizations up with funded yoga classes.

It doesn’t always have to be a workout

One week into my training—and almost 20 years after the very first time I tried a sun salutation—I took my first yoga nidra class, a practice that involves lying on the floor covered in a blanket and being led through 60 minutes of guided meditation. I lay still the whole time, I didn't move once, and I came out of the hour completely mentally refreshed in a way physical exertion gets close at but can't quite replicate.

There are long lines of thought both in yogic philosophy and nervous system science that explain why this form of meditation is so effective (it's a lot to get into here, but look up the five koshas and how they relate to the nervous system), but a big takeaway for me was understanding that I can get as much out of this practice by being still as I do by moving. In other words: I don't always have to work so hard, and perhaps my inclination to do so both on the mat and in other aspects of life is something that could use a little more introspection.

Yoga culture is in crisis—and it’s up to both teachers and students to make it better

Between culturally appropriative practices in the West, whitewashed studios that erase yoga's historical context, and a series of sexual abuse revelations about some pretty influential global leaders in the practice over the past decade, yogic culture isn't always a breath of fresh air. This was pretty apparent even in my first few years as a baby student.

Once I got out of practicing in front of a television and into studio classes in Toronto in the late 2000s and 2010s, I'd often find myself in spaces where I was the only brown person in the room. Other times, there were teachers, usually male, who were way too creative with making hands-on adjustments to people's bodies (consent cards were not yet a thing). More than once I'd attended classes where teachers would make weird jokes in what they thought was an Indian accent, or passive-aggressive comments about what a particular student's body could or could not do.

I've often thought about the conventions and assumptions that make it possible for a whole room of people to sit comfortably through a class when something like this happens. What does a culture like this tell us who yoga is for, and who it is not? More than anything else, I've learned in my time in this program is that yoga is for everybody (and quite literally, every body)—and that it's important to honour the practice's roots as a spiritual and ethical discipline focused on meditation and breath work that predates the idea of India itself without assuming a throwaway "namaste" at the end of a class is going to to the job.