Two-hundred hours seems like a lot, especially when you are smack dab in the middle of a yoga teacher training program.

This can be melt down time for many trainees as they face the reality that the more you learn about yoga, the more you realize you can never learn it all.

Mr. Iyengar reminded us of how deep and wide yoga is when he said, “Yoga is an ocean.” The ocean is used as analogy for patience in Mahayana Buddhism’s Path of the Bodhisattva.

Bodhi means awake and Sattva means existence. So, a Bodhisattva is a person who lives an awakened life with the aspiration to help others awaken, too, no matter how long it takes, even more than 200 hours!

This is also one way to think about being a good yoga teacher; to understand that when we are teaching, that is our practice. When we are on the mat, we are engaged in asana practice. But when we are in front of a group of yoga students on their mats, then our practice is that of teaching.

Our job is to pay attention to our students and they become our dots of awareness. They keep us awake and then we cycle that sense of presence back to them.

Yoga class becomes a feedback loop of shared wakefulness. As the teacher, whole-hearted enthusiasm can spur us to share everything we know all at once, but the ocean of patience will help us see how and when to unfold our instructions, moment by moment.

This practice of teaching yoga is a challenging and valuable one. So, naturally, we need more than 200 hours to really learn how to become a confident yoga teacher, full of compassion and clear intention. With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to share some of what I’ve learned over 30 years of teaching.

I’ve created a few videos offering Teaching Tips for Yoga Teachers. This video, “Don’t Teach What You Know, Teach What They Don’t Know!” is the number one tip for new yoga teachers.

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