Being a yoga teacher is easily misunderstood.

From the outside there’s often this expectation of having it all figured out, being always sweet and compassionate, perfect in every way.

Understanding the mysteries of the universe and dispensing profound wisdom at every turn. Unicorns, rainbows and pots of gold!

Well, that’s a bunch of BS.

As long as we’re human we’re gonna have to deal with human imperfections. In ourselves and everyone else.

And we better accept it or else we risk making a great mess of ourselves and life at large.

Even after a couple of decades of involvement in various spiritual disciplines I am still making mistakes every day. ‘Losing’ my zen at times, hurting people I love by lack of awareness or sheer negligence.

‘Mis-takes’ is a good word to look at though. To take sth for what it’s not, forgetting the nature of life, of human relations and ‘others’, of ourselves even – until we realize the error and hopefully rectify it, which we call Growth.

If teaching yoga appeals to you, be warned it’s no quick fix to all your problems, it’s no red pill to pop over the course of a month that takes care of it all.

Such a pill would be lovely, right? Who wouldn’t sign up for a course, a teaching, a teacher that can believably guarantee to set you perfectly straight once and for all?

A bit of bitter medicine in exchange for eternal bliss and happiness forever after!

Or not even bitterness! A month of amazing secrets of the saints & sages, fun and games, scrumptious food, lovely community, beautiful nature, exercise for body, mind and soul and poof, there’s the modern master of consciousness, ready to enlighten the world.

Well, it takes more than that as common sense will tell anyone. The mind however will be all so happy to believe teachers that tell us otherwise.

Years of practice, lifetimes perhaps will be needed for most of us to address the humongous pile of conditioning, belief systems, impurities and outright wishful thinking that we carry around with us.

Should we thus despair and go back to a life of mindless debauchery and self gratification? Get pizza at least?

Every journey starts with the first step and without it there’s no journey. After a few steps we come to the impression of understanding, a dangerous stage as the mind can easily take it as conclusive.

‘Knowing something’ is one of the major obstacles in itself, having merely replaced one set of beliefs with another.

The great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi compared spiritual practice with the act of removing a thorn from your skin with another thorn. The task is not done by replacing one with the other. We are meant to remove the first by using the second one temporarily, just as long and in the way to get the first out without putting the second one in for good.

Getting a big head about spiritual experiences is a fantastic way to do a few extra laps before going to the next level of knowing less and less to be certain.

So being a yoga teacher is a constant work in progress. Progress is a touchy concept in itself actually. How do we measure it exactly?

Someone said the ability to reconcile paradoxes is a sign of spiritual progress. Like the notion that we’re already perfect while experiencing major struggle and upheaval perhaps. Or the idea that all is One while feeling utterly disconnected and alone.

If we can’t reconcile anything yet, does that mean to be a total failure?

Asking these questions is indeed what makes a spiritual person – to acknowledge that they are there, that they are important, that sitting with ourselves is necessary.

Doing some kind of practice, allowing our awareness to be cultivated and expanded, becoming more natural, the new normal, actually makes these questions a lot more manageable until the disappear naturally.

And for mastery, as someone else pointed out long ago, teaching is the best approach.Make no mistake, not everyone is gonna be famous and fabulous in any profession, teaching yoga being no exception.

But the attempt to explain it to others, to practice to the point of fully understanding viscerally and then sharing it for the benefit of all does have a magically powerful effect on our own process, too.

Someone told you you’ll never amount to anything? What do they know? Have they found perfect happiness with their approach to life, the universe and everything?

Teaching yoga is no guarantee for riches, fame or enlightenment. But it leads to understanding ourselves better, becoming greater versions of ourselves along the way and enjoying life more and more deeply, even when it gets hard.

Amma tells us “Progress is being made when you can retain evenness of mind in the face of praise and shame, honor and dishonor.”. I will leave you all with that one.

Om Namah Shivaya