The Death of Yoga?

One of our teachers sent me this link to an article in The Elephant Journal and asked me for my thoughts: COVID 19 Didn't Kill the Yoga Industry: It's Been Slowly Dying for Years.

Here are the points the article makes: 1. Yoga as fitness turned yoga into just another workout. 2. Drop-in classes killed yoga by allowing students to attend without commitment to studying yoga or being part of a community. 3. Fancy pants. Yoga is often described as a multi-billion dollars a year business, but yoga stuff rather than yoga instruction is where the money is going. 4. The teacher training puppy mill, on which studios rely for income, churns out lots of unqualified yoga teachers every year.

I began practicing yoga over 50 years ago, but I didn't take classes until 1990. Reason?  Yoga classes were hard to find. It wasn't until I moved to Louisville and met Maja Trigg, founder of Yoga East, that I began taking yoga classes.  Back then, class met once a week and you could only enroll for a series of 8 classes.  All the other days of the week, you were expected to maintain your home practice.  Class was not intended to be a "workout". It was yoga instruction. It was intended to give us finer points of practice, individual attention where we needed it, and to answer our questions. 

Maja told us that in a series of 8 classes, she would have all students up in Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) by the sixth class. I asked our Yoga East teachers how often they are even able to teach Sarvangasana in a class. Answer: rarely.  Why?  Students attend class so sporadically that's it's hard to teach a technically difficult asana like Sarvangasana. When students drop in and out of classes, it prevents everyone from making progress.  Students, regardless of ability, often stay stuck at the level of the least experienced student. This is a problem, but this is why we have different levels of classes. Perhaps we need to refine the class levels and establish  requirements for attending levels 2 and 3. 

Classes used to be longer.  Maja's classes were 90 minutes back then. Classes have gotten shorter and shorter. One of our teachers told us that after the shutdown when her classes resumed, the management of the fitness facility where she was teaching shortened the classes to 45 minutes.  Even a 75 minute class does not allow enough time for teaching pranayama, meditation or an adequate relaxation at the end.

The yoga pants problem, as I see it:  Studies show that when women invest their money, their investments pay off better than men's investments. Unfortunately women's investments are 40% that of men.  I would like to see women take the money they spend on clothes and invest it instead.  Why spend $200 on a pair of yoga pants at a company which doesn't care anything about women? Take that $200 and invest it instead.  

The teacher training mill:  After Maja retired and moved away, she phoned us to tell us that we should begin training teachers. We were reluctant to do that, thinking that we were not experienced enough.  However, students began asking for training.  When a student asks about teacher training, we understand it to be a desire by the student to take the next step in their practice.  In the general yoga classes, we don't teach the philosophy and history of yoga, nor can we give advanced instruction.  Teacher training is our opportunity to give interested students a deeper dive into yoga.

Initially, we took the notes we had made in our training with Maja, and we did a training using our notes starting in 1995.  Our first training was a month long.  By 1999, our teacher training was over 600 hours long.  Since then, we have trained over 240 teachers at various levels.  We did a 40 hour gentle yoga training in 2009 to train students who each had been attending classes at Yoga East regularly for at least five years to teach yoga as volunteers for community non-profit organizations.  We have given chair yoga training, MS Yoga trainings, and 200, 300 and 500 hour courses.  We always tell our students that a teacher training course does not turn you into a yoga teacher.  The way to become a yoga teacher is by being a dedicated yoga student and by maintaining a relationship with an experienced teacher as a mentor.  

Teacher training is the beginning point for a new yoga teacher, who has to follow up the training by getting out into the community to teach as many classes as possible. This is the only way to become an excellent teacher. 

Comments are welcome.