The Gap Nobody Talks About in Yoga Teacher Training

Let me tell you about the nine weeks I spent in a hot room in Los Angeles.

Back in 2011, I was training to become a Bikram yoga teacher. The training was just as you might imagine: nine weeks of intense heat, long days, and one main focus. We had to memorise the dialogue, every word, every line, with the right tone and timing, and the specific brand and authority that Bikram Choudhury had built his empire on.

Bikram himself, for what it’s worth, didn’t particularly like me. I wasn’t one of his devotees. I was there to learn to teach, and the culture around me was one of total absorption. In his method, in the man himself, in the idea that what was being handed to us was something almost sacred. A lot of people had drunk the Kool-Aid! Everyone around me thought the dialogue was brilliant; Clever, precise, almost scientific in the way it guided the body.

I really hated it.

I hated the training, and I hated the dialogue, and I spent nine weeks in that room feeling like I was failing at something I hadn’t even wanted to succeed at in the way they expected. But I want to be honest about what it gave me, because I think that honesty matters here.

Standing on a platform in front of a room full of people, saying words I hadn’t written, failing in front of them over and over, and realising that I was still standing afterwards. That taught me something about being a teacher that I’ve never forgotten.

It just didn’t teach me how to see.

The Bikram dialogue contains instructions that, once you understand how the body actually works, do not make sense and are difficult to say out loud without feeling this internal sense of wrongness.

“Lock the knee, your right knee is locked, no knee. Push your hips forward, everything push forward, continuously keep pushing, more and more and more, push harder.”  

These aren’t metaphors or rough guidelines. Teachers had to say these exact words in every class, to everyone, no matter what those bodies actually needed.

I practised Bikram daily for almost five years before I went to training. I qualified, I taught classes, and worked in a Bikram-affiliated studio. And for a while, the dialogue was just part of my teaching. It was just part of the job.

Then I began to study anatomy.

And things started to change.

Many students came to class every day. Sometimes twice a day, and one man I knew was doing that for months on end. He was passionate about the practice, just like many Bikram students, fully committed, almost devotional. He didn’t want modifications. He didn’t want help. He trusted the practice and did what the dialogue and the teachers instructed.

The dialogue said, Push your hips forward. He pushed. Class after class, with the commitment of someone who believed that this was exactly what his body needed, because that was what he had been told.

His injury didn’t happen suddenly or in an obvious way. It developed over months of classes, one repetition at a time. The cue said to push, so he pushed, not out of carelessness, but because he was giving the kind of focused, faithful attention the practice wanted.

He herniated a disc. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t work. He had surgery.

Eventually, I left the affiliated studio. But I returned to teaching Bikram at another studio, not officially affiliated with Bikram but run by someone who treated the dialogue as gospel. Bikram’s method had taken on a life of its own, separate from the man, which shows just how deeply the system had become part of the yoga world.

By this point, I had been practising Ashtanga seriously, learning Mysore style, studying anatomy with a rigour I hadn’t brought to anything before. I knew what the dialogue was doing in bodies because I had the language to understand it now, and because I had seen it firsthand.

I was told clearly that if I didn’t teach the exact dialogue verbatim, I wouldn’t have a job.

I couldn’t say the dialogue anymore. I was done.

So I left, unpaid for fourteen classes. That’s not a small thing when you’re building a teaching practice and every class matters. But I couldn’t stay and still be true to what I knew.

At the time, it felt like another failure in a long line of failures. The wrong studio, the wrong practice, the wrong fit, again. I kept making choices that didn’t work out the way I had hoped, kept finding myself in rooms that asked me to be something I wasn’t, kept starting over.

It took me a long time to realise that none of it was failure in the way I once thought.

I am not writing this to relitigate Bikram Choudhury, whose story has been told more fully and more publicly than anything I could add here. The Netflix documentary exists. The court cases exist. The testimony of the people he harmed exists.

I’m writing this because there’s something beneath the Bikram story that I don’t think the yoga world has fully faced yet.

The misconduct was visible, eventually. It was named, prosecuted, and documented.

But the deeper assumption underneath it, that the right words are the same thing as real understanding, has been much harder to examine. And in quieter, less extreme forms, it is still sitting inside a great deal of yoga teacher training today.

There’s this idea that there’s a perfect language for the body. If you find the right words and say them with enough authority, the body in front of you will respond as expected. That teaching is primarily a matter of learning what to say.

Bikram took this idea to an extreme, a dialogue so rigid and “sacred” that questioning it could cost you your job. But the belief that language is the main tool for teaching, and that the right words will work for everyone, isn’t unique to Bikram. It shows up in many yoga teacher trainings.

I’ve been in trainings where nervous system regulation was promised as a guaranteed result of certain breathing techniques, as if everyone’s body would react the same way. I’ve heard alignment cues given with a confidence that doesn’t match what we know about anatomy. I’ve seen teachers learn a framework and then apply it to every student, no matter what those students’ bodies were actually showing.

None of these teachers were doing anything wrong. Most were just following what they’d been taught.

And that’s exactly the problem.

When I began building Deeside Yoga Institute, I kept coming back to a question I couldn’t quite shake from inside.

What if teacher training started with observation instead of language?

Instead of asking, ‘What do you say to a student in butterfly pose?’ ask, ‘What do you see?’ What is the body in front of you actually doing, and does it match what you expected? And if it doesn’t, which is often the case, since bodies aren’t all the same, what do you do then?

These aren’t complicated questions, but most trainings don’t ask them.

Asking these questions means being willing to deal with uncertainty, something the dialogue model was designed to avoid.

Looking back, the nine weeks in Los Angeles, the studios that didn’t work out, the fourteen unpaid classes, and all those years of feeling like I was failing and starting over, they were building something. Not despite the difficulty, but because of it. Every time I was asked to compromise what I knew, every time I started again, I was slowly gaining clarity about the kind of teacher I wanted to be and the kind of training I wanted to offer.

That clarity didn’t come from always getting things right.

It came from getting things wrong, and staying anyway, and trying again.

That’s what I try to create at Deeside Yoga Institute, not teachers who just memorise the right cues, but teachers who know how to see. Teachers who offer choices instead of just corrections, who help students become independent, and who take real responsibility for what they bring into the room. Teachers who are strong enough to question what they’ve learned, to handle uncertainty, to fail in front of others, and to keep going.

Good teaching isn’t about having the perfect words.

It is built on the ability to see clearly. To stay close to what is actually happening rather than what you were told to expect. To take responsibility for the language you use because language lands in real bodies, and real bodies are not abstract.

The gap between what we’re taught to say and what we actually see isn’t the fault of individual teachers. It’s a feature of a training culture that has valued language over observation for a long time.

Naming it is the beginning of something different.

It’s taken me a long time, and more wrong turns than I can count, to be able to say that with real faith.

It’s not about living perfectly or always getting it right. It’s about being human, making mistakes, falling down, and trying again and again, because we believe in teaching.

We believe in yoga.