On a bright Monday morning at New York Yoga, 14 students in sweatpants and t-shirts sit on technicolored yoga mats, waiting for Michael Gilbert, a 25-year yoga veteran, to begin their weekly vinyasa class. After a few minutes of chanting "ohm," he instructs students in surya-namaskar -- the time-honored practice of sun salutation that leads the body through a whole range of motions.
Similar scenes replay daily in thousands of studios across the country. Over the past decade, yoga practitioners and schools have mushroomed; endorsed by celebrities and athletes, it's being taught in churches and gyms and even over the Internet. In 2008 it drew 16 million practitioners, according to Yoga Journal and Harris Interactive. Last year it became a $6 billion industry, but standards regulating the industry are minimal or non-existent.
In 2009 New York State's Department of Education, flirted with the licensing idea. It sent a letter to yoga studios, asking them to suspend their teacher training programs unless they were licensed, which required a certificate of occupancy and a curriculum review. The licensing idea sparked a huge outcry from the yoga community.
Lea Kraemer, a seasoned teacher who owns Prana Mandir studio on 43rd Street at Fifth Avenue, was outraged. "Their licensing defined yoga as a vocational or technical school, which it's not. It's something for your mind and totality," she says. "But the greater issue is, does New York State know what makes a qualified yoga school?"
Most yogis agree with Kraemer's definition. But as in vocational schools, aren't yoga teacher training programs instilling skills that eventually lead to a career?
In March 2010, after a year's ardent opposition to licensing, the yogis won. Governor Paterson signed a bill exempting New York State yoga studios from licensing requirements. Yogis across the country rejoiced.
Yoga has been around for 5,000 years, its mastery requiring many years of training. Swami Ramananda, president of Integral Yoga Institute in the West Village, believes that a proper yoga practice involves living in harmony with one's true nature.
But not all practitioners see things like Kraemer and Ramananda. Most pursue yoga for athletic, recreational and social purposes. In health clubs, yoga is taught with what Ramananda calls a "just do it" American mentality.
Why shouldn't there be certification to rein in these teachers? After all, physical therapists, personal trainers and Pilates instructors must be certified. Practitioners of Alexander technique, for instance, undergo 1,600 hours of training over a three-year period to become certified. Unless yoga prescribes similar standards, the practice can be dangerous.
In 2007 about 6,000 yoga-related injuries were treated in doctor's offices, clinics and emergency rooms, costing about $108 million, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. Common yoga injuries include repetitive strain and over-stretching of necks, shoulders, spines, legs and knees.
Sara Bertin, one of yoga's casualties, was seriously incapacitated after she took a class in January at the Health and Racquet club in Union Square. "At the beginning of the class, while warming up, I did a twist to the left side. Suddenly I felt unbearable pain in my back, shooting down to my right leg," she says. Her doctor, after an M.R.I., found that her pain was being caused by a herniated disc pushing on a nerve. Her treatment included a heavy dose of steroids. She has so far avoided surgery.
Such injuries are becoming commonplace. One might argue that people should know how to set their own limits. That's not simple, however, especially in a class of 20 or 30, where individual attention is often lacking.
Realizing these issues, the yoga community in 1999 created its own self-policing non-profit organization:Yoga Alliance. It registers teacher training studios that have completed 200 or 500 training hours. This month, Yoga Alliance's website listed about 25,000 registered teachers and about 1,100 registered schools across America.
Yet this length of training is inadequate, and some of these registered schools still have inherent flaws. "A lot of these are a watered down, mediocre, bottom of the barrel scenario of licensing where they'll graduate everybody," Gilbert says. "Regarding teachers, there is no guarantee they are well-trained."
Gilbert, who studied yoga under B.K.S. Iyengar (founder of Iyengar yoga), supports a longer training period. "Iyengar has many well trained students, with huge depth of knowledge. They have no licensing, but they have a clear understanding of how the body works. He established a clear, extreme course that takes two years to complete."
Hansa Knox, ex-president of Yoga Alliance and director of Prana Yoga and Ayurveda Mandala in Colorado, says that the government should promote a licensing policy, as Yoga Alliance has not fulfilled its role. "I believe schools should be licensed. Yoga Alliance has not stepped up to maintain yoga's integrity and protect students," she says. In addition, a continuing system of education is important: "We don't stop teaching at 500 hours. Teachers who work with seniors, children or in medical centers need specific tools to deal with this population."
Kraemer is also critical of Yoga Alliance. According to Kraemer, Yoga Alliance's website doesn't specify which variety of yoga practitioners have studied. Such disclosures would help students pick qualified teachers, ultimately producing students knowledgeable in the totality of yoga.
And since registration with Yoga Alliance is voluntary, many yoga teachers remain unlicensed and uncertified. Since yoga has become an industry, someone needs to protect the consumer. If the yoga community opposes government intervention, let teacher training institutes become licensing agencies, and Yoga Alliance a regulatory body that insists on stricter licensing standards, creates a national registry of all yoga teachers and functions as a sounding board for grievances.
As Bertin says, "Yoga is supposed to be good for you, is healthy. We trust it. Nobody tells you to be extremely careful."
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In lieu of credentials, the consumer ends up going by word of mouth, gossip, and personal inclination.
I think the default "licensing" of yoga schools is along the lines of criticisms one hears between schools including martial arts schools, art and dance schools, etc- you know stuff like, "Our kung-fu is better than their kung-fu", or "a monkey can do what they are teaching", or "that teacher should stick to the ymca", or "That school is for ____ (fill in the blank) fat, old, kids, etc.
If one is serious about yoga, find a school trained in the BKS Iyengar tradition- anything else will just give you bad habits that will need to be broken.
Oh yes- breaks them we wills. bwahahahaha!
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Yes, I think these teachers need to be certified in some way.
200 hours is not enough time to learn how to be a great yoga teacher, but it is enough time to learn how to be a safe one. I'm not sure how much anatomy & physiology/training on injury prevention YA requires, but I think this is the only aspect of training that needs to be "regulated," be it by YA (which I would prefer) or by the state.
Further regulation would be problematic for the following reasons:
1. WHO DEFINES YOGA? One of the great things about yoga is that there are nearly as many perspectives/methods as there are practitioners. While I prefer that the asanas be taught with a dose of the spiritual component of yoga, I think that all varieties of yoga eventually guide you to the same mental and emotional clarity -- some just take longer. Setting limits on the curricula would inhibit innovation and diversity.
2. ACCESS. Everyone should have access to yoga, and adding regulations would make training more expensive, reduce the total number of yoga teachers, and increase yoga class prices for the average student.
3. BEING A GOOD TEACHER HAS MORE TO DO WITH THE PERSON THAN TRAINING. A 200-RYT can be better than a 500-RYT because she has done more of the self work to live her yoga.
That is all. Namaste :)
Yoga teachers cannot be expected to perform a medical physical exam on every person before teaching a posture. There cannot be a risk free world.
I also think that as yoga became more popular/mainstream, there were more and more vinyasa classes put on schedules in gyms and studios and not NEARLY enough beginner classes so that people could learn the basics/fundamentals of yoga and proper alignment.
Even still, lots of people want to think they are "advanced" after taking just a few classes. I actually had someone come into a class (at a gym) 20 minutes late (not good) and when I informed them it was an advanced class, the response I got was "oh, I've taken yoga 5 or 6 times before." What??? And because it was a gym, the students could not be screened before attending and because the class was in session, I could not stop teaching everyone else to inform them they were too late to begin as well as in a class that was inappropriate for them.
It's a tough situation all around. I wish there was an easy solution, though I don't know that licensing is the answer.
HOWEVER, in keeping with the article, I have been in some teachers' classes and am horrified how they do not correct students. I don't know if they are caught up in the class, the moment, themselves, don't notice or what, but have seen countless students practicing postures (asanas) overwhelmingly incorrectly.
So very often when I adjust a student, they are amazed at how great a posture feels. Many tell me after class that they never had a teacher adjust them, which, incidentally, can be done with minimal hands-on ~ I don't know where all these grabby, touchy-feely adjustments came from.
I am not sure if licensing is the answer, but I do feel that more time for study and anatomy should be included in teacher training; 200 hours is not enough.
But perhaps, instead of inventing an entire new bureaucracy that aims to protect us from ourselves, isnt Yoga in itself a chance to rediscover and reclaim personal responsibility over our lives?
The problem with some certifying schools that are not RYS's is that they certify you to teach yoga without anatomy. A lot of yoga teachers at health clubs and gyms fall into this category. They are aerobics instructors or personal trainers who went to a weekend yoga training, who may know well how to bounce around or move muscles, but not necessarily joints. I see teachers who do not students the placement of feet in and out of poses, for example.
The mentality that tells people that yoga is a fitness exercise is what gets people injured. I remind my students as much as I can to park their egos at the door. A responsible teacher will continuously educate her/himself in safer techniques. S/he also needs to make students aware that, ultimately, only they know how deep or how far to go.
As for yoga career, it is hard to make teaching yoga a career. Nor would I recommend that because teaching too much leaves teachers too tired and unable to pay attention to students who may be harming themselves.
There's no evidence that the students of unlicensed yoga instructors suffer any more injuries than the students of licensed instructors, and even if they did, there are plenty of remedies already in place.
I would absolutely prefer the propensity to find a poor teacher reduced, especially for the neophyte student who may not know one from another. And it would be wonderful if we, as teachers of yoga, could muster enough collective integrity to self-police our own faculty. However this doesn't seem to be the current reality. The current reality is that capitalism trumps integrity and in some corners there's very little (if any) yoga left in yoga.
Yoga needs to be held and it needs to be supple enough to grow. The issue is who is doing the holding and how is that holding being managed. While I'd like to see teachers take teaching seriously enough to BE teachers, I do not particularly fancy the idea of someone who doesn't understand Yoga licensing it. But we clearly need something.
For what it's worth I've taken a two-year 2,000-hour yoga college program, am certified by the State of Washington, and have continued my studies with my teacher for eight years. I can only hope other current and potential teachers will consider their responsibility to self, others, and the cosmos and do likewise.
So everybody's got to find their home in Yoga. The training I was taking also included segments on yoga psychology, history, Sanskrit names and meanings, nutrition, self-care, cleansing and in terms of teaching, different considerations were offered for students who are elders or children or pregnant.
My own yoga alliance certified teacher has the most wonderful ability to work with all ages at the same time while making sure that no one over-stretches or does any harm to himself or herself while at the same maintaining a good flow AND no student is ever humiliated or embarrassed. Maybe some yoga students want that kind of attention, Iyengar-like, but I was looking for that flow.
It is true that Yoga Alliance is loosely regulated and that principles of caveat emptor will apply to yoga teachers as to anything else.
It does sound like you are doing what you can do which is off er a clear, safe "container" for your students to find their practice. However, as we all know, there are other teachers who come at it from so many different angles, it would seem like having agreed-upon standards might serve students. For example, an agreed-upon standard might be opening the class with a discussion intended to place the emotional/physical responsibility in the students hands, like you demonstrate.
I don't think regulation is the State's job. Better if it's a peer review, created by and for teachers (not yoga schools per se). To me, membership would simply demonstrate adherence to a code of ethics. Being a certified member of the group would present to the world: 1) There is a code of ethics that I value and 2) As an instructor, I value and agree to share in these best practices.
Just my two cents! It seems to be working well for those of us in my relatively small, but growing field (EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques). I think it ensures a level of quality for our students and keeps us as trainers on our toes.
:)
Innovation and variety of services are what will suffer. Many people want the cheapest possible service. They do not have money for an elite version of Yoga. Many people simply cannot afford a technically advanced and expensive Yoga class.
Variation in services is like buying cheap rather than expensive products in WalMart. Sometimes you get what you pay for, but if you do not have much money, you would prefer something rather than nothing.