Maintaining your studentship

So, you’ve completed your 200 or 500 hours of training — an amazing achievement — and you’ve become a skilled and effective teacher. Now what? Keep going! I promise there is more.

A certification is not a finish line. It is an invitation to life-long engagement with everything teachings have to offer. Maintaining your studentship is paramount to staying inspired, to serving your students and to nourishing your own practice.

But how do you stay committed to your studentship? How do you stay hungry to learn?

Let’s liken it to physical hunger. When you are physically hungry, you eat, you become full, and you no longer crave food. With learning and spiritual practices, it is the opposite. When you do not eat, you lose your hunger. When you eat, your hunger grows. Continuing education as a teacher will keep you growing, ever hungry for more.

When my teacher was a young man living and studying in southern India, he was taken in by a brilliant teacher we lovingly call ‘Appa’. Every night for many years, when they closed the texts they had painstakingly translated, completed the puja, and chanted the mantras, Appa would say: “If you wish, we can carry on tomorrow.”

My teacher says that “learning is an invitation and never an obligation.” Like his teacher before him, every time my teacher and I conclude our time together, he extends the invitation to me: “If you wish, we can carry on tomorrow.”

The invitation to engage with your learning is not about chasing certifications and titles but is a reflection of your reverence for yoga. It is a commitment to taking your seat, to grow your gnarled roots deep and wide, so that you may offer something outward to nourish your community.

Yoga is an ocean so vast you will never find its bottom or its shores. The yoga tradition teaches that three-quarters is always unseen, that there is always more. Do not let this deter you. Let it excite you.

Your pursuit of continuing education is what will keep you fascinated and engaged 10 years, and then 20 years, into your teaching. It is what will keep the act of cuing a downward facing dog exciting and inspired.

When we become the ‘one who knows’ we lose our curiosity. That is a descent into trading our humility for certainty, and to lose our humility is to lose our awe. When we lose our awe, things become dull and what we once loved becomes drudgery. Teaching yoga becomes just another task instead of a devotional offering.