What We Are Really Doing in Our Yoga Teacher Trainings…

When I tell people I lead yoga teacher trainings, they often assume I’m talking about handstands, anatomy, sequencing, philosophy, or learning how to teach poses. And yes, those things are part of it. We spend a great deal of time learning the physical practices, studying the body, understanding breath, exploring meditation, and developing the skills necessary to teach yoga well. But those are the visible parts of the training, and they are not the heart of what we are doing.

The deeper work is learning how to know ourselves.

I don't mean knowing ourselves in the contemporary sense of identifying our personality type, understanding our attachment style, naming our wounds, or accumulating enough psychological language to explain why we behave the way we do. Those things can have value, but they are not the destination. The question yoga asks is much older and much more radical: Who are you, really?

To ask that question seriously requires us to become deeply aware of our own experience: the body, the breath, sensation, thought, perception, and the subtle movements of attention itself. As we become more aware, we begin to see how much of what we call “me” has been shaped by family, culture, history, circumstance, and conditioning. We begin to recognize that the identity we have spent our lives constructing is only part of the story.

This kind of awareness is not simply psychological. It is spiritual because, if we stay with it long enough, something much larger begins to reveal itself.

We begin to discover that the body we experience as my body is not actually separate from the living world around us. It is made from the same earth, water, minerals, sunlight, plants, and other living systems that have sustained life for billions of years. The oxygen moving through our lungs was produced by other living beings. The minerals in our bones came from the earth. The food that becomes our blood and tissue was once soil, sunlight, water, and other life.

We are not standing outside of nature, observing it. We are nature, observing itself.

That recognition changes the meaning of self-awareness entirely. The body becomes more than an object to improve or an instrument to make perform better. It becomes a living expression of a process that began long before any of us arrived here. Our capacity to breathe, sense, move, love, adapt, and recognize the world around us comes from an unimaginably long lineage of life. There is something in us that is older than our names, careers, identities, beliefs, and individual stories.

When we become quiet enough to experience ourselves directly, we can begin to remember this.

This is part of what I believe the practices of yoga were designed to reveal. Asana gives us a way to become intimate with embodiment. Breath gives us a direct experience of our participation in the larger rhythms of life. Meditation allows us to observe consciousness rather than being completely absorbed by everything passing through it. Philosophy gives us language for questions human beings have been asking for thousands of years: What is the nature of reality? What is the self? What is consciousness? What does it mean to live well? What is our relationship to one another and to the world?

The practices are not valuable because they make us better at yoga. They are valuable because they make us more capable of seeing.

And what we begin to see is that the boundaries we experience between ourselves and the rest of life are not nearly as absolute as they appear. Beneath our individual identities is a fundamental belonging, a participation in something larger than the individual self.

This is why self-awareness matters so deeply in a spiritual context. We are not becoming more self-aware so that we can become more fascinated with ourselves. We are becoming aware enough to see beyond the narrow construction of ourselves. The more deeply we know ourselves, the more clearly we can begin to recognize ourselves in everything else.

The grief of another person becomes less foreign. The vulnerability of another living being becomes less abstract. The destruction of a landscape becomes harder to regard as something happening somewhere else, to someone else, because the distinction between “me” and “the world” begins to soften. If I understand that I am part of nature rather than separate from it, caring for the natural world is no longer simply an ethical position I have adopted. It becomes an extension of caring for myself.

And if I understand that another person is not fundamentally separate from me, compassion becomes something deeper than being a nice person. It becomes a natural consequence of perception.

This, to me, is where the work becomes revolutionary.

Modern life gives us endless reasons to experience ourselves as separate. We are encouraged to understand ourselves as individuals with individual needs, desires, identities, and measures of success, while spending enormous amounts of energy constructing and maintaining an identity that tells us who we are and where we stand in relation to everyone else.

At the same time, we are increasingly disconnected from the natural rhythms and relationships that have always reminded human beings that they belong to something larger than themselves. We live indoors, under artificial light, surrounded by machines and screens, moving according to calendars rather than seasons and spending much of our waking lives engaged with abstractions. We can go through entire days without touching soil, watching the weather, being quiet enough to hear the world around us, or paying attention to the living systems that sustain our existence.

Perhaps some of what we experience as modern suffering is the consequence of forgetting what we are.

We have become extraordinarily good at treating ourselves as machines that need to be optimized while forgetting that we are living organisms embedded in an ancient and intelligent web of life. We measure productivity, track performance, manage our time, and attempt to control our experience while losing contact with the deeper knowing that comes from simply being alive and paying attention.

Yoga offers another possibility.

It asks us to return to direct experience, not as an escape from the world but as a way of remembering our place within it. The body becomes a doorway through which we encounter a reality larger than our individual identity. The breath reminds us that we are constantly exchanging ourselves with the world around us. Meditation creates enough stillness for us to become curious about consciousness itself.

The body becomes an antenna for this knowing. Not because every sensation contains a secret message or because instinct is infallible, but because our biology is part of the same living intelligence that has shaped life for billions of years. Our bodies carry the accumulated wisdom of an extraordinary lineage of adaptation and relationship. We are not separate observers placed into nature after the fact. We are expressions of it.

When we learn to listen deeply, we are learning to remember. And remembering changes how we live.

If I remember that I belong to the natural world, I cannot remain indifferent to its destruction in quite the same way. If I remember that my life is dependent upon countless other lives, gratitude becomes more than an idea. If I remember that other human beings are expressions of the same living reality that I am, their suffering becomes harder to dismiss.

This is why I care so much about what happens inside a yoga teacher training.

I don't want to simply teach people how to construct a clever sequence or demonstrate a technically impressive posture. I want to create the conditions for people to become curious about the mystery of being alive. I want them to study the body deeply enough that it becomes difficult to believe the body is merely an object, to study breath deeply enough to recognize every breath as an exchange between themselves and the world, and to encounter philosophy not as a collection of ancient concepts to memorize but as an invitation to investigate the most fundamental questions of existence.

The training is therefore not simply about learning how to teach yoga. It is about learning how to see, and eventually learning to see that there was never a completely separate “you” standing apart from everything else in the first place.

That is the revolution I am interested in: not becoming a better, more disciplined, more optimized version of yourself, but remembering that you belong here; that you are part of something ancient and immeasurably larger than your individual life; that the intelligence moving through your body is not entirely separate from the intelligence moving through every other living thing.

When we remember that deeply enough, caring for one another becomes less of an obligation and more of a recognition. We take better care of the earth because we understand that we are made of it. We take better care of one another because we begin to recognize ourselves in one another. We become less interested in domination and more capable of participating in something larger than ourselves.

This is what I mean when I say that the inner work is the heart of our yoga teacher training.

We are not simply learning how to teach people to move their bodies. We are learning how to become conscious participants in the extraordinary mystery of being alive.

And the more deeply we know ourselves, the more deeply we may come to understand that knowing ourselves was never really about the self alone.

It was about remembering what we belong to.