The longer you teach yoga, the easier it is to forget what it feels like to be a student.
You stop taking other people’s classes—you’re too busy teaching your own. You dismiss workshops because you “already know that.” You forget what it’s like to be confused by a cue, to struggle with a transition, to wonder whether you’re doing it right.
That forgetting is dangerous. When you forget what it’s like to be a student, you lose empathy for the people on the mats in front of you.
In this episode of the Yoga Teacher Confidential podcast, I’m talking about why studenthood—not just continuing education—is the absolute bedrock of your yoga teaching. And I’m sharing what happened when I sold my yoga studio after fifteen years and unexpectedly got back the one thing I’d been missing.
Studenthood and Continuing Education Are Not the Same Thing
In The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook, I write about continuing education as one of the cornerstones of a professional yoga teaching career. Yoga Alliance requires 30 hours of continuing education every three years, plus 45 teaching hours. Workshops, online courses, books, podcasts, mentorship programs—all of these count, and all of them matter.
But here’s the deeper point: continuing education hours alone won’t give you what regular studenthood gives you. More certifications won’t make you a better teacher if your beginner’s mind has gone stale.
You can rack up 300 CE hours and still lose your beginner’s mind if you’re never actually sitting in the student’s seat, feeling what it’s like to follow someone else’s lead.
There’s a concept in Zen Buddhism called shoshin—beginner’s mind. It means approaching everything with openness, eagerness, and a lack of preconceptions. For experienced yoga teachers, cultivating beginner’s mind is essential. And honestly? It gets harder the longer you teach.
When Your Teaching Life Makes Studenthood Complicated
I co-owned Carolina Yoga Company for fifteen years. Three locations at our peak. A team of wonderful teachers. A thriving community.
And for those fifteen years, I couldn’t really be a yoga student.
Every teacher on our schedule knew I was the owner. Even when I was only there to take class, my presence created a dynamic I couldn’t erase. Teachers would wonder: Is she evaluating me? Does she like what I’m doing?
I never wanted that. But when you own the studio, you’re never just another student.
It went beyond my own studio, too. I never felt like I could walk into other studios in my area as the owner of a competing business. So I didn’t go. For a decade and a half, my yoga studenthood shrank to anonymous classes while traveling—rare and precious moments where nobody was thinking about me at all.
Looking back, I can see how that limitation affected my teaching in ways I didn’t fully recognize at the time.
The Gift of Online Classes
Online yoga teaching has been a revelation. Online, you can be a student without being seen.
Your camera can be off in a live class. You can take asynchronous classes. Nobody knows who you are. You can just practice.
That’s one of the reasons I built the Prep Station. The Movement Library has 180+ follow-along sequences, and they exist specifically so yoga teachers can be students. You follow along. You let someone else lead. You practice the practice instead of planning it.
It’s your chance to scratch that itch for novelty and exploration in your own practice, so you’re not channeling it into constantly reinventing your class plans—because your students actually want repetition, not novelty.
Being a Beginner in Something New
During those years when yoga studenthood was complicated, I found renewed studenthood in other modalities.
I started taking equipment Pilates—yes, after 20 years of teaching mat Pilates. The reformer was a genuine revelation. Those first few classes, I was a complete beginner: fumbling with the springs, trying to understand the carriage, feeling muscles I’d forgotten I had.
And then my business brain kicked in. Within about three classes I was thinking: Oh, I could learn to teach this. I could open a reformer studio.
I had to stop myself. Literally say: “Sage, this is just for you. You get to just be a student.”
That moment taught me something important. As yoga teachers, we’re wired to turn every experience into a lesson plan, a business opportunity, a thing we can give to others. That generosity is beautiful—but it can rob us of the very nourishment that makes us good teachers in the first place.
Four Ways to Protect Your Studenthood
1. Take yoga classes from other yoga teachers regularly.
When someone else is making the decisions about what comes next, you get to experience what your students experience: the surrender, the surprise, the occasional frustration, the unexpected delight. If going to a studio feels complicated, online classes are a genuine gift. Camera off, mat out, beginner’s mind on.
2. Explore complementary modalities.
Pilates, tai chi, qigong, dance, seated meditation—all of these will make you a better yoga teacher. Not because you’ll teach them to your yoga students, but because being a beginner reconnects you with what it feels like to not know. Every time you’re the person in the room who can’t quite coordinate the movement with the breath, you’re building empathy for your newer yoga students.
3. Practice saying “this is just for me.”
You don’t have to monetize every experience. You don’t have to turn every class you take into a lesson you teach. Some learning is just for you. And paradoxically, the learning you do purely for yourself often ends up being the most transformative for your teaching.
4. Budget time and money for being a student.
This is a professional expense and a professional commitment. Put classes on your calendar the way you put teaching on your calendar. If your schedule is so packed with teaching that you never take a class, something needs to shift. Burnout builds quietly when you’re pouring out without refilling the well.
Your Studenthood Is Not a Luxury
The yoga teachers who last—the ones still excited about teaching after ten, fifteen, twenty years—are the ones who never stopped being students. They stayed curious. They stayed humble. They kept showing up with fresh eyes.
Your students need you to be a student. Not because you need more credentials, but because the quality of your teaching is directly connected to the quality of your own practice and learning. When you’re actively being taught, you remember what it feels like. And that remembering makes you kinder, more patient, more creative, and more present at the front of the room.
Your studenthood is the foundation of your teaching. Protect it.
Resources
- Listen to the full episode: Yoga Teacher Confidential podcast
- Be a student in the Movement Library: the Prep Station (180+ follow-along sequences)
- Join the free yoga teacher community: the Zone
- Read the book: The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook by Sage Rountree
