There’s no number of years. Here’s what actually matters, and how to check it this week.
Most people who want to teach yoga put it off for years because they’ve decided they haven’t practiced long enough. I’ve been training yoga teachers since 2011, and I’ve come to believe the number of years on somebody’s mat doesn’t predict whether she’ll become a good yoga teacher. Time on the mat is the wrong unit. A year of practice can mean one class a week at the gym or a daily home practice and a shelf of books, and those two people arrive at teacher training with completely different raw materials.
It’s like asking how many meals you need to have eaten before you can learn to cook: some, and it helps if you paid attention to a few of them, but nobody is counting.
The five things I actually look for
Your practice is yours. You chose it. If the studio closed tomorrow you’d roll out a mat in the living room, at least sometimes. It doesn’t have to be perfect, daily, or advanced. It has to be chosen. Teaching is going to ask you to decide, on behalf of a room full of other people, that this matters, and a chosen practice means you’ve already made that decision once for yourself.
You’ve tasted more than one kitchen. You’ve taken classes from more than one teacher, and you noticed they were different. Maybe you loved one and couldn’t stand another. That reaction is information about the yoga teacher you’ll become. The third module of my training puts it to work: an inventory of the last five classes you took as a student, then a go-broad month of four classes you wouldn’t normally choose, because once you’re teaching your schedule shrinks and you tend to take the same class forever. If you’ve only practiced with one teacher, the training builds the breadth in. If you’ve already wandered, you’re ahead.
Something has changed off the mat. You handle a hard conversation differently, or you sleep better, or you noticed your breath in a traffic jam and it helped. If the practice has never once followed you out the door, teaching it will feel like describing a country you’ve read about but never visited.
You can sit. Not in lotus and not for an hour: with yourself, without a screen, for five minutes, without hating it. The Yoga Sutras say almost nothing about physical postures, and the first thing they do say is the whole definition: the seat should be steady and comfortable (sthira sukham asanam). A yoga teacher who can’t find that seat for themselves will have a hard time offering it to anyone else, which is why my training spends an hour on the floor with blankets and blocks before it spends an hour on anything fancier.
You’re curious about why. Not only what pose comes next but why it comes next, why the breath does what it does, why an easy-looking class left you wrung out. Wanting to understand the practice and not only do it is a big green flag: it shows you’re already thinking like a yoga teacher.
Notice what isn’t on the list: flexibility, years, any particular pose, Sanskrit. Those are exactly the things people assume disqualify them, and they aren’t what I look for when I decide someone’s ready.
I did not arrive as an advanced practitioner
I hated my first yoga class. It was harder than I expected, there were hands-on corrections I hadn’t asked for, there was Sanskrit I couldn’t follow, and savasana was bizarre to me, mostly because I desperately had to pee. If I’d felt neutral about that class instead of negative, I never would have gone back to figure out what everyone else was getting out of it. My practice grew out of irritation and curiosity, in that order, and I entered teacher training in 2003 as somebody who’d been running to manage graduate-school stress and had wandered back to yoga because my body asked for it. That was enough, because I’d chosen it, I’d tried a few kitchens, and I was curious.
On flexibility, since that’s the fear I hear most: you’re not flexible? Great! I wasn’t flexible while I was running marathons. And when I was eleven I broke my left elbow badly enough that it was surgically rebuilt, and that arm has had a different range of motion ever since. No amount of practice will change the shape of that joint, and it has not stopped me from teaching for more than two decades or from training other yoga teachers. If anything it helps me see the student in the room whose body is capable and asymmetrical at the same time. Your limitations are not disqualifying. Often they’re the thing that lets you see a student nobody else can.
The one prerequisite people skip
You need a reason you can say out loud. The first module of my training, before anatomy, before sequencing, before anyone teaches a pose, is Intention Setting and Mission, and its central exercise is the five whys. Your partner asks why you want to teach yoga. You answer. She asks why about your answer, five layers deep, and by the time you’re a few layers in, you’re usually not giving the bio answer anymore. The training digs for it in week one because that reason is what carries you through the week-seven wall, when nearly every cohort hits a dip, and through your first year of teaching, which is harder than the training.
So when someone asks me how many years, what I hear underneath is am I allowed? My answer to nearly every teaching question since 2011 still holds: it depends. It depends on whether the practice is yours, not on how long you’ve had it.
The three-part check for this week
- Take a class with a yoga teacher you don’t know. Any style, any studio. Notice three things they say that you’d want to say, and write them down afterward. My students keep a running Cues to Steal list for the whole training. While you’re there, notice two more things: how the teacher opens the class in the first two minutes, before anyone has moved, and what the teacher does about the student who walks in eight minutes late. If you finish that class with three lines on a napkin and an opinion about the latecomer, you’re paying attention like a teacher.
- Practice at home, twice, for twenty minutes, without a video. Move the spine in every direction, stand on each leg for a while, and do something that asks your core to hold you and something that asks it to let go. Then sit for the last few minutes. It doesn’t have to be good. You’re checking whether you can lead yourself, because twenty minutes of that is the seed of leading a room for sixty.
- Do the five whys on paper. “I want to teach yoga because . . .” Answer, then ask why of your answer, five times. If the fifth one makes you a little uncomfortable or you start to cry, you found it.
If you get through all three and you’re still curious, you have practiced enough.
If teaching is calling
The Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training opens applications on October 19 for the February 2027 cohort. Live calls meet once a week on Google Meet, never longer than ninety minutes; the lectures, reading, and practice teaching run on your own clock, and the curriculum opens the day you’re accepted. Join the waitlist to get the application first, along with the early-bird tuition.
If you’d rather test the water, Find Your Teaching Voice is a free short course inside the Zone, and it’s where many of my students start. Still weighing it? Book a free thirty-minute call with me and ask me anything. And if you’re comparing programs, start with how to choose an online yoga teacher training and what happens inside my 200-hour.
Which story have you been telling yourself: not flexible enough, not enough years, or not enough Sanskrit? Tell me in the comments.
