I was scrolling Instagram on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, not looking for anything in particular. A teacher I follow had posted a reel: beautiful studio, gorgeous light, a sequence that looked effortless and inventive. The comments were glowing. Before I had even registered that I was reacting, my chest went tight and my brain handed me the whole sentence: why don’t my classes look like that?
I’ve been teaching yoga for more than twenty years. I had co-led a teacher training that same morning. In the moment, none of that mattered.
What mattered was what I noticed next. In about ninety seconds, five separate forces had fired inside me, so fast that I felt them as one thing: I’m not enough. The Yoga Sutras named those five forces twenty-five hundred years ago. They’re called the kleshas, and these five obstacles to clear seeing are, I think, the most undertaught framework in the entire Sutras and the most useful one for a modern teaching life.
Most of what gets diagnosed as a confidence problem in yoga teaching is actually the five kleshas at work, unrecognized.
A quick map before we start
Patanjali describes the kleshas in Book Two of the Sutras, and they aren’t a random list. Think of them as a tree. There’s one root, and four branches that grow out of it. Every branch traces back to the root, and once you can see the root, the rest of the tree makes sense.
Avidya: wrong-seeing
Avidya is the root. It’s usually translated as ignorance, but I prefer wrong-seeing, because it’s more precise. Avidya is misperception, not a personal failing: you’re seeing something, but you’re seeing it wrong, mistaking a curated slice for the whole picture.
Back to that reel. Avidya is what let me look at ninety seconds of someone’s highlight footage and decide she had it all figured out.
Asmita: ego, or I-ness
Asmita is the “I” that attaches itself to everything. It takes a neutral event and makes it about you. Another teacher posts a beautiful class: that’s an observation. Asmita turns it into what does this say about me?
For teachers, asmita is the voice that can’t separate the craft from the craftsperson, so every piece of feedback, good or bad, lands on your identity instead of your skill. It’s exhausting, and it’s the part of the fraud feeling that whispers your students are about to find you out. If that whisper sounds familiar, you’re in good company, and there’s a way through it that doesn’t require waiting to feel ready first (how to build confidence even if you still feel like an imposter).
Raga: craving
Raga is the pull toward what you want: the full class, the five-star review, the confidence to arrive now, the planning to feel easy already. It’s also the engine behind shiny-object syndrome, the new training, the new method, the next certificate that will finally make it click. If you’ve ever stacked credentials hoping the next one would fix the feeling, that was raga at work, and more certifications rarely fix it the way we hope.
Dvesha: aversion
Dvesha is raga’s mirror, the push away from what you don’t want. For teachers, it usually looks like avoiding discomfort: not asking for feedback, not trying a new format, teaching the same sun salutations because something unfamiliar might not land. It’s also the swing between over-planning every transition one week and winging it the next, both of which feel terrible (the planning-confidence cycle). Dvesha targets the vulnerability of teaching, not the teaching itself.
Abhinivesha: clinging to the familiar
Abhinivesha is the deepest branch. It’s often translated as fear of death, but I find it more accurate as fear of the unknown, clinging to what’s familiar even when the familiar isn’t serving you. It’s the reason you stay in the draining teaching situation, keep pricing your workshop too low, or never publish the page advertising private lessons. The known, even when it hurts, feels safer than the unknown.
Worth saying: abhinivesha isn’t the same as healthy repetition. Repeating a lesson plan on purpose is craft. Clinging to a rut out of fear is the klesha. The difference is whether you chose it (why your students actually want repetition, not novelty).
All five, in ninety seconds
Here’s that Sunday scroll again, traced in real time:
- Avidya: I mistook a curated reel for reality.
- Asmita: I made it about me.
- Raga: I craved her ease and creativity.
- Dvesha: I pushed away the discomfort of where I actually am.
- Abhinivesha: I reached for the familiar groove, “I’m not enough,” because I’ve worn it smooth.
Five forces, one feeling. Once the machinery is visible, you can start to interrupt it.
A five-question checklist you can use this week
You don’t need the Sanskrit to practice this. The next time you have a strong reaction, pleasant or unpleasant, pause and run the list. Don’t fix anything. Just notice what’s running.
- Am I seeing this wrong? (avidya)
- Am I making this about me? (asmita)
- Am I craving something? (raga)
- Am I avoiding something? (dvesha)
- Am I clinging to what’s familiar? (abhinivesha)
Usually one or two light up right away. That noticing is the whole practice.
Bringing it into your classroom
The kleshas are more abstract than the breath, so build up to them. You can teach them without ever using the Sanskrit:
- For avidya: “What are you actually feeling right now, versus what you’re telling yourself you feel?”
- For asmita: “Let this pose be about the experience, not about you. Release doing it right and just do it honestly.”
- For raga: “Notice if you’re reaching for something here, a deeper stretch, a straighter line. What happens if you stop reaching and arrive?”
- For dvesha: “Notice if you’re pulling away, not because this is unsafe, but because it’s uncomfortable. Stay for one more breath.”
- For abhinivesha: “We’re going to try something different today. Notice what comes up when the sequence isn’t what you expected.”
For a workshop or a multi-week series, the kleshas are gold: five weeks, one klesha per week, each illuminated by a physical practice. If building thoughtful series like that is the work that calls to you, that’s the heart of what we do inside Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, my six-month mentorship.
The takeaway
You’re not stuck because something is wrong with you. You’re stuck because five universal human forces are doing exactly what they always do: misperceiving, over-identifying, craving, avoiding, and clinging. That’s the human condition, not a character flaw, and the Sutras mapped it for you a long time ago.
The grooves don’t disappear. They lose their grip when you can say, “oh, that’s asmita,” and keep teaching anyway. The teachers I admire most aren’t free of these patterns. They’ve just gotten good at catching them in the moment.
If you want to do this work alongside other teachers who take the craft seriously, come join us in The Zone, my free community. And if you want the longer version, I go deep into the kleshas in chapters 15 through 17 of Yoga Off the Mat, the book I wrote with Alexandra DeSiato about taking what yoga does to your attention on the mat and letting it shape the rest of your life. It’s out July 14.
