Most 200-hour yoga teacher trainings teach you how to do yoga. But they don’t teach you how to teach yoga.
If you’ve been through a training yourself, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You spent weeks—maybe months—learning Sanskrit names, memorizing muscle groups, perfecting your own poses. You filled out worksheets. You practiced on your peers until everyone was exhausted. And then they handed you a certificate and said, “Congratulations, you’re a yoga teacher now.”
Except you didn’t really feel like one, did you?
I know this because I’ve been on both sides of it. I graduated from my 200-hour training in 2004. I’ve run a 200-hour program at my physical studio, Carrboro Yoga Company, from 2011 until just recently. I’ve taught in other people’s trainings. I’ve mentored hundreds of yoga teachers through my 300-hour program.
And here’s what I can tell you with absolute certainty: the yoga teachers who struggle the most after graduation are the ones whose training taught them yoga but not pedagogy—or more specifically, andragogy, which is the study of how adults learn.
Finding My Training in 2003
Let me take you back to 2003. I was pregnant with my second daughter, and I’d been deepening my yoga practice as a complement to my running. I had just left academia—I have a PhD in English Literature, but there were 700-plus applicants for every desirable tenure-track job, so I pivoted into academic publishing.
And I thought: I’ve been trained to teach. I taught freshman composition, drama as a genre, contemporary literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Why couldn’t I teach yoga?
So I started looking for yoga teacher trainings. This was before everyone had websites, before you could Google things. I’m talking about the printed directory in the back of Yoga Journal magazine. I found one program at a retreat center nearby—the lead teacher was a disciple of Dharma Mittra, very spiritual, a little intimidating, but solid.
But then my mother-in-law found me a training in Charlotte, North Carolina, about two and a half hours away. It was an eight-month program, one weekend per month. And she had wonderful ulterior motives—if I went to Charlotte for training, I’d bring my husband and our two young daughters, and she’d get to see her grandchildren one weekend every month. She very generously offered to cover the tuition. So that became an easy choice.
What Made My Training Brilliant
The program was led by a woman named Lesa Crocker, and she had the most interesting background. She was a massage therapist and a Rolfer, which meant she had incredibly solid anatomy training. She’d studied Kundalini yoga with Yogi Bhajan. And she’d also studied Hatha yoga with Erich Schiffmann, a West Coast teacher who wrote one of the most beautiful books about yoga I’ve ever read: Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness.
Here’s what made her training brilliant: instead of teaching us secondhand information about different styles of yoga, she brought in the actual teachers from those lineages. The premier Ashtanga teacher in Charlotte came and taught us Ashtanga. The premier Kripalu teacher taught us Kripalu.
It was what I like to call an ecumenical approach—broad instead of deep. If I’d wanted to teach Bikram or Ashtanga specifically, I would have needed a deep dive into that one method. But instead, I got this incredible survey, this overview, so I could go in later and flesh out the pieces I needed.
I started that training in September 2003. My daughter was born August 4th, so I had a six-week-old baby when I started. My husband would bring her to me during breaks so I could nurse her. I remember being so nervous before the first Friday night session, and then so excited after those first three hours that I couldn’t sleep.
One of my classmates in that training was a woman named Amy Boerner. Remember that name—you’re going to hear about her in a minute.
Learning from Running a Training
Flash forward to 2010. My business partner Lies Sapp and I took over Carrboro Yoga Company when the founder moved across the country. That summer, we were hosting a 200-hour training led by Stephanie Keach, founder of the Asheville Yoga Center. Lies was already signed up to take Stephanie’s training when the opportunity to buy the studio came up. So she went through teacher training as a student and as the studio owner, which gave her this incredible crash course in all things yoga.
Stephanie’s program was structured a lot like mine had been—ecumenical, with guest teachers coming in to present their respective styles. But Lies noticed some things that didn’t work so well. The intensive format—three weeks straight—was a lot to process. They’d wheel in a TV during lunch to show anatomy videos, and everyone was falling asleep.
All of these experiences informed how we built the Carrboro Yoga Company 200-hour training. We adopted that ecumenical approach—going straight to the primary sources, bringing in lead teachers from our community. We ran it from 2011 until the pandemic hit, then resumed it, and eventually handed it off to my colleague Alexandra Desiato, who’s been my coauthor on four books, most notably our bestseller Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses.
Meanwhile, I turned my attention to the 300-hour training. And here’s where things got really interesting for me as a curriculum designer.
The Gap Most Trainings Miss
The 300-hour at Comfort Zone Yoga has a core curriculum called Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, which is all about structuring the container of your class. It’s designed to help you become almost everyone’s favorite yoga teacher—the one students seek out, the one who creates that magical experience where people feel exactly how they want to feel.
And that structure works beautifully because by the time you get to the 300-hour level, you already have the foundation. You’ve done your 200-hour training. You know the basics.
But here’s what I realized: most people’s 200-hour experience didn’t actually give them a foundation in teaching. It gave them a foundation in yoga.
Let me be really direct with you. If you took a 200-hour yoga teacher training and you finished it feeling like, “Okay, I know a lot more about yoga, but I still don’t know how to actually teach a class”—that’s not your fault. That’s not because you weren’t smart enough or dedicated enough or present enough.
It’s because the training was designed to teach you the wrong thing.
Why Teaching Skills Matter More Than Yoga Knowledge
Most 200-hour trainings are built around the assumption that if you know enough about yoga—if you can name all the poses in Sanskrit, if you understand which muscles engage in Warrior II, if you can recite the Yoga Sutras—then teaching will just happen. You’ll figure it out.
But teaching is a skill. It’s a craft. It’s an art form. And it requires its own training.
Think about it this way: I have a PhD in English Literature. I spent years studying literature, analyzing texts, writing about symbolism and theme and narrative structure. But you know what actually prepared me to stand in front of a classroom and teach freshman composition? It wasn’t my knowledge of literature. It was my training in pedagogy. It was learning how to structure a lesson, how to create assignments that actually help students learn, how to give feedback that lands, how to read the room and adjust in real time.
That’s what most yoga teacher trainings are missing. They’re giving you the content knowledge—which, don’t get me wrong, is important—but they’re not giving you the pedagogical training. They’re not teaching you how to teach.
And here’s why that matters so much: When you don’t know how to teach—when you’re just mimicking what your teachers did, or winging it, or feeling like an imposter every time you step in front of a class—it shows up in your teaching. Not because you’re a bad teacher, but because you’re anxious. You’re in your head. You’re worried about what to say next, or whether you’re doing it right, or what people are thinking about you.
And when you’re anxious, your students feel it. They can’t relax. They can’t drop in. They can’t have the experience you want them to have.
But when you do know how to teach—when you have a structure, a framework, a methodology that you trust—you can relax. You can be present. You can actually see your students and respond to what they need in real time.
The Training I’m Building Now
Here’s the beautiful thing: I get a do-over.
I’m building a 200-hour yoga teacher training right now, and I get to design it with everything I’ve learned from taking one, running one, and teaching hundreds of teachers in the 300-hour level. I get to fix all the things that didn’t work. I get to build in all the things that were missing.
I’m co-teaching this 200-hour with Amy Boerner—yes, my classmate from that 2003 training. She and I are splitting this into two parts.
I’m teaching 50 hours of what I call “the container”—the pedagogical foundation, the teaching methodology, the stuff you need to know before you ever step in front of a class. This is self-paced and online through Comfort Zone Yoga, opening January 1, 2026, so you can work through it on your own timeline, in the ways that work best for how you learn.
You’ll be reading my books: The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook, The Art of Yoga Sequencing, and Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses. You’ll be watching videos—or alternatively, listening to a private podcast or reading transcripts if that’s how you learn better. Because adults learn in different ways, and a good training needs to honor that.
You’ll be reflecting and articulating what you think matters for yoga teaching. What kind of teacher do you want to be? How do you want your students to feel before, during, and after your class? How can you be as inclusive as possible? How can you be of highest service to your students and your community?
This is the pedagogical training. This is the “how to teach” part that most 200-hour programs skip right over.
And then you’ll take all of that learning, and you’ll go practice it with Amy on the ground at Jungle Bay Eco Resort in Dominica. The on-the-ground intensive runs May 12 through 26, 2026. And this is where it gets really exciting.
Amy is leading the destination component: the hands-on practicum, the practice teaching, the embodiment of everything you’ve learned. You’ll be working with your fellow trainees, yes—but more importantly, you’ll be teaching actual humans. Real resort guests. People who didn’t sign up for yoga teacher training, people who just want to take a yoga class.
I’m going to teach you my greatest-hits lesson plan—because you’ve got to start somewhere, right? And you’re going to teach that class to resort guests over the two weeks you’re there. You’ll get to repeat it. You’ll get a do-over if you want to articulate something differently. And as your confidence grows, you can start to vary the recipe.
And in between your practice teaching, you’ll be lounging by the infinity pool, eating organic cuisine that’s served to you without you lifting a finger, doing service work for the local community, and soaking in one of the most gorgeous places on earth.
This is not your typical yoga teacher training. This is a training that teaches you how to teach. And then gives you space to practice teaching in a supported, low-stakes, high-impact way.
What This Means for You
The yoga teaching world doesn’t need more people who can demonstrate a perfect pose. It needs more people who can teach in a way that makes students feel seen, supported, and successful. It needs teachers who understand that they’re not the hero of the story—their students are. It needs teachers who know how to structure a class, how to cue effectively, how to modify and adapt in real time, how to create an experience that serves.
If you’ve been thinking about becoming a yoga teacher—or if you’ve already taken a 200-hour and you know something was missing—this is your chance.
The 200-hour training with Amy and me begins online January 1, 2026, with the on-the-ground component in Dominica running May 12 through 26, 2026. You can find all the details and apply at carrboroyoga.com/destination200ytt.
And here’s something you might not know: there’s no rule that says you can’t do another 200-hour training. In fact, I’d love to work with you in this program. You’ll get so much more out of it the second time around, especially now that you know what questions to ask.
Want to dive deeper into this topic? Listen to the full Yoga Teacher Confidential podcast episode:
