Autumn is my favorite season, and not only because of football. The slightly embarrassing reason is that as the light gets lower, everything casts a longer shadow, and I find that weirdly reassuring. The shadows were there all summer. You just couldn’t see them at high noon.
That’s a useful way to think about the kleshas, the five obstacles that yoga philosophy says stand between us and the full experience of the practice. In Yoga Off the Mat, the book I wrote with Alexandra DeSiato, we open the section on the shadow side of yoga with a question I think about constantly: if yoga promises freedom and liberation, “Freedom from what? What are we trying to disentangle and free ourselves from?” The kleshas are yoga’s answer, “the causes of suffering or the five obstacles to full realization,” the specific ways we get in our own way. And they follow you into the teacher’s seat. They’re in the room every time you teach, wearing yoga clothes, blending in with the students.
Avidya: the 11-person Tuesday
Start with avidya, wrong-seeing, because everything else grows from it. In traditional imagery, “avidya is often given the form of the broad trunk of a tree, with the other four kleshas extending from it as branches.” Misperception is the trunk. And the line from the book I most want you to hear as a teacher is this one: “Wrong-seeing is the status quo—it’s the default nature of things.” You are not uniquely deluded when you misread your Tuesday class. You’re running standard human software.
Teacher-flavored avidya looks like counting 11 students in a room that used to hold 20 and concluding, in the space of one exhale, that you are a bad teacher, that the studio regrets hiring you, that everyone has moved on to the new teacher down the hall. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each one touching a leg or a tail or a tusk and confidently describing a tree, a snake, a spear. As we put it in the book, “to extrapolate from one part creates a misunderstanding of the whole picture. That’s avidya.” The attendance number is the tail of the elephant. It is real, and it is not the animal. Maybe it’s soccer season. Maybe the time change is coming. Maybe your class is exactly as good as it was in March. You are looking at one data point through the lens of your own fear, and the lens is doing most of the work.
Asmita: the toddler who only says “me”
My favorite sentence in this whole section of the book, the one Alexandra and I laughed about while writing: “your ego is like a very loud and persistent toddler who only can speak one word: me.” In the teacher’s seat, that toddler is chatty. It’s the flare of envy when another teacher’s workshop fills and yours doesn’t. It’s checking who showed up before you decide how much to give. It’s demonstrating the fancy arm balance mostly because you’re good at it.
Underneath, the small-s self “often sees the world through the lens of scarcity, believing that there are not enough resources . . . for everyone to have enough and be satiated.” Scarcity is the yoga teacher’s occupational hazard: not enough students, not enough class slots, not enough attention to go around. The toddler is not evil. The book’s counsel here is tenderness, because asmita “comes from a place of fear,” and you can soothe a frightened toddler without handing it the car keys.
Raga and dvesha: two sides of one coin
Craving and aversion are “the two sides of one coin,” and the coin has a lineage. It’s “minted from avidya, wrong-seeing, and then polished by attachment to ego, asmita.” I love that image because it tells you these aren’t five separate problems; they’re one misperception compounding.
In daily life, raga is the ruined morning when your latte order comes back wrong. In the teacher’s seat, raga is craving the full room, the compliment at the door, the student who calls your class life-changing, and feeling genuinely deflated on the days those don’t arrive. Dvesha is the dread that arrives Sunday night before the 6:00 a.m. Monday class, the clench when the student who corrects your Sanskrit unrolls their mat in the front row, the resentment of the studio schedule you yourself agreed to. Here is the sentence I’d put on the wall of every teacher training: “Both craving and aversion are an act of fighting the reality of things as they are.” The full room and the empty room are both just rooms. The suffering lives in the fight.
Abhinivesha: the well-practiced desire to control
Abhinivesha is usually translated as fear of death, and more broadly as the fear of the unknown. In the book we tell a story about Stephen Colbert, who once riffed on a study showing people enjoy stories more when they know the ending, and “suggested that he could provide joy by offering the biggest spoiler of them all: You die.” Dark, and weirdly liberating.
In the teacher’s seat, abhinivesha rarely announces itself as death-fear. It shows up as clinging: to the class that’s winding down, to the studio that’s struggling, to the version of your teaching that depends on a body that is, like all bodies, changing. It shows up as over-planning, the compulsion to script every transition because the unknown feels unsafe. The book’s diagnostic question applies directly: “Notice if you have a well-practiced desire to know, plan, or be in control.” For most of us who teach, that desire is very well practiced indeed.
The shadow, the groove, and the rut
So the kleshas are in the room. Why does it matter? Because what you won’t look at doesn’t leave. It goes around behind you, where your students can sometimes see it better than you can.
The book has language for this, and it comes straight out of yoga rather than Western psychology. In the chapter on vasanas, the hidden compulsions underneath our habits, we write: “Your shadow self is the part of yourself that you repress or you don’t acknowledge. It may be something you’re lightly aware of, but it brings you shame or discomfort, so you don’t engage with it often.” A vasana is “the trace of past events that still causes present action,” and the book compares it to a lingering scent. The smell in the room right now, for a lot of teachers I mentor, is an old one: the need to be the good student, the approval of a long-ago teacher trainer, the belief that a real yoga teacher has transcended envy and boredom and bad moods.
Most of us somehow picked up that job description along the way, even though nobody actually wrote it: permanently calm, endlessly generous, beyond craving and aversion. So we perform serenity. And the performance is a samskara, a groove worn into a rut. The book’s image is trailblazing: the first path you cut through a field makes every crossing easier, until “what was initially helpful can become harmful. You may wear the grass away, exposing bare earth that’s so trodden down that nothing can grow.” Performing calm probably was helpful once. It got you through your first nerve-racking year of teaching. Ten years on, the same performance may be the thing wearing you bare. (In the book I tell on myself with running, a stress-relief habit that tipped into obsession: mileage targets overruled my own body’s signals, and I ran myself into injury more than once. Yoga teachers do the same thing with equanimity. You can get obsessive about seeming fine.)
And the cost is real. What gets shoved out of view leaks: the snarky aside about another studio, the overcorrection into relentless positivity, the burnout that seems to arrive from nowhere. Students feel the gap, too. They may not know what’s off, but a teacher performing wholeness reads differently in the body than a teacher who is simply present, ordinary feelings and all. The strange mercy here is that your believability as a teacher doesn’t come from having transcended anything: it comes from being a whole person who practices anyway.
This is where svadhyaya comes in, self-study, the fourth niyama, the flashlight for all of this. And autumn happens to be a generous container for the work. The season’s whole curriculum is things becoming visible as they fall away, the tree’s structure showing through as the leaves drop, the shadows stretching as the sun rides lower. You don’t have to manufacture an occasion for self-study. The light is doing half the work for you.
Five small practices, one per klesha
You don’t need a retreat for this work. You need about 10 minutes a week and a little honesty. Most of these are adapted directly from the actions Alexandra and I offer in the book.
For avidya, question, and question again. We borrowed this from Byron Katie’s work in Loving What Is. When the after-class story starts (they’re leaving because I’m slipping), ask the first question: “Is it true?” Your mind will say yes; that’s why you’re upset. Then ask the second: “Can I absolutely know it is true?” The answer, as the book notes, “is usually, if not always, no.” Then posit two alternative explanations for the 11-person Tuesday. Soccer season is allowed to be one of them.
For asmita, the loving self-callout. When you catch yourself teaching for the compliment, or checking the roster before deciding how much heart to bring, say it kindly to yourself: “My ego is not my Self.” We pair this in the book with Walt Whitman, whom Alexandra and I will both quote at any opportunity: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” You contain the envious teacher and the generous one. Both get to be in the room.
For raga and dvesha, the mindful pause. Three slow breaths between the trigger and the response. When the dread of the 6:00 a.m. class rises Sunday night, breathe before you reach for your phone to find a sub. The book also suggests the benign placeholder: before you cancel, before you snap, before you soothe the feeling with something you’ll regret, try a smaller, kinder substitute and see if the wave passes. It usually passes.
For abhinivesha, memento mori, the teacher’s version. The book offers a mantra that sounds bleak and lands as freedom: “None of this matters, and we all die.” Read it as celebration, because “if none of this inherently matters, that means you alone get to create your own meaning!” Your Tuesday class will end someday. The studio will change. Your demonstration body will change. Saying that out loud, on purpose, loosens the grip enough to let you actually teach the class in front of you.
For the vasanas underneath it all, journal. Ten minutes after you teach, once a week, write down what actually moved through you during class: what irritated you, who you envied, what you dreaded, what relieved you. Treat the list as data, not as an indictment. The student who reliably irritates you is not a problem to fix; they’re a flashlight pointed somewhere interesting. And if a pattern keeps surfacing, work backward the way the book suggests and ask which old event is still writing this reaction. You may find that “many of your current tendencies for self-protection . . . arise from something that is no longer a threat to you.”
Two boundaries, and one performance to set down
Two boundaries make all five practices safer. Find one place where you get to be a whole person about your teaching life: a peer, a mentor, a journal that no one looks at. Your students are not that place; they came for class, not for your weather report. And let one performance fall this season, the way the trees are demonstrating. (Driving a North Carolina back road last year, I passed a church sign that said, “The trees are about to show us how beautiful it is to let go.”) Maybe it’s the elaborate weekly theme, the relentlessly cheerful greeting when your day has been genuinely hard, the pretense that you love every pose you teach. Set one down and teach a class as yourself. My guess, from years of trying it: your students won’t notice the performance was load-bearing, but you will notice its absence, immediately, in how tired you aren’t afterward.
If the light catches something this season, an envy, a dread, a relief you weren’t expecting, you don’t owe anyone an apology for it. Wrong-seeing is the default. The toddler is loud. The coin has two sides, and the ending is spoiled for all of us. You’re a person who teaches, and the shadow is included in the price of admission. I talk through all of it on episode 106 of Yoga Teacher Confidential, and if you want the full walking tour of the kleshas first, episode 91 is there whenever you need it.
Yoga Off the Mat, the book Alexandra DeSiato and I wrote, is full of ways to carry this kind of practice into the rest of your life. You can find it here. And if it has already been useful to you, we would be so grateful for a rating and review on your favorite bookseller site.
