You’re a person who has lived a life, and that life is exactly what you’ll teach from. “Who am I to be a yoga teacher?” has no finish line, because no certificate, birthday, or handstand ever settles it, so the more useful move is to set it down and pick up a question you can actually work on: how can I serve the students in front of me?
I’ve been teaching yoga since 2003 and training yoga teachers since 2011, and sooner or later, someone deciding whether to train asks me this question. I touched on it at the end of my post about whether to become a yoga teacher. Here I’ll go underneath it: where it comes from, what to put in its place, and what to do with it this week.
Why does “Who am I to be a yoga teacher?” feel so loud?
It feels loud because yoga matters to you. People who don’t care much about the practice rarely lie awake wondering whether they deserve to teach it, so the worry often shows how much the practice has given you. Add a steady scroll of yoga teachers who all seem young, bendy, and photographed on a beach, and it’s easy to decide you don’t fit the mold: too old, too heavy, too stiff, too injured, too new to all of it.
That mold is mostly a picture, and the students who will actually come to your class don’t look like it either. They come in after work, after an injury, after a doctor said “you should try yoga,” and they’re hoping the person at the front understands where they’re starting from.
What’s underneath the question?
Underneath “Who am I to be a yoga teacher?” is the ego asking “Am I good enough?” In yoga philosophy, ego (asmita, the sense of a separate, self-important “I”) is one of the kleshas, the causes of suffering, and it has a habit of putting you in the center of a picture where your students belong. If you imagine teaching and feel dread, look at who’s in that picture: usually it’s you, being judged, rather than the students, being helped.
Craft asks a different question: how can I serve this student? That one has answers you can practice. You can learn how to build a balanced class, how to give a clear cue, and how to offer a variation to the person who needs one, and you get a little better at each of them every time you teach.
Is your life experience a qualification or a disqualifier?
It’s material. Think of everything you’ve lived through as the pantry you’ll cook from as a yoga teacher, and know that the ingredients you’re most worried about are often the ones your students will need most.
- If you came to yoga later in life, you remember what it felt like to walk into a first class without knowing where to put your mat, and you’ll make that easier for the next person.
- If you live with an injury or chronic pain, you already know how to look for a version of a pose that works, which is exactly what many students need from a yoga teacher.
- If your body doesn’t look like the ones in the yoga feed, the students who look like you will see someone at the front of class who could be them.
- If you’ve spent years in another line of work—teaching school, nursing, managing a team, raising kids—you’ve been practicing patience and clear directions the whole time.
In The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook I wrote that needing to work around your own limits in practice makes you a more sympathetic and empathetic teacher, and I still tell prospective trainees exactly that. Your limitations can make you a better yoga teacher for people with similar challenges, and even a day when you sit out a pose and watch is a day of learning (sometimes watching teaches more than doing, which suits anyone with a cranky knee).
What do students actually want from a yoga teacher?
They want to feel better when they leave than when they came in. In more than twenty years of teaching, no student has ever asked me for my Yoga Alliance registry number, and none has asked how far I can fold forward. They want a class that’s balanced, useful, and repeatable, led by someone who’s paying attention to them.
That’s a relief, because it moves the job off your résumé and onto your students’ experience, and their experience depends on skills you can learn: how to put a class together, how to say what you mean, how to see who’s in front of you and adjust.
How do you get from “Who am I?” to “Here’s what I can offer”?
You get there with repetition, the same way a new line cook gets comfortable on a busy night: by learning a reliable recipe and cooking it again and again until your hands know it. Nobody can talk you into relaxing (telling someone to relax usually has the opposite effect), but a clear structure and a lot of practice will get you there at your own pace.
A good teacher training is where the pantry becomes a kitchen. You learn a structure for a balanced class that works for whoever shows up, you cook it for real people while someone experienced watches, and you hear specifically what to keep and what to adjust, so the next class is a little better than the last. Your life experience stays the main ingredient the whole time; the training gives you the methods to serve it.
The question may never vanish completely, and that’s OK! Plenty of experienced yoga teachers still feel a flicker of it before a new class. What changes is that it stops running the show, because you have something more useful to think about: the students who just walked in.
What’s a good first next step if the question is still loud?
Start with what you’d teach before you worry about how. Find Your Teaching Voice is a free short course inside the Zone, my free community for yoga teachers, and its lesson “Find Your Teaching Message” helps you work out what your own life has given you to say. It’s a low-stakes way to open the pantry and see what’s already on the shelves.
If that sparks something, see the dates for the next cohort of the Comfort Zone Yoga® 200-Hour Online Yoga Teacher Training. The spring cohort meets live on video call February–April 2027, and applications are open through January 31, 2027. If you’d like to talk the question through with me first, you’re welcome to book a free 30-minute call. And for the whole path, from first class to first job, start with how to become a yoga instructor.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal to feel like a fraud before yoga teacher training?
Yes. It’s one of the most common feelings people bring to a training, and it usually means you take the role seriously.
Am I too old to become a yoga teacher?
Your age is part of what you’ll teach from, and students of every age need yoga teachers who understand where they are. I go into it in too old to become a yoga teacher.
Do I need an advanced practice to teach yoga?
No. You need a steady practice and a willingness to learn to teach; I cover the details in how much yoga experience you need before teacher training, and is it hard to become a yoga instructor covers what the work actually asks of you.
Will the feeling go away after training?
It usually loosens its grip as you teach more, because your attention moves to your students. More on that in ready to teach after yoga teacher training.
