Part I: Embody Yoga as a Teacher?
What Does It Mean to Embody Yoga as a Teacher?
A reflection on the inner work that quietly shapes the way we teach.
I once taught at an upscale wellness facility where, one day, I opened class by chanting a single Om and later offered students a very modified headstand. After class, the person overseeing the yoga kindly let me know that neither was permitted at their gym.
I respected their guidelines, and still do. They had every right to decide what kind of yoga they wanted to offer, and I had no doubt they would find a teacher whose way of teaching aligned beautifully with that. But I also knew that, for me, continuing to teach there would mean leaving out parts of the practice that felt important to the way I understood and shared yoga. I felt a bit of incongruence, so I chose not to continue teaching there. I also realize that not every teacher has the freedom to make such a choice.
The point was never that an Om or a headstand was necessary for a class to be yoga. Neither is. What stayed with me was the realization that I needed to pay attention to whether the way I was being asked to teach still felt aligned with the yoga I was actually practicing and living.
We may be deeply devoted to our own practice and still discover that the way we teach can be shaped by expectations, by a hope to grow a following, and by what we’ve learned from teachers we admire. Some of that influence is natural and even beautiful. We learn from one another. We absorb language, sequencing, philosophy, and ways of relating from the people who’ve taught us, and when someone moves us deeply, of course something of what we received may find its way into our own teaching.
Still, somewhere along the way, it seems worth becoming curious about what has become part of our own lived experience and what we may simply be repeating because it’s familiar, expected, admired, or successful.
We all know there’s more to teaching yoga than alignment cues, a well-timed playlist, and the quiet pursuit of more… more poses, fuller rooms, greater recognition, or a stronger sense of security. Yoga has always asked us to turn inward, and the places we’ve excavated within ourselves inevitably become part of what we are able to offer. We can only lead someone as far inward as we have been willing to travel ourselves.
So it seems worth asking sincerely, every so often, whether we’re still exploring. Are we still curious about our own depths, or have we quietly settled into a version of practice that feels comfortable rather than one that continues to ask something of us?
Yoga gives us a Sanskrit word for this willingness to remain engaged: tapas, the disciplined effort of practice, traditionally associated with the heat through which impurities and obstacles are gradually worked through. I don’t believe this means our practice must always be difficult or severe. Sometimes tapas may look much quieter than that. It may be the willingness to sit still when we would rather move, to remain with a question we can’t quite find an answer for, to reconsider an assumption we’ve been carrying for years, or to notice when something familiar has become so comfortable that we no longer feel challenged.
And then there’s another question, one I suspect will land differently for each of us: is your yoga spiritual?
If it is, does your relationship with it still invite you toward places you can’t entirely explain or understand? Is there something about the word spiritual that makes you sort of recoil, perhaps because of what you’ve seen done in its name, or because it asks you to consider something beyond what can be seen? Have you found a way of practicing yoga that allows you to remain mostly within what is visible and physical, or does the practice sometimes draw you toward the subtler places as well?
As we mature as students and teachers, the questions themselves tend to mature alongside us. They become less concerned with what we’re supposed to be doing and more interested in who we’re becoming through the practice.
Perhaps that is part of what makes the inward path feel so spacious. Just when we think we understand ourselves, another layer appears, another pattern becomes visible, or something we thought had been settled asks to be met again from a different place. Some traditions speak of a final awakening, a point at which the seeking falls away. My own experience has felt less like arriving and more like moving through an ever-deepening spiral, where each opening seems to reveal another.
When Our Spiritual Practice Becomes Embodied
I’ve always believed spirituality is something we can nourish and open ourselves toward. We invite it through meditation, prayer, pranayama, honest self-study, and a willingness to remain curious about the parts of existence that are mysterious and ambiguous. None of these practices guarantees that we become more compassionate, honest, or awake, but they give us somewhere to keep returning.
Yoga has always been concerned with what is beyond the visible world. Its teachings speak of prana and nadis, consciousness and the subtle body, devotion, liberation, and realities extending well beyond the shape of a physical body expressing a certain posture. We may understand those teachings differently, and our spiritual lives may take very different paths, but the invitation to look beneath the physical surface of things is ever present in yoga.
Embodiment, to me, is what gradually happens when these practices are no longer simply things we do but begin influencing who we are. They find their way into our willingness to listen, how we respond, the way we use power, how we meet another person’s vulnerability, and certainly how we teach.
We can complete trainings, study with respected teachers, attend workshops, meditate, chant, and spend years practicing asana, but eventually another question waits for us: The practice is always shaping us in some way, but are we allowing ourselves to be shaped by it?
Because in the end, our students are encountering more than the trainings we’ve completed or the teachers we’ve studied with. They’re encountering what the practice has gracefully been sharing with us.
For me, I hope those qualities are humility, honesty, love, compassion, and forgiveness. Yours may be completely different, and that difference is part of what makes life beautiful. Each of us brings a certain essence to the practice, influenced by what we’ve lived through, what we’ve questioned and wrestled with, and what we’re still trying to wrap our head and heart around.
Perhaps that’s why I’d rather stay thirsty for the deeper parts of this practice than become complacent with what I already know.
If you’d like to continue the reflection, Part II, The Inner Practices of an Embodied Yoga Teacher, explores some of the practices that may help us live this inquiry more fully as teachers.
If something in this reflection is stirring something in you, whether it is a question about your own depth, your own blind spots, or simply a longing to be met and understood, I offer 1:1 Support Sessions, sixty minutes online, rooted in ancient wisdom and lived experience.
Leslie Storms is a yoga and meditation teacher, marriage and family therapist, registered nurse, aromatherapist, Ayurveda nutrition counselor, marma point therapist and Reiki practitioner. Her work draws from decades of lived, embodied experience across healthcare, therapy and contemplative practice.
