Taking yourself from being a student to teaching yoga is a huge leap with big rewards. Check out these personal and emotional benefits yoga teachers experience.
Teaching yoga is the way to learn more about yoga practice in your own life.
If you are a yoga practitioner you already know at least some of the benefits of yoga in your own life. In the east, the benefits have been understood and celebrated for thousands of years. Western science is just catching up with research into the health benefits.
In this article, you will learn about why taking the step from practicing yoga to teaching it can bring great rewards.
Learning how to teach yoga and gaining the appropriate certifications is part of the experience so you’ll learn a little about that too.
Read on for 10 reasons to start teaching yoga.
1. Earn $400,000 a Year
Is $400,000 a year a reason for teaching yoga?
While a few yoga teachers earn big money, they are few and far between. Most yoga teachers don’t earn great sums but perhaps they can learn something from those that do.
Eva Taylor, owner of YAMA Talent, an agency for yoga teachers says she has clients who make that kind of money. How do they do it?
Event appearances are the top-earning gigs. Give a live lecture or lead a conference teaching session and you could earn between $5,000 and $10,000 over a weekend.
Publish a yoga book and you can add tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your earnings. Endorse a brand of leggings and make some social media posts about it and you have another source of revenue.
If you want to learn about teaching yoga, check out the fees for attending training. You’ll discover that teaching others to teach yoga must be financially rewarding. Multiply the fees by the number of students and deduct an estimate for costs and you have a tidy profit.
Deliver online classes on third-party platforms or even from your own website or youtube channel. It’s an opportunity that the top-earning yoga teachers exploit. Contemplate the irony of thousands of years of yoga heritage delivered to thousands of yoga content consumers while you check your bank balance.
Add to the revenue with merchandise such as branded clothing and associated sales of perfumed candles and incense sticks. You might even deliver yoga classes, occasionally.
2. Improve Your Yoga Practice
If you are already practicing yoga you are aware of the physical benefits. Perhaps your physical practice is competent. On the other hand, perhaps you have some gaps in your knowledge and practice.
Wherever you are in your yoga journey learning to teach will accelerate you forward. Your physical practice will intensify as you learn and are challenged by the teacher training. You will learn variations and fill gaps in your knowledge and skills.
Learning to help others with their practice and the alignment that is right for them will help you explore your own practice and alignment. This will take your practice to new heights. With this intensified practice will come the increased benefits.
3. Reap the Health Rewards
What health rewards can you expect?
Expect greater flexibility and alignment together with improved posture. Build muscle strength. Together these reduce the impact of aging, arthritis, and back pain.
Yoga practice takes joints through their full range of movement and helps prevent cartilage degeneration and damage to joints. Backbends and twists keep the spinal disks moving and healthy.
Weight-bearing exercises such as downward and upward facing dog strengthen bones and help prevent osteoporosis. Increasing blood flow gets oxygen around your body to boost tissue health.
The lymphatic system benefits from contracting and stretching muscles, and increasing the drainage of lymph. This helps fight infection and dispose of toxins. You have better digestion and less irritable bowel problems.
Increased heart rate during yoga practice lowers the risk of a heart attack. Exercise has also been found to boost your mood and may be useful for people with moderate depression. Increased serotonin levels associated with yoga practice and especially meditation have been found to be associated with greater happiness.
Improved coordination, relaxation, balance and less tension all contribute to improved well-being.
4. Develop Your Meditation Practice
When teaching yoga, you have an obligation to walk the talk. Your personal practice must reflect what you teach. This integrity communicates to your pupils and builds their confidence in you as their guide.
The physical practice of yoga positions or postures is only a part of yoga teaching. Chanting and meditation practices offer access to mental or spiritual growth. A daily practice of meditation will deepen your understanding of your mind.
This understanding of your mind will help you discover truths about yourself. You will become aware of patterns of thinking that are helpful and unhelpful. You will learn to make changes to the way you think.
Learning to help others meditate can become a means of developing your own practice.
5. Learn to Teach
Teaching yoga will provide you with an understanding of how people learn and how to teach. Different people learn in different ways and no one teaching method works for everybody.
You will meet enthusiastic beginners and disillusioned learners. You will meet reluctant contributors and peak performers. Learn to provide them with the direction and support they need to progress.
You will learn how to plan a class, keep it interesting, motivate, and enthuse. Learn to teach novices and experts alike.
These transferable skills can be applied to other subjects and skills in and outside of work. The experience of teaching yoga is great for improving teaching in school, training in the workplace, and leading teams or coaching.
6. Learn About Business
Like any other business person teaching yoga on a freelance basis, you need business skills. You have to learn about getting clients, keeping clients, and handling difficult clients. You have to manage suppliers and cope with competition.
Managing costs and finances are important you can find yourself being a busy fool, working hard but not making any profit. These transferable skills apply to any business.
Combining teaching or coaching skills and business experience can be a powerful skill set for your career.
7. Learn to Overcome Challenges
An estimated 75% of people experience some form of anxiety about speaking in public. Some studies have shown that many people fear public speaking more than death.
If you have some anxieties about talking to groups of people you can overcome them. Stretching your comfort zone and becoming more used to speaking to a class comes with experience.
Other challenges you may face include negotiating with suppliers, sticking at it when things are not going well and the challenge of learning.
Teaching yoga can be an opportunity to overcome these challenges and be a source of confidence that you can overcome other challenges in your life.
8. Building a Community
When you are teaching yoga you build a special rapport with the students. They learn to trust you and you help them progress. The plus that yoga gives people in their lives creates a unique shared experience with you and the students.
The bonds you make with people you learn to teach yoga with can be very strong too. The network you establish at this stage in your career can be a tremendous support as you face challenges establishing yourself as a teacher.
This community of support and learning is very rewarding and can last for many years.
9. Build Confidence
Successfully developing your yoga practice and living a more healthy life can lead to greater beliefs in the benefits of yoga and your confidence as a yoga teacher.
Overcoming the challenge of learning and establishing yourself as a yoga teacher builds on this. A community of support and shared learning further re-enforces your confidence.
10. Real Job Satisfaction
Research shows that while we need money to live, pay is not the main thing that motivates people in their work. The three things that motivate people are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
“Autonomy” is about being self-directed, choosing your own way. A freelance yoga teacher chooses their own way. Even an employed yoga teacher usually has autonomy over the design and delivery of the yoga class.
“Mastery” is about the need we have to be good at something. We like to get better at things. If yoga is something you would want to get better at for fun, how motivating is it to gain mastery of it as a job?
“Purpose” is about having a reason for doing what you are doing. For many people, it’s not about the money, it’s more than the money. It’s about making a difference to people’s lives.
These three motivators in your life combine to provide a source of real job satisfaction.
Start Teaching Yoga
Some or all these 10 reasons to start teaching yoga may resonate with you. As with all teaching, it starts with learning. You have a learning journey to start.
Learn about yoga practice. Learn about teaching it. Most of all learn about yourself.
To learn more about learning and certification click here.