Your Seven Questions · YogaSoul
There is more in yoga than you have been able to reach.

Here they are

Seven questions to ask any
teacher training before you pay.

None of them are trick questions and none of them are about us. Ask them of every school you are considering, including ours, and pay attention to what happens in the pause before the answer.

Who is actually in the room every weekend?

Programs get sold on one teacher's name and delivered by a rotating cast. Ask for the name of the person who will be there every single weekend, and then ask what happens if that person is sick. A school that brings in guest teachers is not a problem. A school where nobody is consistently present is a different thing entirely.

How many people were in your last cohort?

Not the cap. The actual number, the last three times they ran it. "Small" means different things to different schools, and twenty-four is not small. If they will not give you a number, that is your answer.

What week do I teach for the first time?

If the answer is somewhere near the end, you will graduate having taught a handful of times. Standing at the front of a room is not something you can learn about. Ask for the week, and be suspicious of a program that saves it for last.

What are we reading?

Ask for the list. If it is a spiral-bound manual rather than the Sutras, the Gita, and the actual texts, you are being given a summary of a tradition instead of the tradition.

Whose lineage is this?

Every real tradition can trace itself, teacher to teacher. If the answer is a style name or a brand, ask again. If nobody can name their teacher's teacher, that is not a lineage. It is a curriculum.

What happens when life happens?

Someone in every cohort gets sick, or has a funeral to get to, or loses a job halfway through. Ask what they did the last time it happened, not what the policy says. The answer tells you whether you are a student or a line on a roster.

Would you ever tell me not to enroll?

Ask it straight, and watch what happens next. A program that has never turned anyone away is optimizing for enrollment rather than for you. The good ones will say no sometimes, and they will tell you why.

We wrote these, and we answer all seven on our own site, which is either useful or self-serving depending on how you read it. If someone gets cagey on the last one, you have learned what you needed to know.

Rachel Cieslewicz practicing in Salt Lake City

Now see how we answer them.

Both trainings answer all seven on the page. If anything here raises a question we have not covered, write to Rachel and ask it.