Why I Stopped Teaching Yoga

For a long time, I felt guilty that I stepped away from teaching yoga.
- Guilty of the loss of confidence.
- Guilty of how long it took me to remember the love within this practice.
- Guilty that something I loved so deeply had become something I needed distance from.

With time, space and more breath in my body, I can feel the truth clearly - Stepping away from teaching yoga may have been the most devoted act of yoga I have ever practiced.

The Beginning

My first teaching role came from a place of hunger. Not spiritual hunger but survival hunger.

I finished my training and yearned to be a teacher, I said yes to the first opportunity that came. I only knew how to please, how to follow, how to fit myself into spaces that didn’t always feel right (because that’s what the patriarchy and a toxic home taught me, right?) A sheep following the herd while quietly sensing something wasn’t right.

As a white woman walking a spiritual path rooted in traditions much older than my lineage, I have learned to slowly and humbly listen (and speak up). I see how often yoga in the west becomes whitewashed and disconnected from its roots - how a practice rooted in liberation can become another hierarchy, another place where power is distorted. 

The studio I worked in was unhealthy: the leadership was angry, manipulative, and rooted in control rather than care. At the time I didn’t have the awareness or language to name it. My body knew, but I had not yet learned how to listen to that inner feeling. I wasn’t awake enough, not to myself, and not to the deeper roots of this practice to recognize how far that environment was from the heart of yoga.

Instead, I kept showing up. Teaching. Performing. Trying to prove something. 

2020: My mom died.

2022: I taught my last in person class from the mat.

2026: I am writing this article from the heart.

I Quit and Embodied the Student

Grief rearranges everything -  the inner world, the outer world. Losing my mom at 26 became the catalyst that set the veil on fire, sending the layers of my life slipping away faster than I could comprehend.

I was burnt out. Exhausted. Numb. Raw. Angry. Confused. Heartbroken. I kept teaching, my body tired and my heart heavy, the practice holding me while I learned to hold myself.

Struggling to pay rent, to buy food, feeling alone and unsupported - I couldn’t keep living this way. I quit and moved to a new state. I worked as a field instructor at a wilderness camp; that experience changed my life. It forced me into myself in ways I hadn’t known were possible. I felt community for the first time ever; I was seen. I found passion. I felt sparks of being alive again. I began to feel my grief instead of being consumed by it. I was holding myself with more ease.

I contemplated returning to the mat asking myself again and again: “Am I ready to teach again?” The call never landed in my body.
I thought it was a lack of confidence and in some ways, it was. But over time I began to understand it differently: my nervous system was asking for sacredness - time, space, depth.

I needed to step away from teaching to truly become a student. For the first time in my life, I am deeply devoted to my personal and collective practice. Yoga has expanded vast and alive through me.

Devotion and Remembering

In the years I stepped away from teaching, I have returned to myself - I returned to yoga; to its heart, its roots, its sacred essence. And there, I found bhakti ~ the path of devotion.

• Devotion to truth.

• Devotion to love, in all her forms.

• Devotion to this Earth, and the sacredness that lives in all things.

The essence of Mother Kali moving through me; fierce, transformative, burning away illusion. The essence of Krishna whispering reminders of love, surrender, and sacred play. This sacred Earth and the medicine of plants revealing my inner world so I can be inside the practice of self study.

Yoga is no longer something I teach; I embody - it is continuously teaching me. Evolving as both student and teacher for the entirety of this experience. 

And the realization in this time away is that I never stopped teaching - I just stopped teaching from a yoga mat - teaching changed form.

I have been teaching myself; tending to my own heart and practice, embodying presence.

I have been teaching in conversations with community and strangers.
In quiet moments holding space for another.
In the energy I bring into a room.
In the love I express towards this experience.

That is the space I want to create in this world - a space where devotion, presence, and love are continuously teaching, reminding others of the teacher already within.

The pause is the practice. It is the medicine. It is the teacher.

I’m not sure when I will return to teaching yoga in the traditional sense but it will come from service, liberation, love, devotion, and truth and it will arrive when it is meant to arrive.

Thank you to all my teachers - near and far, seen and unseen.
With Immense gratitude…. Thank you.

Old pic because that left hand is covered with intentional ink these days but I love the essence of this open palm - an offering