The Shala Daily

In a recent video on my site, I waded into one of those questions that makes everyone squirm: who actually gets to teach Ashtanga yoga? The old system was brutally simple. You showed up in Mysore. You practiced under Pattabhi Jois for years, maybe decades. If he decided you were ready, you got authorized. No rubric. No committee. No one checking if the decision was fair.

Was it transparent? Not even close. Was it relational? Absolutely. The assumption was that teaching readiness wasn’t just about whether you could demonstrate postures. It was about something murkier, harder to pin down.

📋 The Checklist Trap

Modern teacher training tries to solve the opacity problem with structure. You need this many hours. These postures. These exams. Everything measurable, everything documented.

But here’s what I keep running into: someone can execute every pose in Primary Series with textbook precision and still teach in ways that damage students. Someone else might never bind in Marichyasana D but have the kind of svadhyaya that shifts how a whole room breathes.

I’ve seen both. The teacher with impeccable form and zero capacity to adapt. The teacher who barely fits the traditional mold but somehow creates space for actual transformation.

The video talks about closed systems versus open systems. A closed system assumes you can control all the variables—tick the right boxes, produce a qualified teacher. An open system recognizes that teaching happens inside a tangle of relationships, histories, bodies, and contexts that refuse to be standardized.

🧭 What We’re Actually Looking For

So if checklists don’t capture it, what does? A few things that matter more than a clean jump-back:

Can you see the student in front of you, or just the ideal form you’re trying to impose? Do you understand dharma—that each person’s path has its own shape? Are you doing your own work, or teaching to avoid it?

And maybe the hardest one: do you have an ethical framework that includes the possibility that you might be wrong?

That last question is where the old model often failed. Authorization came with authority. Authority went unquestioned. We know how that story ends.

🔥 Better Questions

I don’t think there’s a perfect system waiting to be discovered. But we can ask sharper questions.

If you teach: What’s your relationship to tapas—not just on the mat, but in your life? Are you growing or performing growth? How do you handle conflict? What happens when a student’s body doesn’t do what you expect, when your method doesn’t work?

If you’re a student: What do you actually need from a teacher right now? Precision or permission? Challenge or safety? Those needs shift. The teacher who’s right for you today might not be right for you in two years.

The video ends without resolution, which feels right. Maybe the point isn’t to perfect the certification process. Maybe it’s to stay in the discomfort of not having a clean answer, and to keep asking what teaching and learning actually require from us. Not what they required in 1985 in Mysore, not what some training manual says—but what they require here, now, with these specific bodies and histories in the room.