Lineage: supporting each other
This post was written with the support of the American Yoga Council, and will be shared on their blog, The Pulse.
Lineage can be a complicated term for yoga teachers, and one that carries a lot of baggage. Some teachers use lineage as a placeholder for official hierarchies and badges of authority that are earned as much through privilege as through commitment. Some people use lineage to assert their superiority over lesser mortals who haven’t been able to spend years travelling to ashrams or following celebrity teachers around the world.
Traditional, hierarchical lineages can even be terrible organisations, where abuse and ill-treatment festers in the corners and people emerge a decade later, wondering what they spent their formative years doing.
But lineage is also a loaded term, because we all know, and often crave, the idea of both certainty, and community in yoga. And lineage is often where we find both of those things.
I don’t think anyone can give you certainty in the practice of yoga, at least not long term. I think that if you find a teacher who promises positive results of any kind, especially when the answer depends on a simple, universal system, I think you should be very sceptical of them indeed.
But the community: that’s what so many yoga teachers are missing, in my experience. We work surrounded by students, but rarely our peers. And even when we are around our peers, we’re often in competition with them. This makes for collectives of yoga teachers that feel oddly lonely, and very anxious. Consuming more content, whether it’s a podcast or an article like this one, can only go so far in helping us feel seen and heard by each other.
As yoga teachers, where we find community, therefore, is often by taking more training. I wonder if our drive to take more and more courses has less to do with wanting to update our skills or even compete with others, and more to do with just wanting to hang out and learn from each other. That’s so valuable, so rare for many yoga teachers, and honestly? Often worth more than the content of the course on offer.
But at the same time, believe me when I tell you it can be very hard to get yoga teachers to make time to come together unless it’s for a productive reason. We’re not alone in the world in having too much to do, not enough time, and too many other distractions. We want to just hang out in real community together, but in practice, getting to that monthly teachers’ drop in is less of a priority than all the other things we definitely have to do this week.
So many times, taking a 5-session course or weekend workshop in some new aspect of the practice or pedagogy can be the best of both worlds, giving us both new content and new connections to reinvigorate our teaching practice.
Meanwhile, at least in theory, almost every therapeutic and pastoral profession has some form of supervision – either through mentoring, or sharing with peers. But the teaching of movement and stillness, whether it’s yoga or Pilates or meditation or karate, rarely includes any system for teachers to get ongoing support for the work that they do. This is why, when I train yoga teachers, my most common piece of advice is to find some form of ongoing support where you can vent and share about the weird and wonderful work that we do.
The problem is that not all supervisory relationships are equally supportive in nature. Not every yoga teacher’s mentor is well-trained or well-suited to the work. And not all communities are constructive and healthy. Some are echo chambers riddled with toxic inter-personal dynamics, prejudices and jealousies. You don’t need a formal hierarchy to treat other people badly.
In the end, what I’m saying is that we need to think about lineage more deeply, but we also need to take our peer relationships and mentorships much more seriously. Because when you tell me about who your teachers and your inspirations are, you are telling me about what started you on the path to teaching. But when you tell me about the people and groups that support you now, you are telling me about the kind of teacher you are going to become.
And without real and ongoing support, whether it’s from peers or mentors, colleagues or fellow travellers on the path, most of us will burn out and never make it that far.