For the last two years I’ve been hosting small group mentor calls for my teacher’s online 500-Hour Advanced Teacher Training. With COVID the demand for online teacher trainings has risen and I’ve been fortune to work with a teacher who wants to include me in his trainings to support teachers on their journey.

With these mentor calls I’ve had the opportunity to connect with teachers from all over the US and Canada. Some are brand new teachers fresh from their first 200-Hour Teacher Training. Others have been teaching group classes and guiding private clients for longer than I have. Although we all come from different places and have different teaching backgrounds, it seems as though almost every conversation has included the same question: What am I even doing?

Teaching yoga can come with a lot of baggage. Like many fields and occupations, there tends to be a lot of imposter syndrome and insecurities.

Am I even qualified to be teaching yoga?

Do I have enough knowledge and experience to consider myself a teacher?

What am I even doing?

Early on in my yoga teaching career I was generally quite confident. At that point I had been teaching dance classes for a few years and teaching dance and yoga were pretty much the same thing, right? (Full transparency, 2022 Erin is rolling her eyes at that thought.) I knew, or at least I thought I knew, exactly what I was doing. I showed up, came prepared with a sequence that involved some tricky transitions, bumping music, and everyone seemed to leave class pretty satisfied with that I had to offer.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with how I was teaching early on in my career. I was probably a pretty solid teacher. I cared about the students that showed up for my classes and I showed up to the best of my ability. However, a few years into my teaching career, my approach shifted. I started to take myself and my yoga studies more seriously. And with that shift popped up this recurring question that sticks with me to this day, “What am I even doing?”

I’m coming up on 13 years of teaching yoga and I still wonder if I even know what I’m doing. And I don’t see that as a bad thing.

In the mentor calls that I’ve been hosting there’s a sense of defeat that simmers up when a fellow teacher questions themselves. After teaching yoga for so many years I should feel like I know what I’m doing, right? I often remind teachers that it’s okay to not know what you’re doing. Perhaps that’s part of the process.

I see the process of reflection and questioning as a huge positive. Whether you’re teaching yoga, practicing yoga, or doing something unrelated to yoga, when you stop questioning you ultimately stop growing and evolving. Yoga, in its many forms, is all about awareness and self-inquiry. It’s important for yoga teachers to give themselves space to constantly question themselves for their own growth. At the end of the day their students are just going to benefit from the never-ending process.

What am I even doing?

Always growing.