Manifesto
If you have ever walked out of your own yoga class wondering if what you taught was good, than this is for you.
For over a decade, the same story has circulated through blog posts, forums, and advice columns: yoga teachers describing empty rooms, spiraling self-doubt, feedback that amounts to opinion and a persistent, unshakable sense that their certification left them unprepared for the actual work. We all feel it, have felt it, even when we lack the language for it.
The same pattern repeats across studios, cities, and states. Even teachers with twenty years’ experience unknowingly send mixed messages, over-cue, or keep their eyes fixed on the mat trying to remember their sequence while practitioners are disengaged, confused, and largely unnoticed.
Delivery has become so inconsistent while we have an entire billion-dollar wellness economy that has emerged that last 5 years that promises consumers the same things yoga can do in 1 class.
This is no individual failing, it is an industry that has long operated on feels and vibes and a call for a fundamental reconsideration of how yoga is taught, how teachers are trained and how studios operate.
Why YOGAUX Exists
Understanding how to teach yoga from the perception of the learner (student/practitioner) might just help struggling new teachers or dare I say, veteran teachers, more than we all realize. There continues to be a persistent gap in the yoga industry of “strong teachers” derived from researched-backed principles of learning science, human behavior, memory and integrating them all at once.
Certification programs are disconnected from producing skilled educators.
This creates teachers who are underprepared to teach and instead just regurgitate.
This forces them to recall memory from their mats and perpetuates an insecure identity crisis.
This means studios think they need to "invent yoga styles" to differentiate in a crowded market.
This confuses consumers about what they're actually looking for.
This accidentally built a multi-billion dollar wellness economy that now perpetuates itself because business systems measure the wrong things with the wrong vocabulary.
The reality is that teaching yoga is an act of service.
Learning to teach any learner who rolls out their mat requires clear communication, adaptive training methods, with skills to recognize patterns, behaviors, multi-task, and reduced subjective narratives of improvement with defined standards for what “good teaching” actually is.
Yoga teachers deserve tools to be fully integrated in their own classes, lead with confidence, create with deliberate intention so meaningful connections with students and the practice, don’t inadvertently create another industry that promises everything yoga does.
Teachers deserve methodology, not mystique and students deserve consist delivery and less confusion. We’re not here to tell teachers “any yoga is better than theirs”…
Choosing to become a yoga teacher is a powerful decision that can transform your practice and your community.
We just want you to know, great yoga teachers aren’t just born. They’re built.
—Brittney Coates, Founder