Honouring yoga's cultural heritage and lineage (answer from Katie)

Katie unpacks how to share chanting, sutras, and the koshas with integrity, drawing on Krishnamacharya’s three pillars for ethical teaching. Love, practice, and lineage become a clear permission slip to teach the subtle work without appropriation.

• service as the foundation for teaching
• embodied practice over performance
• why struggle creates better teaching maps
• naming sources and honouring lineage
• cultural sensitivity in subtle teachings
• practical ways to introduce chanting and koshas

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Chapters

• 0:01 A Sensitive Question On Sharing
• 0:18 Respecting Tradition And Lineage
• 1:03 Krishnamacharya’s Three Requirements
• 2:05 Practise What You Teach
• 2:28 Struggle As Teaching Strength
• 3:19 Credit Your Teachers
• 4:02 A Permission Slip To Share

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Okay, this next question comes from Alain and or Aline. I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. It's not strictly a business question, but it's a great question and it's very relevant to business. So I'm definitely going to answer it here. She says, as a yoga teacher and student, I feel drawn to share the more subtle aspects of yoga like chanting or sharing about the koshas or the sutras. But there's a voice that goes, Who am I to share this? Not because I don't think I understand about it enough, but more out of a sense of respect and a feeling that I'd love to share these aspects with my students in a way that honours yoga tradition and lineage. I'm so glad that you asked this question. I think it is so incredibly important. And as yoga teachers, one of the things that I'm really interested in is making sure that we do not culturally appropriate or yeah, like out of a sense of sort of arrogance or even just misdirection, take on sharing the teachings in a way that is not culturally sensitive or appropriate. The great Krishna Macharya, who really is the grandfather of modern yoga, certainly at modern yoga as it's taught in the West, you know, he was the teacher to BKS Ayanga, he was the teacher to uh Sri Pitabi Joyce and many, many others, Desika Char. He said that you need three things to be a good yoga teacher. He said that you need to love people and really want to serve them. And I think that's a really beautiful foundation. And I can hear from your question that that's very much where you're at. Like you really want to share these teachings and you're passionate about them. Um so that's the first piece, that there's a genuine desire to share and that you love your students and you want the best for them and you want to be, you know, uplifting. Um, the second piece that he believed was important is that you are practicing yourself. So whatever it is you're teaching, um it's part of how you're living. You know, don't talk about vegetarian diet if you yourself are not a vegetarian. Uh, don't teach um, you know, about the koshas if you don't know about the koshas and you're having to like look it up in chat GPT and you don't really know what you're talking about. Like have an embodied practice. If you're teaching yoga asana, practice yoga asana. If you're teaching pranayama, practice pranayama. So you should be um engaged in the practices that you're teaching. Now, there's an important caveat there, which is you don't need to necessarily be a master of them. So I always give the example of handstand, which was my nemesis for so many years. I struggled for years with handstand pose, and then I eventually got to the place where I was fairly proficient with it, um, but it took a long time. And I've always felt that I'm a really good teacher for inversions because of my struggles. Like if you're able to just do something really quickly and easily, you're probably not gonna be the best teacher because it just came so easily to you. So, what what tools, what tricks do you have that you can share with people? On the other hand, if you've struggled and worked really hard and been challenged by something, um, you're gonna be such a great teacher of that thing because you know the tricks, you know the practices, you know the hacks, because you've done it yourself, you've been through it. So being in relationship to what you're teaching, but not necessarily perfect at it is really important. And then the third piece that Krishna Macharya said were prerequisites to be a teacher, a good teacher, is a sense of lineage and understanding your own teachers. So if you understand where you've come from, and if you're humble and if you're honest about your passion for the teachings, but also about the fact that this is where I learnt this, this is where I read this, this is the teacher that taught me this. You credit your sources, you acknowledge your teachers, and you continue to be in relationship with your teachers. In other words, you're not just out arrogantly um, you know, creating your own intellectual property, creating your own method without any sense of connection or reverence, um, then you're on the right track. My own teachers, Sharon Gannon and David Life, created the Jiva Mukti Yoga method in the 1980s, but they did so in humble um acknowledgement of the three teachers that had really informed their learning and their practice. And those teachers and that lineage was the anchor point for the method they created, which was Jiva Mukti Yoga. So I'm answering your question using the teachings from a great master, Krishna Macharya, um, and what his guidance was around what it takes to be a good yoga teacher, what it takes to be an ethical yoga teacher, and then almost a bit of a permission slip around sharing the teachings, um, as long as you keep those three important factors in mind.