Yoga Is For Everybody? Not Quite...

This 2-minute quiz shows you if yoga is for you. Or what you should do instead.

Why Fake Your Practice and Yoga Teaching?

Happiness | Lifestyle

In school, you can try to fake knowing more than you do but when it comes time for the test the truth comes out by way of your grade.

In bed you can try to fake feeling more than you do, even orgasm, but when it comes down to it you’re only fooling yourself if you think your partner can’t tell.

In teaching yoga, you can show up, pretending to be “ultra spiritual” a la JP Sears and act the part of a yoga teacher, even faking happiness and serenity, but eventually one of two things will happen to you:

  1. You’ll fall apart or give up from the exhaustion of pretending
  2. Your students will call you out as being a Poser.

You can’t keep faking you have your shit together if you really don’t and aren’t even trying to discern what is real or not. Yoga is like truth serum and it will make you tell on yourself.

…Until you wake up.

So why fake it when it comes to yoga teaching? And who are the biggest poser teachers?

Be wary of those teachers that teach yoga, professing to know all the answers to life, to asana, to spiritual questions but never actually practice yoga asana, meditation or practice self-inquiry.

They give the rest of us a bad name that are trying to keep it real. And that means we have to work harder to elevate the profession because of them and I’m pretty sure they’re tired of putting up the façade all the time.

My Advice If You’re Living Life as a Fake

  1. Get over who you think you should be and just start playing the part of yourself.
  2. Get on a mat, go to class, walk, run, ride a bike, breath, move, meditate.
  3. Admit you don’t know and are still learning. No one ever said you had to know everything anyway.
  4. Accept your own humanity as imperfectly perfect. You are not wrong to be afraid and it doesn’t diminish you when you admit it and allow it to empower your next choice.
  5. Avoid “positive denial” where you get stuck in faking positivity. Yogic discernment is about seeing what is real and living in reality. Pretending it’s always “all good” is a sign of being out of balance and lacking discernment.

When everyone starts practicing the most advanced yoga pose, being themselves, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. Today stop pretending and start connecting to what keeps us real.

Let’s learn to face our denials and show up as who we really are, a work in process, just like our students. Love yourself, love your day, love your life.

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