What Makes You Qualified to Teach Yin Yoga

What Makes You “Qualified” to Teach Yin Yoga?
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[00:00:00] Hello. Today, we are going to talk about

When are we qualified to teach Yin Yoga? And does getting a certificate from a teacher training qualify you to teach Yin Yoga

And can you ever really be done learning to teach Yin Yoga? And then what happens beyond the certification? And what a certification can’t teach you about Yin Yoga So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So if that sounds intriguing to you, stay tuned

Welcome, or welcome back to a Yin Yoga podcast. Thanks for coming back, y’all. My friends, if you have not yet [00:01:00] rated the podcast and offered a review on whatever platform you’re listening, I would be uber grateful if you would do that.

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Before we dive into the episode, I just wanna thank, Jane, I believe her last name is Leroid? I don’t know if I’m saying that right. Jane from the UK, for hitting that, , wanna support my work button.

So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, in every single episode show notes, there’s a little button, or a link, it’s not a button, a link that [00:02:00] says, “Do you wanna support my work?” So for those of you who’ve been listening for a long time, and you’ve already rated and, you know, subscribed and followed and left reviews and done all those things and you still wanna find a way to show your appreciation, that just takes you right to PayPal, and you can just drop in whatever amount strikes your fancy.

It, helps to keep me in matcha and microphones, as I often say. And then no pressure whatsoever to do that, but for those of you who do, thank you. And thank you, Jane. And then a second reminder, dear listener, is that this podcast is an adult podcast with adult subject matter, and intended for adult audiences.

So if you have small people around, you are gonna wanna grab some headphones now. Okay, let’s dive into the episode. So this idea was sparked in me based on a comment that I saw in a Yin Yoga network group. [00:03:00] And the comment, I won’t say the whole thing ’cause I don’t wanna out somebody, they had asked a question, and then somebody had said something about, “Well, you know, learning that in my training,” or, “Didn’t you learn that in your Yin training?”

Or, you know, “I found these things that you’re asking for in my Yin training,” something like that. I think I had chimed in, and a few other people had said, “Oh, that’s in my Yin training.” About the answer to the question was en- encased in our Yin trainings. And the person said, “Well, I’m already certified to teach Yin.

I just wanted to know if there’s any blah, blah, blah.” And that really got me thinking. I’m already certified to teach Yin. Hmm. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Can we ever be certified to teach Yin? And does certified mean qualified? We don’t know. So that’s why this episode. I do have notes, ’cause I have done a little brainstorming

so my friends, if you are watching the video on YouTube and you see my eyes looking down and then coming [00:04:00] back up, that would be why. I’m trying to keep myself on track. So a certification or a certificate may give permission to start teaching. And then you even think about that. Permission from whom?

Whom is giving you this permission to start teaching? Yoga is an unregulated industry, which I am grateful for, and also has its negatives. But mostly I’m grateful for. So who is giving you this permission? Is it the person who gave you the certificate? Is it the Yoga Alliance? , I know other countries have other versions.

I know in Canada we actually do have a Canadian Yoga Alliance which is not at all connected to the American Yoga Alliance. So is it some sort of registry body that likes us to think that they’re a certification body and that they’re, air quotes, “certifying” us to teach? So who’s giving us this permission attached to this certificate?

That [00:05:00] right there is worth questioning. But let’s just argue if a certificate does give you permission to begin teaching, but it doesn’t signal completion. And in many ways, the deeper someone goes into yin yoga, the more nuanced, complex, and unknowable this practice actually becomes .

So one of the annoying things about yoga culture is how quickly we can start identifying ourselves as experts. Someone takes a weekend training and suddenly they’re, air quotes, “certified.” Having a certificate from a Yin Yoga training doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to teach Yin Yoga. In my over, at the time of this recording, 22 years in the yoga world has taught me that there’s a huge difference between being certified and qualified.

Having a certificate is one thing, being deeply [00:06:00] steeped in something is another. Now, I’m not saying this to be judgemental, I’m just trying to identify a problem that exists in our yoga verse and as a reflection on our modern certification culture You know, back in the olden days, you know how yoga teachers came about?

They did not take a 200-hour or a weekend, you know, workshop in restorative or yin and then march forth and start teaching. Nay, nay, I say. They found a teacher, and they studied deeply with that teacher, probably over the course of years, and that teacher, in sort of like an apprenticeship model, and then eventually that teacher gave them a little tap on the head or a push on the butt or whatever it is and says, “Now you, go, go forth and teach.”

This is how it used to be done. But of course, you bring things to the West, and , the certification, , process becomes sort of Americanized or Westernized. And [00:07:00] now all of a sudden people sign up, they give you money, they do some certain number of hours. They may or may not actually have to do any homework for that program.

They may or may not have actually had to had an established practice before they even started that program. That’s a rant for another time. But they sign up, and they give you their credit card, and they pay, and so now they are expecting a piece of paper that says, “I am certified.” But what does certification actually mean?

Maybe it’s permission to begin. We could debate that even. Who’s giving this permission? But it’s not mastery, and this modern fast-track learning culture that we have where people take a weekend training and then suddenly think they’ve got it all, or they take the, a bunch of new information in an intensive format, you know, sort of straight through in 10 days or 7 days or a weekend and then they think they’re [00:08:00] certified, they think they’ve got it, they’re, it’s down, they’re ready.

This is one of the reasons that I do not offer my training in a intensive way, and the only way that I would do that is if we were all away somewhere, like at a retreat center or something, where people had nothing else in their life to focus on. They weren’t doing laundry, they weren’t dealing with kids, they weren’t going to their day job if they had one.

They, you know, weren’t any of that. They were literally just immersing themselves. I think if people are already experienced teachers and they can do it in that way, then maybe we can have a course run in a more immersive way. But even then, it’s still better if it’s stretched out, ’cause here’s why, my friends.

So weekend trainings, , just cram a bunch of information in your head, and it doesn’t even have time to sort of settle into your bones. You don’t really have time to sit with it, to practice with it, to question it, to come back to the instructor and ask questions once [00:09:00] you’ve, , sat with the information for a few weeks.

So this is why I’m not a fan of weekend trainings, and I’m not a fan of, like, intensive immersives either, unless they’re tropically away somewhere. It doesn’t have to be tropical, but just away, where the s- the people are away from their lives so they can 100% focus on the training. Because here’s what I know, and I know this because I used to teach long before I started teaching yoga, I used to teach hair, and that the overwhelmed mind says no, and when there’s a whole bunch of information coming at you in a condensed way, like in a weekend, there’s only so much of that you’re going to absorb.

And then the weekend’s over, and woof, the teacher’s gone. You have this piece of paper, but actually now you have maybe more questions than you had to start off with, or you don’t really have anyone to ask those questions to. So this is my problem with that model. So this modern fast-track learning culture that we have where we like to think we can just get all this [00:10:00] information in an intensive and actually understand and remember and question it- Weekend trainings versus longer trainings.

So for example, my trainings are spread out over a season at this point, and they’re a weekend or two a month with gaps in between so that people come with me for a weekend, we learn, learn, learn, learn, learn stuff, and at least 90 minutes of it is practice. So they learn a bunch of stuff, they get a chance to practice, and then they get to go home and go over the information and practice the things that we’ve done and sit with it, and then they get to come back and ask questions.

That wouldn’t happen if it was just a shorty weekend training. Now, I do think that a short weekend training can be… This, the purpose that a short weekend training can serve is just to let you know if this is something you wanna do. So if you’re like, “You know, I really like yin, and it sure would be nice to broaden [00:11:00] my yoga teaching horizons, but I’m not 100% yin yet,” not pun intended, not totally in, maybe I’ll take like a 20-hour or 30-hour.

Okay, that is a smart use of a 20 or a 30-hour, knowing that if that 20 or 30-hour wets your whistle, you’re gonna dive way deeper later, right? But not thinking that that 20 or 30 hours suddenly, air quotes, certifies you or qualifies you to teach yin. So those short trainings can be good to weed people out almost, who , really wants to teach yin and is really dedicated and devoted to yin, and who was just like, “Oh, well, that was interesting, but I’m gonna go back to teaching whatever I was already doing.”

But these weekend courses and these small short courses give us a false sense of completion and certification. This is another reason why even though I used to teach at a yoga therapy college, I used to teach their yin module, this is one of the reasons why I let that [00:12:00] go, was because we were doing 20 hours straight through in a weekend, and a lot of it on Zoom, once, you know, COVID hit.

And I could just see that people were not absorbing the information. And then if they’re in that program full-time, the very next weekend they’re now learning a bunch of new information on another topic. And so it just didn’t allow for this sort of deeper, more immersive experience

So they can create a false sense of completion. You know, when I was teaching in that yoga therapy program, people would get a little certificate that they’d completed the yin module, and some of them definitely had the humility enough to know I’m but a baby on the path of yin and I’m going to now do more study, but some of them did not.

They were just like, “Okay, dusting off my hands, I am now certified to teach yin.” So that’s why I stopped teaching these shorter trainings, because I realized that all it was doing was putting out more teachers in the world who thought they were qualified to [00:13:00] teach yin, but really they were barely introduced to yin.

And this is the big difference between, a short weekend or a, five-day or seven-day training compared to a training that’s spread out. So the reason I spread mine out over a season is so that there are gaps and people have opportunities to sit with the information, to review it, to, you know, re-watch the videos or redo the practices or start to bring these little concepts into their own teaching and see if any questions come up about that, ’cause I love questions.

So a certificate can mark the end of a training, but it should probably actually mark the beginning of much deeper study , one thing I’ve learned over my, you know, decades plus of, two decades plus of teaching yoga is that the deeper you go, the less certain you become The deeper you go, the less certain you [00:14:00] become.

When I was a brand new teacher, a sort of new teacher, immature teacher to yoga, I thought I knew so many things. I thought I knew the right way to do warrior. I thought I knew the correct alignment for this. I thought I knew exactly what order the poses should go in. And now I realize I know very little.

I mean, I actually in hindsight, compared to that, know a lot, but I’m always learning, always growing. And so early certainty in my training versus a mature nuance, right? The more… When I was a more immature teacher, I’m not saying this as an insult, I mean, like, I didn’t have the experience as a yoga teacher, compared to now being a more mature teacher.

I’ve realized that anatomy is far more complex than I ever thought it was, especially when you start looking at individual bodies and, how everyone’s so different. I’ve learned that there’s actually conflicting theories around fascia, meridians, mobility, our nervous systems [00:15:00] I’ve begun to let go of rigid answers.

Very rarely now in my teaching is there a right and wrong or a black and white. There’s often a, “Well, it depends.” When I become more and more comfortable saying that, “You know what? I don’t know,” or, “Well, it depends I personally, if I’m gonna study with a teacher, I trust teachers more when they retain their curiosity and study and they’re willing to say, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s also even more helpful if they can then turn me on to a resource or someone else that might know the answer to the question. But having the humility to say, “I don’t know,” it’s actually where, in my opinion, a mature practice is or where wisdom lives So if you are a yoga teacher, hopefully you wanna become the forever [00:16:00] student.

This is why even experienced teachers keep studying. We keep revisiting the foundational teachings at different stages. Like, how much can we actually absorb in one sitting? So for example, when I watch Paul Grilley’s Anatomy For Yoga, which I’ve probably watched, like, 15 times now, if it’s been a year or more since I’ve watched it, I’ll watch it again and be like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

So I’m always, even though I’ve watched it numerous times, visiting it again and seeing it with fresh eyes. Different things will stand out to you at different parts of your life. Paul’s leveling system, air quotes, when we learn from him, was quite interesting. So Paul really understands how the human mind learns, and it learns through focusing and repetition.

And so, for example, if you wanted to [00:17:00] do Paul’s level one, that would be your first level, and then if you did level two, that was a repeat of level one, but with some extra add-ons. So when you did your level two, you took level one with the people taking level one, so you got all of that in review, but then you got some extra things as well.

Very smart system. And then level three was actually what most teachers would have thought is level two. Here’s a bunch of new information. And then level four would have been a repeat of level three with extra information. And then there were people that even apprenticed with him, so they were there multiple times over , multiple, level one, two, three, fours, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and did deep apprenticeship with Paul.

So this is actually more traditional way of learning. You would learn the information, you would repeat it again and again, over and over, you would study with the teacher over and over, maybe move into an apprenticeship model or a mentorship model- [00:18:00] And then there’s also can we learn from different lineages and perspectives?

So I’ve mentioned it in many episodes that I love my teacher Paul Grilley, and I did some good study with him, but that then when I started taking therapeutic yoga, my lens shifted a little bit, and I started pulling in therapeutic elements into my Yin. There’s whole episodes on that which I can link to in the show notes, so I won’t go into that right now, but, languaging changed, some other things changed, as I was learning from a different perspective

And then let’s talk about personal practice and how that changes our understanding And to me, personal practice is key to being a teacher. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong, my friends, with, um, you know, going to a yoga class. I go to one most weeks. I was going [00:19:00] every week, but I had a bit of a, a knee thing pop up, so I’m going most weeks.

Um, and I’ve already gotten little things where I was like, “Oh, I never would have thought of that,” or, “Hmm, I wouldn’t have done that that way. That’s really interesting,” from taking this practice, and I’ve added some things into my own teaching because I thought they were so beautiful. Now, not in a copycat way, but just in a, oh, it never occurred to me to use that instrument to bring people out of Shavasana, for example.

Little koshi chimes. It’s one of the things that this teacher did to bring you out of Shavasana, and I just thought it was so magical when she did it. I was like, well, when I teach her, why am I not using those little koshi chimes to bring people out of Shavasana? They’re so wonderful. So this is just one small example.

Yes, go to other classes. 100%, that’s fun. We love that. But also, you gotta practice, and I have a whole episode on why you need a home practice. Again, I will link that in the episode [00:20:00] notes if you have missed it. So personal practice is key. So there’s a difference between collecting certifications and deepening wisdom.

So I’m gonna say that again. There’s a difference between collecting certifications and deepening your wisdom. I’ve, I had several students that have, taken multiple trainings before they come to my course. And I have teachers who are a, , a new kind of 200-hour graduate, haven’t taken a Yin training, come to my course.

And so, you know, it’s a really interesting thing if we were to think, oh, well, you know, I have my certification now, so I’m good. You know, I’ve got my certificate now. I’m good. I [00:21:00] don’t need any more.

Doesn’t really work that way. A couple of students that stand out to me, and I know there’s more of you, past students that had more than one yin training in the past, but a couple that stand out are, Janice and who you just heard from rec- and then also Beth, who you just heard from recently on the pod, came and talked to us about knees and hips.

So both of those two had previous yoga training, yin yoga training, even quite a bit of yin yoga training, and by some of the yoga bigwigs. So here’s what Beth said, for example. This is her feedback after. She said she didn’t have hesitations about the course, more considerations, whether or not the weekends were free, finances, et cetera.

But once she listened to the podcast, [00:22:00] she knew she was gonna figure out how to make it work. So Beth says, “I had done more than one yin training before yours.” A 30-hour at the same studio she did her 200-hour. Bernie Clark s- training. , Sabine Winkler’s myo training, an Ayurveda and yin training, a somatic yin training, a self myo yin training, and some of these, again, were with some of the, the well-known folks in the yin community.

So th- she had all that under her belt before she took my training, and then she says, “Your training was different because of the information on Chinese medicine, the writing sequences as homework, Paul Grilley’s anatomy presentation, more in-depth use of Chinese medicine, the meridians and the sinews, using seasons as planning for classes,” and she was introduced to, a bunch of new poses.

And she’d already been teaching, but she definitely feels more [00:23:00] prepared, she says here, and has been really considering her sequence. , And then she says below, that she would 1000% recommend this program. So there’s an example of somebody who, you know, had lots of yin training and still is continuing to learn, continuing to grow, continuing to seek out new training.

And this is really important

And then my friend Janice, who’s also been on the podcast, I will link her episode below, she talked on unearthing trauma, and here’s what she had to say about taking another training, my training. “I’ve studied with Paul Grilley as well as Bernie Clark. Nic’s training stands out unique.

Her approach to yin is a truly quiet practice, and her focus on developing teachers to appreciate quiet space and yin.” , And then she just talks about one of the standout features of [00:24:00] my course was all the Chinese medicine information, the manual. , She loved that we had time for questions, and it was a good blend of yin and practical teacher you need to know stuff.

And then she says, my refreshing humor and style, to a one of a kind of training.” So the reason I’m reading these, not word for word, but just giving you the overview of what these other teachers have said when they take my program, is just to show you that they’ve taken multiple yin trainings from some of the biggies like Paul and Susie, and like Bernie, et cetera, et cetera.

And that still they’re continuing to learn and to grow and to study

Some teachers take one training and stop, which in my opinion is a big mistake. Others continue to learn, perhaps get apprenticeship or mentorship. They continue to [00:25:00] practice, questioning, refining, and evolving. Why do we think that is? Why is it, I put this question to you and you can let me know in the comments or in the DMs on Instagram if you’re listening on Apple.

Why is it that some teachers are always growing, learning, evolving, studying, and some take one course and then think they’re, air quotes, “certified”?

Depth cannot be rushed. Yin yoga is experiential knowledge, and time is an essential teacher. And humility is not a concept, it’s a byproduct of experience. And what I have noticed over and over again in the yoga teaching community is that there’s kind of three things going on. There’s people that are…

have imposter syndrome, which is not the same as humility, by the way, where [00:26:00] they just don’t feel like they know enough, they’re not worthy enough. This is usually linked to some sort of a self-esteem thing, and they probably don’t just struggle with imposter syndrome in their yoga teaching, they probably struggle with that or things like that in other areas of their life as well, okay?

And then there’s the people who get, , one certificate and say, “I’m already certified,” which is no humility there. . So the word there that would come up would be ignorant, and by the true definition of the word ignorant, which means you don’t know how little you know.

So there are the teachers out there that get one air quotes certificate from one weekend intensive and think they’re now certified. And the reason they think that is because they truly don’t know how little they know, and how much there is out there still. And then there are the teachers that have true humility, and you can be confident and humble at the same time.

This is why I separated imposter syndrome over to the [00:27:00] side, because that’s a different situation than humility. Somebody can have a lot of experience and wisdom to offer and still have the humility to know they don’t know everything, and that they’re still always learning, and that sometimes something they believed turns out to not be true, and they may have to go back and go, “You know what?

I used to think that, but actually I don’t know about that.” That’s humility

What years and humility can reveal is that we stop believing in universal one-size-fits-everybody answers. We stop trusting fixed rules as an absolute, and you become much more cautious with certainty, not because we know less, but because we have seen more, and we’ve seen variations that certainty can’t hold.

So experience doesn’t make you more certain, it makes you more precise, hopefully makes you more wise, [00:28:00] and makes you more humble So we can learn techniques quickly, but sensitivity takes time

Okay, and then let’s just talk about the shadow side of certification culture

So I already mentioned that in the past, in traditions like yoga and in meditation, you would have studied very deeply with a teacher for many, many, many years, and then at some point they would have given you a little shaktipat perhaps on the head in the, in the Indian tradition or maybe a little smack on the butt and said, “Now, you go forth and teach.”

And that is when you would teach. You wouldn’t teach before that. You know, one example of this in my own life is that, um, I had for a lo- many years, and the only reason I’m not still studying with him is ’cause he’s not tech savvy enough to be online and I moved to a new province, but for many years I had a meditation teacher who was incredibly knowledgeable and [00:29:00] experienced, and he was a very interesting blend because he was an American living in Canada but had also studied, Buddhism in not only the Tibetan tradition, but also the Chinese Zen tradition and the Japanese tradition.

So he had lived , and studied with Tibetan monks and nuns. He had lived in, . He’d also lived in China, and he had lived and studied in Japan. And in addition to that, he had a PhD. So the man knew what he was talking about.

So not only did he have all of the sort of book smarts that you would get from a PhD, but he also had this very lived experience of living in these cultures, learning to speak their local languages, and studying deeply. So that was my teacher, and that’s the reason he became my teacher, because I’d had teachers in the past where I would ask them a question and they would say, “I don’t know,” which is fine if you don’t know, but then they would have nowhere to send me for the information.

There was no, ” I don’t know, but, , you could check here,” [00:30:00] or, ” I don’t know, but let me look into it and get back to you.” It was just, “Yeah, I don’t know.” Well, okay. So anyway, I’m a very questioning type of person. You may have gathered that by now. I ask a lot of questions, and a lot of hard ones.

And so not only did I need a teacher who could explain to me the symbolism of the different colors of lotus flowers and what this word meant in Sanskrit and that word meant in Sanskrit, and how is that different than Chinese, Japanese, I needed that, but I also needed somebody who could keep it real and make it relatable, and that’s what this teacher was.

So he was a gem of a human. He’s not dead. He’s still around. I just can’t study with him. A gem of a human, and I really adored him, and I miss going to his sangha with my sangha mates all the time. Anywho, that long story to let you know that I did not have any designs on teaching meditation until he gave me the little pat on the butt.[00:31:00]

Well, he didn’t actually pat my butt. That would have been inappropriate. So what happened was I was teaching yoga. I was offering very brief guided what I would say are contemplations, not meditations, ’cause those are different. Little guided contemplations for about five minutes before people would slide into their Shavasana.

And these students started asking me to teach them meditation because they’d had these guided contemplations with me, and they knew that I had a meditation practice, and I felt wholly unqualified to do I felt like I could walk them through the basics of like here’s how to build a meditation practice.

. So I would refer them to , my teacher’s, , weekly beginner meditation class on Tuesday nights. I’d say, “Just come on Tuesdays. I’m there often.” Like, “My teacher will teach you,” and they wouldn’t, ’cause they wanted to learn it from me. And so I said to my teacher, I said, “What can I do about this?”

You know, I- I have these people asking me to teach them meditation, and I keep trying to get them to come here, but they don’t want to. [00:32:00] What am I gonna do? How can I convince them to come to the Tuesday class? And he said, “Oh, well, you should absolutely teach them meditation. But first, we have a couple things to go over.”

So I had to do s- a little more sutra study, I took some vows, et cetera, I got a Dharma name, and then I got the little push, “Now, go ahead and teach.” Now, is this the kind of certification, air quotes, that people recognize in our current modern world? Nope. The fact that I studied with the same man twice a week for many, many, many, many, many years in addition to my previous studies, and that then had his stamp of approval and that he said, “Now go forth and teach,” did that…

Does that matter to probably to most Western people? Not so much, because it’s not tangible, it didn’t happen at a university, et cetera, et cetera. But this is the way things used to run. Now, I have since also taken, , Michael Stone’s, mindfulness [00:33:00] facilitator program. I designed to help you to teach mindfulness meditation, and I took that online. He’s passed away unfortunately, my dear Michael. He was also somebody who I thought of as a teacher. , I took that online, ’cause I missed the window to take it with him in person, but I also took it because I knew that would give me a more formal, “You’ve taken this course, done the assignments, here’s a certificate.”

Right? So that, now I have both, and I’ll probably continue to take meditation, facilitation trainings for sure. But you know, very few people would have recognized or valued the really actually far more in-depth, far longer, far deeper training that I had with my teacher over the years, and they would have been looking at that certificate that I got just last year.

Was it last year or the year before? Can’t remember. Anyway. So this is the shadow side of [00:34:00] certification culture, is that we’re taking little short courses to get a certificate, but we’re not doing deep study. Most of the teachers I know are feeling pressured to appear knowledgeable but aren’t actually taking the time to become knowledgeable.

They’re branding expertise, and they’re using social media as an authority or a performance, and they have a fear of admitting uncertainty, and they’re mistaking information for embodiment. So in this shadow side of certification culture, are we rewarding false confidence more than depth?

That’s one worth sitting with

[00:35:00] Okay, let’s talk about humility actually as a yin quality. So remember that there are qualities to yin and yang, and I’ve done whole episodes on that too, which I will also link in the episode notes. Humility as, not as self-doubt, but as openness and curiosity. So when my sense of worth as a human or as a teacher is not attached to me looking smart or being educated or collecting certificates, then if somebody has a question that I don’t have the answer to, I have no problem saying, “You know what?

I don’t know,” because I’m open to the fact that I have only so much knowledge and that I’m always learning and growing And that yin is the quality of receptivity. Yin is the quality of receptivity. [00:36:00] So can we remain teachable and curious and open? Can we learn to listen more and more deeply over time?

Can we let our experience soften certainty?

Maybe one of the signs of deepening as a Yin teacher is becoming less interested in being the authority in the room. And I would say of all teachings, not just Yin, right? The humility to know that you are there just but to guide people, and that ultimately they are the authority over their own experience, their own bodies

Okay, so now we might question, so how many trainings should someone take? Well, this is a great question. I can’t really answer it directly because the answer would be as it often is with Yin, well, it [00:37:00] depends. It depends on your intention, right? Remembering that depth is not measured by certificates.

So if you have taken a quicky Yin training and it was enough, and I’m talking anything, 50 hours or less, you’ve taken a training like that, and it was enough to wet your whistle, so to speak, or get you curious, and maybe you fell even more in love with Yin, and now you’re like, “Ooh, I want more,” well, then you continue training and you continue studying.

Some people are big fans of collecting trainings without integrating the material. I had a friend like this once. She was always very busy, like reading this book and taking this course and this workshop and da, da, da, da. And she was doing so much of it that at one point I said to her, I was like, “Well, when have you scheduled the time to like assimilate that stuff and to let it [00:38:00] steep into you and actually become part of your being and look at it and decide what is for you and what is not for you, and notice how it has affected your life?”

I got a long silence there because she was so obsessed with learning, and I can fall into this as well if I’m not careful, which is why I give myself one continuing ed thing a year. And if there isn’t something in that year that works with my schedule, I’m okay with going two or three, but not more than one a year, because I’ll go nuts and I’ll just take everything.

But what I’ve learned is that when I do that, I don’t have the time to sit with it deeply and investigate the information and integrate it and let it steep into me, and let me ask the questions about parts of it. And do I believe that? And hmm, has this changed the way I think? And hmm, right?

So we need time to do that.

[00:39:00] So there’s so many people out there collecting trainings and certificates thinking that is somehow going to make them a better, wiser, deeper teacher, but they’re not actually spending the time integrating the material. They’re not letting it steep into their bones

And then there are the people who deepen this knowledge profoundly through practice and reflection. So they take the time to take what they’ve learned in these trainings and these courses, and they sit with them, and they practice with them, and they reflect on them The ongoing learning matters more than, air quotes, “arriving somewhere.”

I promise you, dear teacher, it does not matter how many hundreds of hours of training you have if you’re not actually absorbing the wisdom of those trainings

So the issue isn’t taking one training, [00:40:00] the issue is in believing that one t- after one training, the learning is complete. That I have taken my 20-hour, 30-hour, 50-hour Yin training and I can now dust off my hands and I am certified to teach Yin

I don’t believe that exists. If you were a teacher who really loved Hatha or even Vinyasa, we’ll say, and you did your 200-hour, my hope is that at, let’s just say you really… We’ll just use Vinyasa as an example. Say you really love Vinyasa, and you take a 200-hour Vinyasa or kind of power course, and you really love teaching it, and it’s like the best thing ever to you, I hope you wouldn’t, at 200 hours, dust off your hands and go, “Well, that’s that.

I’m complete.” No. Wouldn’t you continue [00:41:00] on, whether it be through mini trainings or workshops or through getting your 500 or who knows? Wouldn’t you deepen? If you , really love a practice, wouldn’t you keep going? And yet somehow when it comes to Yin trainings, people think that like a 20 or a 30 is complete.

So they may have like a 500-hour, you know, Vinyasa or Hatha or power training, and then they take like a 20 or 30-hour weekend Yin workshop and think they’re done. It just doesn’t work that way So this is why the idea of being, air quotes, “certified” in Yin Yoga feels incomplete to me. Because the certification can mark the beginning of teaching, but it can’t give you what only years in the room will reveal, which is not more knowledge, but more seeing, more listening, and ultimately more humility.

And when [00:42:00] throughout that process you realize, ooh, I have more questions than answers actually about this yin practice. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things about Yin Yoga, is that it resists certainty. The longer you teach it, the more subtle it becomes. The more you realize bodies are different, nervous systems are different, people are different, and that no single training could ever teach us everything

And that maybe the goal is not to become the expert who has arrived, but instead to remain teachable, to keep listening, to keep observing, to keep learning. Not because we’re inadequate, but because the practice is alive. And the deeper you you go into teaching yin, often the more questions that come up.

And that, my friends, [00:43:00] is what I’m here for. So if you do want help, if you do wanna take the next step, if you’ve taken a short training, a, you know, a 20, a 30, a 40, a 50-hour training, and you wanna dive even deeper, I have a 100-hour, at the time of this recording, um, therapeutic yin training. And at the time of this recording, if you’re listening live, registration will be open for the fall 2026 round, and there is a link in the show notes for you to check that out if you’d like to join me.

It’s live on Zoom and recorded, and you have access to the recordings for a year. Why a year, you might say, not 30 days or 7 days? Well, I’m glad you asked, because remember, the overwhelmed mind says no. And so I want you to be able to sit with the information, get whatever you’re gonna get from it that fits you and who you are as a teacher right now.

And I want you to have the ability to put that stuff into teaching and into practice, and [00:44:00] then say in three months maybe go back and listen to some of those videos again and go, “Oh, you know what? That did not stand out the first time. I did not remember hearing that.” Then you could do it again at six months, and again at eight months, or nine.

And then the other way to study with me is once you’ve taken my training, and I have several teachers that have taken my training, take my training again as my assistant. That’s my way of starting an apprenticeship model, right? They… Just like Paul did, you take level one. Level two is taking level one again and adding a few extra assignments.

And so I do that model as well. People take my 100-hour, and then at some point, maybe a year, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years, who knows down the road, they wanna go through it again, not only to, you know, add to whatever they may have missed, but also ’cause I’m always adding to the training. I’m always learning.

I’m always growing. So there’s always new stuff in the course, and then they’ll assist me for the [00:45:00] class. So if you want to dive deeper into yin, if you have a big old crush on yin, and you wanna go deeper, and you do have a short training, and this podcast, my way of seeing things, my point of view, has resonated with you, then if you’re listening to this live, registration’s open.

If you’re listening in June 2026 or July or August, , registration is open for the September start. The link is in the bio. And if you’re listening to this later, you can get on the wait list. That link is also in the bio. You can just click that, it says get on the wait list, and if you look up to my top of the page by my picture, there’s a but- button you can click there to add your name and email.

You get a little free PDF sequence, , or you can do the same at the bottom of the page, and eventually there’s a polite pop-up that comes up. So if you’re listening to this in the futures and registration is not currently open, get on the wait list, and then you’ll know as soon as it opens up.

[00:46:00] A little food for thought. The shadow side of certifications, and what do these things actually mean, and when are we actually, air quotes, “certified?” Right? And does certified actually mean qualified? Okay, I hope you found some of this helpful. I hope there’s plenty of food for thought there for you. Until we meet again, bye for now.