Someone asks what you do, and “yoga teacher” is out before any other answer gets a look in. Not the thing you do on a Wednesday. The whole of it. Most of the time that’s a good thing. It’s also why a class of three can get in the car with you and still be going by the time you’re on the drive home, asking whether any of this is working and what that says about you.
It’s a lot to put on one ordinary evening. It didn’t get there by accident, though, and it can be spread out, so a slow night in the room stops reaching every other part of your life at the same time.
When to use this
- After a quiet class that hit harder than the numbers deserved
- When a studio cuts your slot and it lands as personal rather than practical
- When you notice every plan in your diary routes through teaching
- When someone asks what you do outside yoga and the answer takes a while to arrive
One job, carrying everything
We all need to feel we’re good at something that matters. We need to feel close to people, and of some use to them. Research on what motivates us keeps coming back to that same short list, and it barely changes.
Teaching gives you the whole list at once, which is part of why you love it. It’s where a lot of your friendships are. It’s the thing you’ve worked hardest to be good at. And somewhere along the way it probably became your answer to who you are. If you came to teaching through a hard chapter of your own, it might be holding something else as well: the proof that the chapter meant something.
That holds together fine. Until it doesn’t. When one thing is carrying every need you’ve got, a bad night in it shakes all of them at once. So three people on a Wednesday doesn’t stay a fact about the diary. It reaches your sense of being any good at this, even your sense of who you are. No wonder the drive home was loud.
None of this is a flaw in you. It’s just what people do with work that feels like a calling. The research on our basic needs says we go and meet them wherever it’s easiest, and teaching makes that very easy.
Burnout research is consistent on one point. The people who burn out hardest tend to be the ones whose sense of self is most fused with their work. Researchers call it over-identification, and the caring professions fill those studies. Meanwhile the actual numbers move for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with you. A new school term. A gym opening round the corner with a January offer. None of that should be able to reach who you are. When it all runs through teaching, it does anyway.
The teachers who last decades tend to have somewhere else to stand when teaching wobbles. That’s not a coincidence.
Give the load a second home
Take a page and write “teaching” in the middle. Around it, put down honestly everything it carries for you beyond the craft itself. Your social life might be there. Your own movement. The feeling of being useful. Maybe the proof you made something out of a hard time. Draw it and you’ll usually find teaching doing four or five jobs beyond the actual one. Seeing that on the page is half the work.
Now pick the one thing with no other home. Just the one. This isn’t a big overhaul. And nobody’s asking you to care less about teaching. Give that one need a second place to live this month. If teaching holds your whole social life, a regular evening with people who’ve never done a downward dog will do more for your teaching than another workshop would. If your body only moves when you’re cueing, take a spot at the back of someone else’s class and be nobody’s teacher for an hour.
The second home doesn’t need to be anything impressive. A choir. A parkrun where nobody there knows what you do for work. What matters is that one need is getting met somewhere your timetable can’t reach.
Then notice what changes on the next quiet night. When teaching carries less than everything, a quiet Wednesday stays the size of a Wednesday.
Action steps
- Today, take ten minutes and draw the load map: “teaching” in the middle, everything it carries around it. Nobody sees the page but you.
- Circle the one item on the page with no other home in your life.
- Choose its second home and book the first small step this week, small enough that you can’t talk yourself out of it.
- After your next quiet class, read the page again before deciding what the numbers meant.
- Redo the map in three months and notice what has moved.
Related resources
- Who looks after the teacher?
- The room you grow in
This kind of spreading-out is part of what a professional body is quietly for. Membership at YogaPros was never just the cover and the listing. There are peers to learn alongside, and learning that pulls you in directions your own timetable never will. A teaching life with more than one room in it copes better when one room goes quiet.