On Tradition, Accessibility, and the Responsibility of Teaching
I’ve been thinking about this question, particularly in relation to something we often hear in yoga classes: You don’t have to be spiritual to practice yoga.
I believe that’s true.
But I also believe yoga is much more than physical movement.
Those two understandings aren’t in conflict.
The challenge for those of us who teach is learning how to honor both — without diminishing yoga’s philosophical depth, and without deciding for students what their practice must mean.
Come As You Are
In yoga, we often offer some version of this:
You are welcome here.
No beliefs required.
No pressure.
Come as you are.
I don’t see these words as a compromise of yoga’s depth. “Come as you are” may be one of the deepest invitations yoga offers.
You don’t need to arrive calm.
You don’t need to understand Patanjali, know Sanskrit, chant, or have any interest in philosophy.
You don’t even need to know why you’ve come.
You begin with your actual experience. And practice gives you ways to investigate it.
You may come because your back hurts.
You may come because you want to stretch.
You may come because you are stressed, because a friend brought you, or simply because something about the practice makes you feel better.
There is no lesser doorway into yoga.
Spirituality itself means different things to different people. For some, it is devotion to the Divine. For others, it is a way of meeting consciousness, suffering, and meaning. Some people explore these questions deeply without ever calling themselves spiritual.
“No beliefs required” doesn’t have to mean “no tradition offered.” As teachers, that’s the distinction we’re asked to hold.
Many Traditions, the Oldest Questions
The texts that have shaped yoga’s many traditions were concerned with questions far beyond physical well-being.
The Yoga Sutras weren’t written to make us flexible.
The Bhagavad Gita wasn’t written to manage stress.
The Upanishads weren’t written to help us unwind.
These texts ask some of humanity’s oldest questions:
What is consciousness?
What causes suffering?
Who am I?
How should I live?
What is freedom?
What is my relationship to something larger than myself?
But they don’t all answer them in the same way. There isn’t one singular “yoga tradition.”
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras point toward kaivalya, often translated as liberation, more literally a kind of aloneness or independence: pure consciousness no longer entangled with material nature, including the movements of the mind. The Bhagavad Gita offers several paths: action, knowledge, and devotion. The Upanishads, composed over centuries, explore the Self and ultimate reality in many voices. Later traditions, among them Tantra, Hatha Yoga, and Vedanta, carry yoga in still other directions.
They overlap. They influence one another. They aren’t interchangeable.
Modern yoga often names a single destination for all of this: union. But the traditions describe liberation in many ways. For some, it means recognizing the true Self. For others, discerning consciousness from material nature, or union with the Divine, or devotion and surrender. Buddhist traditions question whether there is a permanent self at all.
Running through them is one great inquiry:
Who — or what — am I beneath everything I ordinarily identify as myself?
It can begin as simply as the words we offer when students arrive:
Notice the body.
Notice the breath.
Notice the mind.
That can sound almost ordinary. But underneath it is an ancient question:
Am I my body?
Am I my breath?
Am I my thoughts?
Who is noticing all three?
We don’t even have to say that last line. The practice can reveal the question.
Our responsibility isn’t to give students the answers. It’s to remember that these are the questions from which yoga emerged.
To honor these traditions is to let them remain many.
Yoking, Gathering
The Sanskrit root yuj carries meanings of yoking, joining, harnessing, and applying.
Patanjali offers his own definition in the second sutra: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ — yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind.
There is something I love in that older image of yoking.
The mind scatters.
Attention moves outward.
Practice gathers it,
so that we can see clearly.
In class, it might sound as simple as:
As you breathe, gather the threads of your attention.
That, too, is one way of experiencing yoga.
Asana Was Never the Whole of Yoga
Yoga is not simply the shape the body makes. It’s what we’re doing with attention, awareness, and perception.
Patanjali describes eight limbs:
Yama — ethical restraints; our relationship with others
Niyama — observances; our relationship with ourselves
Asana — posture
Pranayama — practices of breath and vital energy
Pratyahara — the turning inward of the senses
Dharana — concentration
Dhyana — meditation
Samadhi — meditative absorption
Asana is one limb.
The order carries meaning, with the later limbs turning more inward. But the Sanskrit word is anga — limb, not rung. The limbs aren’t steps to be completed one by one. They inform one another.
The limbs aren’t simply things we learn about.
They are ways of practicing.
And one limb can reveal another.
The Posture Becomes the Doorway
It’s sometimes said that practicing yoga without its spiritual dimension is like hammering at a piano without being musical: the form is there, but not the soul.
I understand what that image is trying to protect. I don’t agree with it.
A child can sit at a piano and press one key. Then another. They aren’t failing to play the piano because they haven’t yet understood Bach. They are beginning. Yoga deserves the same generosity.
Someone takes Warrior II because they want stronger legs. One day the posture becomes uncomfortable, and they want to come out. The teacher asks:
Can you notice the impulse to leave? Is there something to explore here, or is it time to come out?
Suddenly we are somewhere else. There is attention. There is self-study. And there is the question at the heart of non-harming: what is this sensation communicating, and how might I respond with both curiosity and care?
The student didn’t walk in looking for any of that. The posture became the doorway.
In Yin, this question never leaves the room. A student settles into Butterfly, and a few minutes in, sensation gathers along the inner thighs and low back. The long hold invites an ongoing conversation with the body: stay, adjust, or come out? Some sensations invite curiosity. Others — sharp, electric, burning, or otherwise concerning — call for us to ease off or come out. Exploring discomfort and overriding the body are not the same thing, and the choice belongs to the student.
Is this sensation asking for curiosity, or for care? Perhaps both. You can soften, use support, or come out. All of these are practice.
Discernment is not the same as endurance.
Or someone comes in knowing nothing about yoga. They stretch. For the first time all day, they feel their breath. They notice they’re clenching their jaw, and they soften it. For three breaths, they are completely here.
Who are we to stand outside their experience and say, that’s not yoga, that’s stretching? Something may already have begun.
So the responsibility shifts. The student doesn’t have to know what they’re holding. The teacher should.
What Are You Actually Transmitting?
This is the question I return to most:
Beyond the sequence,
the playlist,
the aesthetic,
the alignment cues,
even the Sanskrit —
what are you actually transmitting?
Every teacher could ask it — not defensively, but sincerely.
A yoga class can offer strength, mobility, flexibility, pleasure, nervous-system regulation, and stress relief. Those things are valuable. Some would say that if this is all a class offers, it shouldn’t be called yoga. I see it differently. A physical practice can still be yoga — the Hatha traditions didn’t regard the body as beside the point.
Don’t mistake one part of yoga for the whole of yoga.
And this doesn’t mean every class needs to become a philosophy lecture. You don’t need to announce, “Today we’re practicing ahimsa.” You might simply ask:
Can you meet this edge without forcing?
You don’t need to lecture on svadhyaya. You might ask:
What do you notice about the way you respond when something becomes difficult?
You don’t need ten minutes on aparigraha.
Can you let go of what you thought this pose was supposed to look like?
And pratyahara might begin with:
Notice the sounds around you. You don’t have to shut them out. See if your attention can gradually begin to turn inward.
Teaching about philosophy passes on information. Letting it shape the practice makes room for understanding to arise on its own. Both have value. They aren’t the same.
The philosophy doesn’t have to be laid on top of asana.
It can live inside the way asana is taught.
Transmission Is More Than What We Say
We transmit through what we value.
Through what we don’t rush.
Through how we respond when someone can’t do something.
Through whether silence is something to be filled.
Through whether the body becomes an object to perfect or a place to inhabit.
Through whether discomfort is something to conquer or something to investigate.
Through whether rest must be earned.
Through whether we teach students to override themselves or listen to themselves.
A teacher can give a beautiful talk about ahimsa and then shame someone for resting. Which teaching did the student receive?
A teacher can speak about non-attachment while being preoccupied with how every posture looks. A teacher can teach surrender while controlling every breath in the room.
And a teacher might say very little about philosophy while teaching with humility, patience, curiosity, non-harming, spaciousness, and respect for each student’s agency.
We can’t see another person’s inner life from the outside. Someone can chant, quote Patanjali, and speak of chakras without examining themselves at all. Someone else can move through a simple practice and touch something the teacher never intended.
The appearance of spirituality is not necessarily spiritual depth.
So perhaps the question isn’t only “What philosophy am I teaching?” It may be:
What quality of relationship am I inviting students to have with themselves?
Keep the Door Open
I love the image of a door. If we keep the depth of the practice within reach, then one day, if a student is ready, the door is still there.
Meditation, silence, philosophy, a Savasana that is more than recovery after exercise — all of it can remain available.
Sometimes teachers go further and say that every student really came for this deeper dimension, whether they know it or not.
This is where I pause. We don’t know that. A student may walk in and say:
“I’m not spiritual. I just want to stretch.”
Believe them.
Welcome them.
Let stretching be enough.
If we decide privately that they really came for something else, we’ve placed ourselves above them, as if to say, I know what you need better than you do. And “come as you are” quietly gains a condition: come as you are, but eventually become what I think yoga should make you. That isn’t quite the welcome we meant. Their experience belongs to them.
And still, the door stays.
Offer breath.
Offer attention.
Offer silence.
Offer inquiry.
Offer philosophy when it fits.
Give context without requiring belief.
Someone may practice for thirty years because it helps their back. Someone may simply discover that they can breathe when they’re frightened. We can offer opportunities to explore. But what they find, and what it means, is theirs to discover.
Keep the door open.
Don’t push anyone through it.
Teaching Yoga Carries Responsibility
Teachers are sometimes described as custodians of a tradition that has come down to us intact.
There is real responsibility in that. But yoga didn’t arrive in our hands intact. It has been adapted, argued over, and transformed across centuries. Much of the postural yoga we teach today took shape in the twentieth century, through Indian teachers responding to changing cultural and historical circumstances. Without remembering this, preserving yoga can quietly become freezing it.
Living traditions change. Evolution is not the same thing as erasure, and accessibility does not require dilution.
Rather than custodians, I think we are students. We’ve received something. We keep studying it.
That means knowing enough to distinguish tradition from interpretation, and interpretation from innovation. Ishvara pranidhana, for instance, is often taught as “surrender to something larger than yourself.” That’s a meaningful contemporary interpretation, but in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Ishvara has a more specific meaning. Naming it as an interpretation honors both the source and the teaching.
We don’t need to be Sanskrit scholars or historians. And sometimes the most respectful thing a teacher can say is:
“I don’t know.”
It can be tempting to feel that yoga’s survival rests on how each of us teaches. I’d hold that more lightly.
We don’t own yoga.
We don’t need to save yoga.
But we are responsible for the version of yoga that passes through us.
Every teacher changes what they receive — through their own body, culture, and moment in history. The goal isn’t purity. The goal is to be conscious of what we’re doing.
Know What You Are Holding
This may be the heart of it.
You don’t have to make anyone spiritual. That isn’t your job.
But it matters to know what you are holding.
If you teach yoga, keep learning — not to become an authority, but because you are in relationship with something larger than your own class, your own training, your own method.
Yoga is sometimes called a science of consciousness. It doesn’t need to be called a science to be legitimate. It is already a rich family of philosophical, contemplative, ethical, devotional, and embodied traditions. That is profound enough.
And reverence doesn’t have to be heavy. You don’t have to be serious to be spiritual. Reverence can hold humor, play, and ordinariness. A room full of people wobbling in Tree Pose and laughing is yoga, too.
Teach with curiosity.
Teach with humility.
Teach with reverence.
And let that reverence move in two directions: toward the tradition, and equally toward the person standing in front of you.
Sometimes honoring tradition gets used to justify overriding students. Sometimes meeting students where they are gets used to justify removing the tradition entirely. We don’t have to choose.
We can preserve depth without imposing belief.
We can make yoga accessible without pretending it has no history.
We can invite inquiry without prescribing the answer.
Know what you are holding.
Keep the door open.
Remain a student.
Be conscious of what passes through you.
Because sometimes honoring a tradition doesn’t mean preserving a single answer.
Sometimes it means making sure we don’t lose the questions.
If you’d like to go deeper
Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (North Point Press, 2009)
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017)
Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010)
