I finished reading “Teaching Yoga” by Donna Farhi this weekend.

Wow, it made me think. It made me think about how I’ve taught yoga in the past, how I will teach it in the future, and how I behave as a yoga student.

She basically outlines the ethics behind teaching yoga, and how to be a morally responsible yoga teacher and student. 

My favourite part was the ethical inquiry titled “It’s okay to say you don’t know”. In this part Farhi explains how in a Western Culture we are expected to always know the answer to every question, and that our culture makes it shameful and not okay to say we don’t know something (especially if we are a trained expert  in that field).

I experienced this first-hand while teaching. I noticed that some of my students are more advanced in asana than me. I am not afraid to tell them that I don’t know how to do a pose. I try and learn, rather, from the student. Maybe there is something that they know about a certain pose, that I don’t.

Some yoga teachers might ‘fake it till they make it’, and pretend that they can do all the poses, and that they know everything. This would be going against the yama, ‘SATYA’ (which means truth).

What do you think?