Why Become A Yoga Teacher? 7 Benefits Of The Career

If you’ve been wondering ‘why should I become a yoga teacher?’, then this is the article for you. To give you a well-rounded view, this article will be divided into two parts:

• 7 Key Benefits Of Being A Yoga Teacher
• Myths About Becoming A Yoga Teacher

To experience these benefits, you will first need to get qualified by completing a Level 3 Yoga Teaching Diploma. Once you've completed this course, you will be officially recognised as a certified instructor. 

Furthermore, you can download OriGym's course prospectus for FREE in order to learn more about this course.

Is Being A Yoga Teacher A Good Career Choice?

If you’re already passionate about the practice of yoga, leaving your current role and jumping into yoga teaching is certainly an attractive prospect.

However, changing careers is a big decision! Considering both the financial and social impact of pursuing this career is necessary to determine whether being a yoga instructor is the right move for you.

According to Indeed, the average yoga teacher's hourly wage is £25.47/hour, and Glassdoor states the annual salary often starts at around £16,000 for freshly graduated teachers with an average of £38,363:

As you’ve probably already considered, there are also tons of social benefits of pursuing a career related to your hobby. For example, you’ll spend every day doing something you love and working alongside like-minded people with similar interests.

One thing you may not have considered is how versatile the role can be. Once qualified, be prepared to spend a good portion of your time:

• Networking
• Visiting studios
• Sending emails
• Attending workshops
• Building an online following or marketing a yoga business

Your social media presence is crucial for you to reap the benefits of being a yoga instructor, as is developing a holistic knowledge of marketing to promote your practice and keep your clients flooding in.

An obvious benefit of being a yoga teacher is incredible job satisfaction. While it can be difficult to maintain this in a regular working environment, yoga is built-in with stress reduction as well as job flexibility - all contributing factors for job satisfaction. 

Although it might seem like a fairy tale, you'll never know how good the job can be unless you try it! If you have a true passion and interest, the question of ‘why become a yoga teacher?’ should be easy to answer.

7 Key Benefits Of Being A Yoga Teacher

For those still wondering why they should become a yoga teacher, there are plenty of benefits we’ll explore to help you decide why this is the ideal career for you!

#1 - Why Become A Yoga Teacher? It Deepens Your Practice

If you’ve been practising for a long time, it’s likely you’ll experience a period of time where your yoga practice feels stagnant. You’re bound to hit a plateau at some point and this is natural! 

Deepening and expanding your practice is a great reason why you should become a yoga teacher. Benita Mayo is a yoga instructor who didn’t go into yoga teacher training with the intention to teach. 

In an interview with the University of Virginia, she explains she did it to deepen her own practice. After completing her yoga teaching course, she said she felt the obligation and desire to let people know that yoga is for everybody.

She now teaches Yin Yoga and gentle Hatha Yoga classes, which are more sustainable practices.

Going back to basics is one of the best ways to deepen your practice. Consider taking a beginner class to focus on adjusting your alignment or even go on a yoga retreat to immerse yourself in the basics again.

One of the benefits of being with a yoga instructor during a retreat is learning new and creative ways to do things. Consider a yoga mantra: mantra is a sacred sound, word, syllable, or group of words in Sanskrit, believed to influence the mind and spirit.

The most popular mantra is ‘Om’ or ‘Aum’ in Sanskrit. These three letters correspond to the states of being. The A is the waking state, the U is the dream state, and the M is the state of deep sleep.

You may have never considered using mantras during classes before. Or you might decide mantra isn't for you at all! Take influence from other yoga teachers and employ alternative techniques like reading a book quote, singing, or storytelling.

#2 - The Benefits Of Being A Yoga Teacher Include Ultimate Flexibility

One of the biggest benefits of being a yoga teacher, and one of the biggest draws of the role in general, is that it doesn’t have to be a 9-to-5 career. You get to choose how classes work alongside your private life and create a schedule that works for you.

If you love to travel, you can set up blocks of time away from the studio for a holiday, or even expand your horizons by becoming an overseas yogi, working in yoga centres around the world.

The ability to make your own hours is an invaluable advantage for yoga instructors. If you’re an early bird, you can teach morning classes at a corporate fitness centre or health club. If you’re a night owl, run private yoga sessions, or lead an evening class at the senior centre. 

A recent article from Insight discussed how flexible hours are the main reason self-employed people are happier than traditional workers. Self-employed people also generate on average £5,000 more than the average UK salary while working ten hours less per week.

66% of these people say they’re better off financially, while 65% claim they also feel better in terms of life satisfaction. This means you can reduce the likelihood of stress and yoga burnout. 

The flexibility benefit of being a yoga teacher isn’t useful just for personal freedom - it gives you a safety net when you need it. In this article, Michelle Berlin shares how she became a yoga teacher back in 2007 after a car accident left her with multiple spinal injuries.

Michelle worked on her own healing through yoga and, thanks to the flexibility of the job, she was able to take time off when she needed a rest and recuperation day and schedule classes when she was up to the challenge.

#3 - Why Be a Yoga Teacher? To Be A More Creative Yogi

Another of our benefits of being a yoga instructor is that the profession will provide a boost to your creative juices!

Anne Cushman, pioneer in mindfulness and creative expression, explains how the practice of yoga can help to overcome creative blockages in our mind and body and significantly enhance energy and originality.

She believes that, when you take new and expansive shapes with your body, you’re also influenced to take new and expansive forms with the mind. 

Growing your creativity is a great reason why you should be a yoga teacher as it requires you to stretch beyond what you know and understand. Each student brings unique abilities and limitations that you can learn from.

As you learn to develop your own unique yoga teaching style, you’ll be more comfortable custom-tailoring your classes to the type of students you have.

You’ll also learn to explore various teaching methods and practices that evolve you as a yoga instructor while expanding your own understanding and knowledge of yoga.

No matter the reason why you become a yoga teacher, there is always something new and different to learn. The more profound practices of yoga, especially Dharana and Dhyana are particularly powerful for training you to access and remain within a focused flow of creativity.

While artistic expression can be deeply fulfilling, accessing creativity is not always straightforward. Creativity arises naturally when we are in states of presence and stillness. 

This is why creativity is one of the benefits of being a yoga teacher. When you practise asana, pranayama, and meditation, you access a distraction-free place where your inspiration flourishes.

#4 - Travelling The World Is Among The Benefits Of Being A Yoga Instructor

Another benefit of being a yoga instructor is the freedom to travel the world as a yogi. Teaching yoga worldwide allows you to meet and share your experience and knowledge with people you would never encounter teaching at a studio in your home country.

Gemma Clarke, a travelling yogi based in Phuket, Thailand, talks about becoming a digital nomad and travelling yoga teacher on her blog. After she completed her intensive yoga teacher training on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand, she immediately began teaching at the school.

Soon after, she secured a one-month placement teaching at a yoga retreat in Cambodia. A few months later, she returned to the UK and taught yoga in gyms and studios. While she states this was a great way to build up her experience, it cemented the idea this was not the lifestyle she wanted to be living.

After years of travelling, teaching, and living overseas, she wanted to create a lifestyle where she could be free to live wherever she wanted while working remotely.

It might seem like an impossible feat but there are plenty of ways to find work while travelling. Here’s just a few suggestions on how you can make the most of being a yoga teacher abroad:

• Networking: Word of mouth is one of the best ways to get you new opportunities so network with studio owners and yoga teachers you meet on your journey.
• Use The Right Resources: Tools such as Yoga Trade or Yoga Travel Jobs can help you find teaching opportunities.
• Find a local yoga studio: Become friends with the staff and teachers, and offer to substitute classes if they ever need someone to fill in.
• Define your brand: As the market for yoga teachers is more saturated every day, try to define what you stand for, and what makes your offering unique to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Travelling is a big reason why people become yoga teachers. See new places, try new foods, and learn and grow from other cultures. Plus, the cost of living in countries in South East Asia is much cheaper.

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Aside from answering ‘Why become a yoga teacher?’, check out these articles to see how you can be successful in this industry:

• How To Become A Successful Yoga Teacher: 11 Top Tips
• How To Turn Yoga Into A Career
• What Makes a Good Yoga Teacher?

#5 - Why Become A Yoga Teacher? It’s Immensely Rewarding

Every time you teach a class, you’re helping people. You’re helping them get closer to their goals, even if you only see a student once or a few times.

The gratification of helping others on a daily basis is one of the biggest benefits of being a yoga teacher. You get to cultivate positive energy from within yourself. You give the gift of yoga, share your positive energy, and usually walk away with more fuel than you had before you taught a class.

When you see others starting their journey to spiritual and physical healing, there’s hardly a better feeling in the world. Whether you realise it or not, you have a story to tell - a story that will spur your students on to take their own path.

Teaching yoga provides students with the tools they need to grow spiritually, physically, emotionally, and mentally. Seeing them flourish from your guidance is, without a doubt, one of the most rewarding aspects of being a yoga teacher.

#6 - Why Be A Yoga Teacher? To Specialise In Your Favourite Style

Why become a yoga teacher if you can’t focus on your favourite styles? On one end of the spectrum, you have more restorative yoga practices. These classes typically involve four or five postures, staying in each of them for prolonged periods. 

At the other end of the spectrum are faster, more movement-based practices. This could be teaching Vinyasa Yoga classes, or instructing hot yoga in a 35°C studio.

As a yoga instructor, you have control over the type of training you provide. Keep this in mind when you’re looking for yoga studios to teach in. If they don’t offer your preferred style, promote yourself as an instructor who can help them grow their business.

As a teacher, it can be handy to refine your offerings by specialising in a particular form. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t still teach Yin alongside your Power classes, but you could invest in a high-quality yoga book to expand your knowledge, while attending workshops for Power yoga.

Don’t feel pressured to choose your niche as soon as you graduate from a teacher training course. Some people will know exactly where their heart lies, or will have a background in a field like psychotherapy or osteopathy and want to enhance their existing offers by completing the training.

But for most people, a specific interest won’t materialise until more experience has been gained. It’s completely normal to evolve in your yoga practice and branch out into many different directions over time.

Don’t feel pressured to re-invent the yoga wheel or create a class that’s entirely new. This is another benefit of being a yoga instructor. Your strength as a teacher lies in teaching authentically and with a positive attitude.

#7 - Keeping Your Work-Life Balance Is A Benefit Of Being A Yoga Teacher

For those in high-powered jobs that take up a lot of personal time, keeping the line between personal and professional can be hard. However, you don’t need to worry about this with yoga because it’s already built into the work! 

Maintaining your work-life balance is another benefit of being a yoga teacher. As a tool of self-study, it helps us understand our patterns, strengths, and weaknesses, all of which are important when establishing healthy boundaries with work.

Some teachers end up teaching too many yoga classes at the start of their careers because they are concerned about maintaining a certain income. However, they soon realise this isn’t sustainable and is taking away from the very thing that made them a fantastic yoga teacher.

David Irvine is a world-renowned speaker and author who maintains an active lifestyle with yoga. In this blog post, he talks about the key principles to keep in mind as a yoga teacher trying to maintain life balance and combat burnout.

Yoga is all about presence and placing yourself at the centre of a moment. But it doesn’t have to stop as soon as you leave the studio. Practice being present in your daily life to understand your mind and body.

Another benefit of being a yoga teacher is having a routine and yoga exists on the foundation of a firm routine. 

Research has proven routine plays a huge role in happiness and healthy lifestyles, so it’s not surprising people who incorporate yogic routines end up eating, sleeping, and exercising more consistently.

Myths About Becoming A Yoga Teacher

While there are many benefits of being a yoga teacher, it’s likely you’ve also heard plenty of myths! In this section, we’ll clear up some of these myths to help you make the right decision about becoming a yoga teacher.

#1 - You Must Be Flexible To Be A Yoga Teacher

If you’ve been feeling down and asking yourself ‘why become a yoga teacher if I’m not bendy?’, we’ll start by saying it’s unrealistic and unnecessary thinking you’ll be able to perform every single asana to pro levels.

Every single body is different, with built-in limitations of flexibility and strength. This means you shouldn’t expect any teacher, yourself included, to know the hundreds of poses and modifications.

You should know, before you become a yoga instructor, that flexibility isn’t a prerequisite and consistent practice will actually improve your flexibility over time, as well as aid:

• Balance
• Posture
• Strength

Yoga isn’t just physical - it’s about placing your attention on the breathing underneath various postures. It’s about maintaining an attitude of presence and self-acceptance, focusing more on the ‘how’ than the ‘what’.

Yoga stems from a history that’s over 2,000 years old and the physical poses are only a tiny part of a larger practice that includes breathwork and meditation. 

So, if you’re wondering why you should become a yoga teacher if you don’t have all the asanas nailed, think about all the other ways you can be an effective teacher of mindfulness, being present, and remaining appreciative and open.

#2 - Yoga Teachers Understand The Body As Well As A Doctor

One of the benefits of being a yoga teacher is the trust and positive bond you’ll build with each of your students. This means your students will be comfortable opening up to you and asking all sorts of questions.

However, you should keep in mind your own experience is not the same as speaking to a medical professional.

Students may tell you about various mental and physical health problems. Unless you have a previous certification in medicine, the best answer you can give to these students is to speak to their doctor, or refer them to another professional.

Work with your students within their limitations, listen to their feedback, and teach them only what you know.

The same goes for nutrition and dieting advice. There is nothing in the traditional yogic texts that tells you what to eat or how to eat. While you can encourage healthy eating habits from what is common scientific knowledge, don’t give advice on things you don’t fully understand.

All of this is not to say yoga teachers can’t have valuable insights into the state of someone’s health and wellness. Just keep in mind your own knowledge and remind students they’re talking to a yoga teacher rather than a medical professional.

#3 - All Yoga Teachers Are Relaxed And Positive, Never Succumbing To Stress

You might be wondering why you would be a yoga teacher if you can’t keep calm and collected all the time. However, it’s important to note many yoga instructors start their journey as a remedy for their suffering, pain, and anxiety.

After many years of dedicated and thorough practice, one of the benefits of being a yoga instructor is you will have accrued experiential wisdom about what consistent yoga practice can offer to those in need.

If you’ve been thinking ‘why be a yoga teacher if I’m always stressed?’, don't worry! Not only will consistent practice reduce those stressful emotions but being open with your clients about the fact you’re struggling will allow them to bond with you.

A lot of people don’t consider instructing yoga classes as ‘work’ in the same sense as having a regular 9-to-5. However, if you’ve been struggling with burnout, one of the benefits of being a yoga teacher is flexibility for taking time off. Everyone needs and deserves the ability to switch off and do some self-care.

#4 - Doing More Advanced Poses Means You’re A Better Yoga Instructor

As a yoga novice, you probably fell into the trap of believing your ability to go deeper in backbends, further forwards in forward bends, or balance longer in handstands were all indicators of your yoga spirituality.

This isn’t to say that asanas (postures) aren’t an integral part of the yoga experience. However, what yoga is really about is what the postures teach: patience, self-awareness, and compassion.

Through the asanas, you practise being present and conscious of your actions instead of mindlessly moving through the world. Using asana as a tool to connect with yourself and explore your emotions is one of the best ways to use postures.

Being unable to do certain poses doesn’t mean you aren’t good at yoga or aren’t as good as someone who can do that pose. Being a successful yoga teacher isn’t measured by the number of advanced postures you can do. 

Try a gentler, softer approach to your practice and teaching. You’ll soon discover the positive impact it can have. You’ll be able to improve your well-being this way more profoundly than with any fancy arm balance you’ve ever performed.

Before You Go!

Aside from the great benefits of being a yoga teacher as listed above, always keep in mind there are pros and cons to every career. However, in this role, the positives far outweigh the negatives.

To experience these benefits for yourself, be sure to complete our Level 3 Diploma in Teaching Yoga! During your study, you will learn how to develop skills and knowledge that will set you up for future scuess. 

Find out more about this qualification by downloading our course prospectus - It's FREE!