Piedmont Yoga Studio News: September 2011
The email was signed by the chairperson of the Ethics Committee of a powerful international Yoga organization. Recently, Yoga Journal published an instructional article I wrote, and someone at the magazine mistakenly credited me as being a teacher certified by this organization. Now just to be clear: Thirty-one years ago, my very first yoga teacher was trained in India by this organization's founder and leading light, I'm a graduate of this organization's San Francisco training program, where I apprenticed for 18 months with one of this organization's two most senior American teachers, I ... well, you get the picture. But I have never, ever been certified to teach by this or any other organization, nor do I care to be. You know what the great Groucho Marx once said: I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. 


The reaction was swift. Two of the organization's certified teachers contacted the Ethics Committee, roughly equivalent to the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, crying foul. The Ethics Chairperson's message was polite but firm: could I arrange for Yoga Journal to correct this egregious piece of misinformation. I was both sympathetic and amused. It mattered not to them that I'd been deeply immersed and relatively loyal to what I perceive as this organization's guiding principles and practices for 31 years, just about half my life. In the end what did matter was that I wasn't formally certified.
Usually I procrastinate with little chores like this one, but I was sort of interested to see what would happen. Right away I contacted Yoga Journal's Managing Editor, who contacted the Senior Editor who worked on my article, who then went up the ladder to the Editor-in-Chief. So no more than 15 minutes after receiving the complaint, I had assurances that the magazine would set the record straight with a correction in the next issue, and the whole mountain-out-of-a-molehill was, at least theoretically, resolved.


Whenever the subject of certification comes up, as it does now and again, I'm reminded of when the controversy first engulfed this organization's members way back in the early 1980s. On one side were the stalwarts who strongly supported certification for any teacher who claimed to represent the organization. Their argument, which makes perfect sense, goes like this. If I belong to an organization that caters to the public, I want that public to hold my organization in high regard-let's face it, in the end it's simply good public relations and good business. But if there are teachers out there representing themselves as my organization's agents who are causing havoc, like continually hurting or abusing their students, their behavior will inevitably reflect on me. Then no matter how competent I am as a teacher, there will always be people who tar-and-feather me with someone else's wrong doing. And if I'm the boss of such an organization, and that organization grows into a world-wide phenomenon, then I'm going to want some control over what goes on in my name. Certification is a form of indoctrination (much like an initiation) in which the aspirants are required to jump through a dizzying-one might say maddening-array of hoops just to attain peon status. To move up in the hierarchy is a long and laborious path, with no guarantee of success. Those who make it up to or near the top are deserving of enormous respect, even if you don't agree with their choice of career path. And if I put so much effort into winning the certification prize, it's likely I'm going to toe the company line so that I can reap the benefits that accrue to the teacher who has the organization's imprimatur. At the very least I'm not going to do anything to get the organization's Ethics committee breathing down my neck, threatening excommunication if I don't mend my evil ways.


Back then though there was an opposing but just as compelling point of view from a small but vociferous opposition. Certification? That's OK if you're an aerobics teacher, but a yoga teacher is a bird of an entirely different feather. As a psychic once told me (a friend of a friend, who was giving me a free session, don't get the wrong idea): You're working with peoples' souls. How can you certify a soul worker? And besides, certified teachers are compelled to hoe more or less along the same row, and eventually what you'll end up with, say the naysayers, are a bunch of Stepford yogis, cookie cutter teachers from whom all creativity and spontaneity has been erased in favor dull conformity. 


Thus it goes back and forth, the question of certification still debated today between the loyalists and iconoclasts. Over the years new teachers joined the ranks of the loyalists, proud to take their place among some of the most respected teachers in the world; at the same time, many of the old guard cracked under the pressure of teaching exclusively in the manner laid down by the organization, and reluctantly or with relief left the fold. Who's right? Who knows. I'm always eager to welcome this organizations certifieds to teach at PYS, because I know their training has been top-notch; on the other hand, I have nothing but admiration for those intrepid teachers who've blazed their own paths, and they too always have a home at PYS. 


And now on to what is decidedly our non-certified business. After making a huge fuss about our new Yoga-Versity and promising a 6-day August intensive followed by a 10-month Graduate Yoga program, we sadly have to take it all back...the best laid plans etc. I apologize to anyone who got all excited, and especially to those (few) students who went through the trouble to register for the intensive. Do you remember the Not-Yet-Ready for Prime Time players? That's what I ultimately decided about this program, that it wasn't quite ready, and so pulled the plug. Please put your excitement in mothballs for another year, we'll probably try again next Fall with a new and (I hope) vastly improved version of the program.
