How my calling found me

Yoga drew me from adolescence. When I took my first teacher training, it felt less like a choice than a response. I never thought, “I want to become a yoga teacher,” or “this would make a good career.” My first yoga teacher had left the country, and I went looking for classes at the community center in my neighborhood. The center had no yoga classes at all. I was so outraged that I felt I had to do something about it: I had to teach yoga there myself. I was eighteen, and less than a year later I began my first teacher training.

The second time, in Iyengar yoga, the training was the only path that could deepen my understanding. I was told that some questions can be answered only by committing to the path and becoming a teacher. So I did. In both cases, it was a deep calling, and it felt more like destiny than like free choice. Looking back, I recognize the shape the Gītā describes: a law that starts before me, which I found and then followed.

What Iyengar adds

B.K.S. Iyengar draws the idea of dharma in a wider circle than any single society. In Light on Life he writes, “Dharma is not about denomination or cult. It is universal” (p. 240). He describes it as “the search for enduring ethical principles, about the cultivation of right behavior in physical, moral, mental, psychological, and spiritual dimensions” (p. 240). He also gives a test of authenticity: when a code is “culturally limited or warped, then it falls short of the definition of dharma” (p. 240). Alongside the Gītā’s emphasis on station, Iyengar emphasizes growth, and both readings can live side by side. In the same passage he says, “to stick to ethics is our human duty” (p. 240).

Iyengar’s dharma, which “supports, sustains, upholds” (Aṣṭadaḷa Yogamālā, vol. 1, p. 158), offers a practical counterpart. Practice discovers that support, and personal preference has little to do with producing it. The work is to recognize one’s own law, and to act while releasing the fruit, the same instruction we meet in 2.47.

A fair distinction for teachers

For a yoga teacher, the distinction between own-law and own-choice has practical consequences. Teaching taken as a chosen identity depends on mood and approval. Teaching taken as dharma holds steady on days when mood and approval fall away. The student in the room receives the same quality of care in both cases, and the teacher feels the difference in her own body.

On hard days, what carries me to class is a sense of duty, and my students give it a face. I think of the time and effort they put into coming. I think of their anticipation on the day of class, and the day before. I see them packing their yoga clothes into their bags before leaving for work, and planning their week around the class. I see them preparing mentally for the practice. I see them coaching themselves to come even when they are tired, when there is traffic, when other obligations pull them away from their commitment. Then I think of how they will feel after class: the relief, the breath, the community. And I gather my energy, and I go and teach.

I also think of the teachings I have received. In the Indian traditions, knowledge passes from teacher to student in an unbroken chain, paramparā. When I took on this wisdom, I also took on the responsibility to pass it on. That responsibility, too, belongs to my own-law.