Learning Yoga at Home – the pros and cons

Doing yoga at home is not just for yoga teachers and hard-core yogis. It's what we should all be striving to do, in my opinion. Now, with the internet, it's easier than ever … but potentially dangerous too!

The internet didn't exist though, when I first started yoga. Perhaps that was a good thing. The only real option (to me at least) was going to India … the source, which is exactly what I did, spending years in yoga ashrams and studying with various yoga teachers along the way.

But still, I felt like something was missing.  It wasn't until I found Swami Gitananda's "Yoga Step By Step" correspondence course that the "yoga lightbulb(s) finally came on. Yeah, I know … but this was no ordinary yoga book. It was a yoga masterpiece, and my understanding of yoga has never been the same since.

But what I really got from it was an awareness of how much is missing from yoga in the modern yoga class approach, and how, when done skilfully, so much more about yoga can be taught on paper and with visuals. Now with the video capabilities of the internet, we can leap even further.

I've been working on that for the past few years … trying to figure out how to effectively teach yoga online without compromising the integrity of yoga.  There have been many ups and downs along the way, and now, based on the feedback I get, I'd say that I'm doing a fairly good job … at least compared to what else is available online so far.

I still teach yoga classes because I believe there is much to be gained from them. But my experience has shown me how limiting they can be, especially for teaching students how to safely and confidently practice yoga at home, on their own.

The Internet has opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for yoga, but even though there are tens of thousands of yoga websites online already, most yoga teachers who created them still seem to be stuck in their yoga classes … yet to realize the great teaching potential of this global medium.

Teaching people how to practice yoga at home, from home, I think, is the way of the yoga future. If only just a few yoga teachers start to realize how to use the internet to effectively share the teachings of yoga and get more people off the couch and doing yoga at home, then that future looks pretty enlightened to me.