I Walked Out Of A Yoga Class This Week

I don’t say that lightly.

I have been teaching for twenty-seven years, fourteen of them as a studio owner, and I understand better than most what it takes to hold a room, run a business with integrity, and show up consistently for students who are trusting you with their bodies and their wellbeing. I have enormous respect for anyone who steps up to teach. It is not easy work. But still, I walked out. And just to be crystal clear: this is not a personal attack on the teacher or the studio. And in case you’re wondering, I will not be sharing those details.

This experience has been both upsetting and enlightening for me. I doubt my younger self would have had the courage to do so. In truth, I have never walked out of a class before and have been sitting with why I did, ever since — not to vent, but because I think it points to something important that is happening across the industry right now, and that students/clients deserve to understand.

Despite best intentions, what I witnessed was not yoga in any meaningful sense of the word. It was a fitness-fusion hybrid — part stretching, part Yin, part vague Vinyasa flowing shapes set to appropriate (yet overpowering) music — led by a young woman who was clearly well-intentioned and enthusiastic, but in my opinion, one who has not yet developed the foundational skills that genuine teaching requires. The music was so distracting I couldn’t hear her cues and found myself watching the person next to me (via the wall mirrors) just to follow along.

Let me just pause for a moment and say how much I loathe mirrors in a yoga studio. It reminds me of Bikram Choudhury, well-known yogi, egomaniac, and sexual predator. Each to their own, but I just can’t do mirrors when I’m on the mat.

At no point did the teacher, nor my fellow student, notice me doing this. There was no reading of the room — no awareness that one of us was literally having to mirror another just to participate, no modifications offered, no sense that the bodies in front of her were individual, complex, living systems with histories, injuries, and needs that a generic sequence simply cannot serve. The class was a mix of younger women I assumed were in their twenties and thirties, and me — likely the oldest person there. I was certainly the only menopausal one. And yet the approach was identical for every single one of us. Same pace. Same intensity. Same language. Same complete absence of the nuance that genuine teaching requires.

When you try to be everything — Pilates, yoga, breath-work, dance cardio, and vinyasa “flow” — the reality is, you end up being nothing. And the women in that room — many of them identified by my shamanic radar upon entry as clearly struggling with some serious health stuff — deserved something so much more than that.

Here is something I have come to understand deeply over two and a half decades of this work: real competency in yoga teaching cannot be fast-tracked.

It takes years — at minimum a decade — for a teacher to truly find their voice, develop their anatomical literacy, and cultivate the quality of embodiment and perception that allows them to read a body from across a room. To notice the subtle misalignment and know how to correct it. To sense the emotional fatigue in a student’s face before she herself has named it. To make every person in a room of twenty five or more, feel somehow like they are being seen individually.

That is an elder’s skill. It is earned through thousands of hours of practice, study, teaching, and — critically — living. And this is where I want to be gentle but honest, because it matters for the women I serve.

If you are teaching mature women — women navigating perimenopause, menopause, the physical and emotional complexity of midlife — you cannot truly understand what they are moving through unless you have lived some version of it yourself. You cannot script the experience of childbirth, of hormonal upheaval, of the specific grief and power of a body in transition. Without that lived understanding, even the most enthusiastic and well-trained young teacher is working with a map of a territory she has not yet entered. And for women who are already pushed to their limit, already running on depleted adrenals and a nervous system that has been in survival mode for decades, a generic “push harder” or “just breathe deeper” approach is not just unhelpful — it can cause real harm.

The statistics bear this out as well. Research published in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies found that yoga injuries occur at a rate comparable to all sports injuries combined among the physically active population — far higher than most people assume when they unroll their mat expecting a safe, gentle practice.

Between 2001 and 2014, yoga-related injuries seen in US emergency departments nearly doubled, rising from 9.5 to 17 per 100,000 participants. And crucially, the increase in injuries is partially attributed to the rise of unqualified instructors leading classes for beginners. Those numbers predate the explosion of fitness-fusion yoga and the post-pandemic rush back to studios — which means the current picture is almost certainly worse. And yes, Australia shares similar statistics.

So here is a question I find myself sitting with, one that I don’t have a definitive answer to but that I think deserves to be asked honestly: since 2021, we have seen a notable increase in reports of connective tissue vulnerability, cardiovascular irregularities, and inflammatory conditions across the broader population. Many in the health and wellness community are beginning to ask whether some of what we are witnessing — including the apparent increase in yoga-related injuries — may be connected to the physiological impact of those “experimental products” that much of the industry enthusiastically promoted and many practitioners took. I am not making a claim here; I am asking a question. I think this is a conversation our industry leaders and our health-oriented communities, really need to start having to avoid more heads being buried up asanas as time goes on. And to avoid more injuries and deaths.

I also want to name something about the environments many of these classes are held in, because I think it deserves more attention than it gets. The trend of cranking up the heat and flooding studios with LED lighting concerns me — and this is personal, not just philosophical.

When I opened my studio, I was deliberate about every single choice. Recycled and repurposed furniture. Salt lamps. Incandescent bulbs. Eco-friendly props and yoga equipment. Students were encouraged to avoid wearing cloying perfumes that might irritate allergies for others, and drinking coffee right before their practice. We used cleaning products that were non-toxic and environmentally sound. Right down to essential oil burners and sage smudges before and after teaching. Not because it was trendy; nobody else was doing this in their studios at the time. But because it was consistent — with my own values and healing work, with the practice, with the philosophy, and most importantly, with the Yamas and Niyamas that underpin everything yoga is. Ahimsa. Non-harming. Of the body, of the nervous system, of the Earth we share.

It seemed self-evident to me that you could not teach a practice rooted in conscious, harmonious living inside an environment that contradicted every one of those values.

And yet here we are. Studios drenched in LED lighting — which a growing body of evidence suggests emits frequencies genuinely disruptive to the nervous system. Some are even adorned with plastic plants and plug in air fresheners, while their students are told they are healing. Environments cranked to artificial heat that creates a false sense of flexibility and coaxes bodies into ranges of motion their connective tissue is perhaps not ready for, setting up injuries that surface quietly months or years later. Harsh chemical cleaners used on the mats themselves. The aesthetic of wellness… without the substance of it.

It seems that for many modern studios, the Yamas and Niyamas — those foundational ethical principles that are meant to govern not just our practice but how we move through the world — have quietly been set aside in favor of what looks good on Instagram and Facebook. And I think that matters because try as one might, you simply cannot compartmentalize integrity. You cannot teach presence and self-awareness while designing an environment that fragments the nervous system. You cannot claim to honor the body while filling the room with frequencies that harm it. It just doesn’t make sense on any level.

Yoga has always been, at its heart, an ecological practice. A practice of right relationship — with the self, with others, and with the living, intelligent world. When we lose that, we don’t just lose an aesthetic. We lose the soul of the thing itself.

There is also something I want to say about accessibility and the erosion of the teacher-student relationship, because it goes to the heart of what yoga truly is.

You cannot call or drop into most studios anymore. Instead, you are funneled into apps, waitlists, and automated booking systems that reduce the experience to a transaction before you have even arrived at the venue. Personally, this drives me nuts. I have never used a QR code; and never will. Yes, I understand the operational pressures that drive this — I ran a studio for fourteen years; I know the reality of that. But at its essence, yoga is a direct relationship between teacher and student. It is mentorship. Transmission. When we hide that relationship behind software and scale it into a product, we lose the very thing that makes it medicine rather than exercise.

I share all this not to be unkind to anyone, and genuinely not to position myself above the fray — at 56 I am still learning, still evolving, and still humbled by this practice on a regular basis. And I know this will never stop until I leave this physical plane. I share it because you deserve to know what to look for. Because your body, your nervous system, your midlife transition, deserves to be met by someone who has done the real work. Someone who knows your name, understands your stage of life, has lived in her own body long enough to read yours with some wisdom, and who respects the extraordinary depth of the lineage she is holding. Whether you're a regular or a random drop-in.

I’ll be honest with you. I really needed a good class this week. Those who know me, know there are very few folks I trust with my body and energy. But after some perplexing news, I softened and recognized I needed to be held, to let go, to hand my body over to someone else, and simply breathe. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that. And so, I walked out carrying more tension than I arrived with.

Was it karma? Was it the universe holding up a mirror to remind me of the value of what I have spent over two decades building? Was it simply “bad luck,” or one of those necessary moments of humility that keep a teacher honest? Should I have just sucked it up and done my own practice at home to further develop my self-mastery skills?

Perhaps it was all those things at once. I’m still processing it.

Regardless, what I know for certain is this: the experience of being truly held in a yoga class — of feeling genuinely seen, supported, and guided by someone who knows both the practice and the unique landscape of your body and your life — is becoming increasingly rare.

And that loss matters.

Why? Because that quality of holding is not a luxury. It is not an indulgence for the spiritually inclined. It is medicine. It is what allows a woman (and a man) to finally, fully, let go. It is also what keeps our community strong and evolving.

Yoga is not a workout. It’s not a stage. It is a path to the soul.

Don’t ever forget that.

AHO