Yoga Instruction Online … Bogus or Brilliant?
Yoga instruction isn’t limited to the classroom anymore, thanks to the internet. The World Wide Web has opened up a huge new realm of yoga possibilities. Unfortunately, it has opened up a whole new can of worms too!
Along with informative sites by knowledgeable teachers, there’s also a whole lot of incomplete and misleading information being spread by inexperienced yoga enthusiasts. This cut-and-paste cyber world makes it simple for anybody to create a website on any topic, yoga included, and load it up with content that makes the creator seem like they are an authority … when in most cases, they are far from it.
The bottom line about yoga instruction online is, Buyer Beware!
You can definitely learn yoga online … but you don’t want to be careless about it. As with anything online, proper research is your best friend.
Yoga instruction online is not really any different than in the living, breathing world. You need a teacher with adequate knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, that knowledge and experience is lacking in most yoga teachers today … on or offline.
The modern yoga world too often mistakes enthusiastic yoga teachers for knowledgeable ones, and the modern standards of a few hundred hours of yoga teacher training sure don’t help matters. These extremely basic requirements are a terribly insufficient barometer for gauging whether or not someone really does have the understanding and experience to properly teach yoga.
It may seem a lot easier to determine who is a good yoga teacher live and in person then over the internet. But that also relies on you, the student, having enough knowledge and experience to really know the difference. The Bhagavad Gita cautions us that in Kali Yuga, our present worldly age, “great orators are often mistaken for the wise,” and that has certainly become the case in the modern yoga scene.
Amid a sea of yoga junk on the internet today, there are definitely some nuggets of gold … some masters who have taken their immense knowledge and experience of yoga and are applying it through modern technology in unique and valuable ways. Sorting through the massive online yoga universe to find them takes work … but once you do, I’m sure you’ll feel that it was time and effort well spent.