Wellness Pros and Our Own Wellness

People in the yoga and wellness spaces foist around a lot of shame and guilt as we expect yoga professionals to always embody the stereotypical ideal of “healthy”. This means we feel bad when we catch colds, not only because we are sick but because for some reason our getting sick is a “moral failing”. Maybe, we think we aren’t as good at yoga as we originally thought.

I find that people who work in yoga tend to believe a couple of things I don’t think are true.  First,  steady yoga practice will always keep us in perfect physical condition, able to battle every contagion to ever enter our atmosphere. It won’t.

Second, because we teach yoga, we have a moral and ethical obligation to always be “healthy”. This isn’t true because yoga practitioners and teachers, for all our lovely qualities, are just regular people like everyone else. We stress out with our families, struggle paying our bills because of our typically low-wage jobs, and succumb to the call of social media to fill our time and take the edge off our over-stimulated nervous systems.

So why do we hold ourselves to a standard we would never hold our students to? I think our very first step is to remember our own wellness matters as much as others, and to give ourselves grace within that journey. In an industry comprised primarily of women, we often choose to support other people’s wellness before we support our own. This includes skipping or altering our practice, forgetting to be a real person with hobbies and interests outside yoga or wellness, and not prioritizing our own pleasure and joy.

This is where the conversation becomes tricky: we already know all the things. We are aware of how important it is to engage in self-care activities, prioritize yourself, move your body, calm your mind, and nourish your spirit. We feel immense guilt and shame when we aren’t constantly doing those things. We know our students look to us both as aspiration and for inspiration. What happens when we can’t live up to that superhuman standard?

We need to take the dream down a few notches. We give our students as much shame as us when we make them feel like they need to do everything we believe a “good” yoga practitioner should. Making our students feel shame is never good for business. We espouse that we all should practice three days a week at least; meditate, eat “healthy”, and have a kind smile on their faces. If we teach people ideals like this as what we should be striving for, it feels incongruent when we ourselves cannot live up to them.

This conversation needs one simple universal truth. We matter. We matter as much as every other person on the planet does, and so instead of striving to lead by impossible standards, perhaps we lead by remembering we are all in this together.

Then we can teach our students they matter too – that their healing journey doesn’t need to be Instagrammable. We can set a new standard where we, the yoga and wellness professionals, get to find our own imperfect path to feeling better and more ourselves. Then we leave the shame and guilt of getting it perfect the first time on the side of the road where it belongs.