If you’re exploring yoga teachers in Vancouver specifically, you’ll notice a wide range. Some, highly trained instructors, some, less so. Neither is automatically good or bad, but transparency is non-negotiable. The benefit of finding a teacher within a lineage is that the history, texts, and teachings already exist for you to study, with or without the guidance of a teacher. If you like the teachings but something about a teacher rubs you the wrong way, you can always find

Teaching yoga involves more than demonstrating postures. It involves working directly with people’s bodies and minds, which carries the risk of harm if done carelessly or without adequate understanding. It also involves influencing internal states—calming the nervous system, opening emotional layers, and sometimes surfacing unresolved experiences. Students often enter yoga spaces in states of vulnerability, whether they recognize it or not.

My Tantric practice has widened my capacity for nuance, teaching me how to love fully without falling into self-abnegation or abandoning boundaries. My practice has become my refuge, a place spacious enough to hold my hurt, my rage, and my fierce, sacred love, and all of the mysterious ways that grace arrives to me.

The popular association between each cakra and a color from the ROYGBIV spectrum (red to violet) isn’t found in the original yogic texts. These assignments came much later—popularized by Theosophists in the 19th and 20th centuries and cemented by authors like Anodea Judith in the 1980s.

Yoga is not a performance of health, it’s a path of awareness, liberation, and union. Invite yourself and students into self-inquiry rather than self-optimization. Ask, “Is this helping me connect more deeply to myself and the world?” rather than, “Is this making me healthier or better?”