When Yoga Teacher Training Is More Emotional Colonization Than Inner Liberation
Many years ago, I found myself in a car with four other yoga teacher trainees, en route to a then-trendy yoga studio in Berlin-Mitte. Let’s call it Spirit Yoga Mitte, because that’s exactly what it was called. We had just finished several hours of training and, for reasons I’ve since deleted from memory, were heading to another studio.
Somewhere along the way, the four women in the car started chatting enthusiastically about Germany’s Next Topmodel. I’m not even sure if that show still exists – I actively don’t watch TV. In any case, I remember vividly how alienated I felt in that conversation. Again. This time, not because I was questioning the whitewashed stories we were fed or silently debating the ethics of white women in bindis chanting in Sanskrit – but simply because I had never watched Germany’s Next Topmodel, couldn’t care less, and found the whole conversation just as tired as watching men in polo shirts playing golf.
While they dissected the personality traits and physical features of various models with the seriousness of a plastic surgeon smoothing out the wrinkles of a 90-year-old woman, I found myself wondering: why would anyone training to be a yoga teacher find celebrity gossip this compelling? I was confused, disappointed, and mildly horrified by the company I was keeping.
Years later, someone else from that training, Anna – a woman of Color, the only non-white trainee besides me, and the only one willing to ask uncomfortable questions – summed it up perfectly. She said, “It was obvious from the beginning. They were all just doing the training because they wanted to be thin.”
Anna had a way of seeing through things with disturbing clarity. She was sharp, politically conscious, and absolutely unwilling to play nice for the sake of group harmony. She made people uncomfortable. She made me uncomfortable. Which, in spaces like that, often is the closest thing to doing actual yoga.
Toward the end of the training, we had what was euphemistically called “Psych Hour.” Everyone dreaded it. Rightly so. Patricia, the founder of Spirit Yoga, would take small groups of trainees and emotionally dismantle them under the guise of personal growth. In hindsight, it was less psychology, more spiritual shock therapy.
I was torn apart in front of a predominantly white group and retraumatized in the process. Patricia somehow managed to push me into re-encountering a deep childhood trauma, even after I tried to resist. To this day, I still feel a wave of nausea when I remember the shame I felt opening up in that setting. Stripped down emotionally in a room full of people who were anything but a safe space.
There was no follow-up. No integration. Just raw exposure. This was trauma excavation without any profound psychological training, let alone trauma-informed care. It was reckless, harmful, and quite frankly, lawsuit material. But I was younger then. More accommodating. Everyone else played along, so I did too.
Later, I told Anna a little of what Patricia had said to me. She just looked at me and replied, “She should really deal with her own whiteness first.”
That one sentence. It sliced through everything. Anna had captured, in one sharp breath, what the entire training had lacked: a critical understanding of whiteness, power, and privilege. She gave me something no one else had in that space – a sense of being seen. And I’ve never forgotten it.
Years later, when my son and I became the targets of a violent, racist attack in the outskirts of Berlin, Anna was the one who helped. She connected me to a support organization, which helped for a while – until everything stalled because the perpetrators were being protected by the Verfassungsschutz.
But back to Anna.
Of course, she didn’t become a yoga superstar. I have no idea if she still teaches yoga, or if she ever really wanted to. I do know that she stayed politically active. That she didn’t get the academic jobs she deserved. Because institutions tend to avoid people with too much integrity. And I know that now, just like then, she’s speaking out about war crimes in Palestine, probably holding her heart together with sheer will as her people are being murdered.
People like Anna are why I haven’t written yoga spaces off entirely. They are rare, but they exist. The ones who see clearly, speak truth, and hold space not just with their hands on their hearts and retreat offerings, but with political clarity, cultural awareness, and a backbone.
They’re almost never on stage.
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