Let’s be honest, the thing has now become a joke: teaching yoga is no longer a skill that matures over time, as in all body disciplines, with the sweat of the forehead and practice, but rather a status that you buy easily, and rather cheaply, in the flourishing market of training courses for yoga teachers.
We are witnessing a bizarre reversal in which the cart - the teaching - is put before the horse - the practice - which should (if only for common sense) tow and give foundation to the teaching.

The offer is wide and satisfies all palates. To increase its revenues, the market of yoga in fact has been enormously segmented in the last decade giving rise to styles, methods, variants for every taste, each accompanied by the relevant kit of 'teacher training course'. The main Italian yoga periodicals, mostly similar to women’s costume magazines, are full of advertisements of training courses for yoga teachers given, in the vast majority of cases, by self-referential 'gurus'. Mind you, it is certainly not a prerogative only Italian. Italy and Europe, in general, are at least ten years behind what has already happened in the United States but are dangerously following in its footsteps.

Yoga Alliance, a private organization founded in 1996 in the United States, now holds a monopoly in the market of teacher training (also in Italy) and, in terms of penetration in the training market, has far exceeded even the rather unsuccessful attempt of the Indian Prime Minister to launch an international license of teacher of "yoga" provided by the Ministry of yoga AYUS (AYUS: Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and homeopathic treatments).

Yoga providers have well understood that selling a yoga course (classes, seminars, intensive, etc.) is no longer enough: the audience wants teacher training courses; the audience wants to buy the status of 'yoga teacher' to wear with friends and colleagues. The symbolic advantages are assured, earning with a few euros a label that - from the value point of view - adds a lot of stuff to the already overloaded ego: the 'spiritual', 'evolved', 'conscious', 'physically healthy', 'alternative' but also 'austere, 'calm' but also 'fascinating, 'controlled' but also 'natural.

Poor us, and poor students... but are there any remained? ... and poor yoga! To introduce inexperienced teachers, that is to lower the quality of the offer, like it can be read in the manuals of economy, will be able to carry in future to an important decrescita of the interest in yoga and to a phenomenon of inflation, however already ongoing in the States.

Maybe better so, you will start from a genuine interest in the subject and not from a compulsive shopping in which the decision-making process of buying yoga appears very strongly, if not exclusively, driven by needs induced and hetero-direct: fashion, beauty, fitness.