- Five conditions sit under every teaching career: students leave, class numbers rise and fall, studios close, timetables change, and some classes simply do not land.
- None of the five is a verdict on you. Most run on things you never controlled, and you will rarely be told the real reason.
- These are conditions of the work, the way weather is a condition of farming. Nobody thinks the farmer caused the rain.
- Yoga and Stoicism teach the same distinction: you have a claim on your effort, and none on its results.
- Sorting what is yours from what never was does not keep studios open. It changes what a closure costs you, and puts your effort where it still moves something.
A teaching career comes with five facts you can count on: students leave, class numbers rise and fall, studios close, the timetable changes under you, and some classes just do not land. None of them is a verdict on you, and most run on things you never controlled. Expecting them, and sorting what is actually yours, changes what each one costs.
By YogaPros — the professional body for yoga teachers since 2006, with more than 10,000 members across 100+ countries.
What are the five facts of a teaching life?
Five conditions sit under every teaching career, and reading them together loosens the grip of any one.
- Students leave. Even the ones who told you the class saved their week. Shifts change, babies arrive, knees object, families move. Most of it has nothing to do with you, and you will almost never be told the real reason.
- Rooms rise and fall. January arrives full of resolutions and August empties for the holidays. Numbers move with term dates and the weather.
- Studios close. The decision is made in a spreadsheet you will never see, sometimes by someone who never took your class.
- The timetable you built changes under you. The cover teacher cancels at five. The retreat does not fill. The hall gets double-booked for a children’s party.
- Some classes do not land. You prepared well and taught well, and the room stayed flat anyway. A year of teaching hands you at least one of those nights.
Read together, they stop looking like failures and start looking like weather. These are conditions of the work, the way rain is a condition of farming. Nobody thinks the farmer caused the rain.
Why isn’t a closing studio a verdict on me?
Because the decision was made in a spreadsheet you never saw, usually for reasons that were never about your teaching.
The message lands on a Tuesday, between the school run and your evening class. The studio is closing at the end of the month. Six years of Thursday nights, finished in two lines and a sad-face emoji. You know the spiral that starts here. Maybe the numbers were my fault. Maybe I should have promoted it harder. By ten o’clock a closing studio has become a referendum on you, and you are lying awake questioning the whole career. But rent, footfall, a landlord’s plans, a lease: none of it was ever in your hands. The spiral survives on one confusion. It reads a condition of the work as a report card, and it is not one.
How do I handle the parts I can’t control?
With a very old distinction: you have a claim on your effort, and none on its results.
Yoga got here first. The Bhagavad Gita’s most quoted teaching says exactly that, a claim on the effort and none on the fruit. Teach the class as well as it can be taught; the size of the room was never in the contract. For anyone whose results run through other people, that line reads less like philosophy than like a job description.
The Stoics taught the same. Epictetus opened his handbook nearly two thousand years ago by dividing everything into two piles: what is up to us, and what is not. Your judgement and your effort sit in the first pile. Other people and outcomes sit in the second. Peace, he said, comes from working the first pile and leaving the second alone.
Modern research on acceptance keeps confirming the old instruction. People who spend their energy fighting facts they cannot change tend to carry the stress longer and act later, while those who accept the fact and redirect tend to recover sooner. Acceptance gets confused with giving up. Up close it looks more like accuracy: an honest account of where your effort still works, so that all of it goes there.
How do I sort what’s actually mine?
On the night something goes wrong, put it on one page and split it into two short lists.
It takes ten minutes. Write what happened in one plain line, with no interpretation: “The studio closes on the 31st.” Underneath, make two lists, one after the other, headed Mine and Not mine. Not mine: the studio’s rent, the student’s new shift, the children’s party, August. Mine: how I prepare, how I reply to the email, whether my insurance is current and my agreements are in writing, whether I ask the owner for a reference before the doors shut, where the class could move.
Then act once, small, from the Mine list. One message, sent before bed. Read the Not-mine list and leave it alone. Notice where the spiral wants to live, because almost everything it wants to chew on sits on the second list, which is exactly why chewing never produces an action. The sort will not keep a studio open. It changes what the closure costs you, and it puts your effort where effort still moves something.
Where does a professional body come in?
When the Not-mine list holds a closing studio or cancelled cover, the floor under you decides what the week actually costs.
Insurance that is current and agreements in writing are not the exciting part of a teaching life. They are the part that turns a bad month into an inconvenience rather than a crisis. Keeping that floor solid is a large share of what a professional body is for. YogaPros holds the parts of a teaching life that should not rest on any one teacher’s memory or good luck, so that when one of the five facts lands, you are not also scrambling for cover you assumed was there. The sort tells you what is yours. The floor holds the rest.
Members go deeper. YogaPros members can read the full version of this piece in the Learning Hub, with a downloadable one-page card for the five facts and the Mine / Not-mine sort. It is part of the Wellbeing & Mindset collection: practical support for the working life of a yoga teacher, including the unglamorous floor that decides what a bad week costs.