See below for verifiable details on these core takeaways:
Since launching its registry in 1999, Yoga Alliance (YA) has never assessed or certified the actual competency of teachers or trainers (which they designate as “schools”).
Instead, Yoga Alliance has recognized teachers and trainers based entirely on two things: paperwork and the payment of fees. In return, registrants receive coveted “registry marks.”
The Irony of “Approved” Studios: A Case Study
A few months ago a student who had gone through my teacher training called me looking for advice for an upcoming teaching “audition.” She told me of a Craigslist ad that a local studio had posted looking for qualified teachers. You might wonder why I thought it was odd to learn about this ad. It’s because this studio offers their own 200, 300 and 500-hour training programs and regularly churns out teachers like gum balls out of a machine. The point? Their program is so bad that they won’t even hire their own trainees! But the studio trainers are YA-accredited so they keep bringing in trainees who don’t know any better, taking their money and running trainings with a sub-par curriculum. This is a big and reputable studio – I kid you not. I’ve got lots of stories that would make you go… huh, really? – Teacher Trainer
On October 12, 2019, I captured this page on the Yoga Alliance website entitled “Spirit of the Standards July 2016.”
Instead of serving as the backbone of what the organization stood for, this foundational page was baffling and completely devoid of actual standards.
Even with the updated requirements that took effect in February 2020, Yoga Alliance failed to introduce actual standards, opting instead for administrative hurdles:
Even with the updated requirements that took effect in February 2020, Yoga Alliance failed to introduce actual standards. Instead, they created an administrative burden for trainers:
In 2023, we came across newer documentation from Yoga Alliance. This later update introduced actual sentences rather than mere topical phrases — a step closer to what one expects from a centralized registration body:
While we cannot know for sure, it’s reasonable to presume this update was inspired by the critical observations published here.
Even so, a closer look reveals more of the same:
I am not suggesting, nor have I ever suggested, that Yoga Alliance should endeavor to develop or uphold competency standards. They have demonstrated no capability to do so. Rather, I’ve published this information to make it utterly clear: treating YA as a vanguard for teaching competency is an illusion. Believing that YA ensures quality only distracts teachers from finding real, meaningful ways to elevate teaching standards.
My feeling is that it is the responsibility of the TRAINER and their respective YTT offering to ensure benchmarks are in place and the responsibility of the prospective TRAINEE to do their due diligence. I know many trainers who have only taught yoga for a few years who begin a YTT, pay their dues to YA and boom… they’re off and running and counting the money in the bank. In these cases, they give substandard trainings and then disappear a few years later, not having established credibility in the field. My priority is creating a safe, quality standalone YTT without the approval of anyone except my own board and governing body, which in my case is with the endorsement and teaching of Registered Nurses, Advanced Practice Nurses, Doctorate Nurses and other recognized expert medical professionals. – Annette Tersigni, The Yoga Nurse link
It is a telling reality that there are many highly recognized, influential teachers who are not registered with Yoga Alliance.
This is not a statement against individual teachers who do choose to register. Rather, it demonstrates a fundamental truth: Yoga Alliance registration is not required nor does it directly correlate with skill, experience or influence.
To illustrate this, a search using Yoga Alliance’s own teacher directory (as documented on October 3, 2019) revealed that numerous high-profile educators and thought leaders were absent from the registry:
Of course, it’s not only widely-known teachers who decline to register with Yoga Alliance. Many competent everyday instructors also bypass the registry entirely.
For instance, in response to a FB community discussion regarding whether registration matters, numerous teachers weighed in to confirm they operate successfully without YA affiliation:
Rather than providing meaningful resources to help trainers elevate the quality of education, Yoga Alliance primarily burdens them with red tape, rising fees, and an unusually high application fee.
Beginning in February 2020, Yoga Alliance formally shifted the responsibility of assessing competency (across unspecified standards and more than 50 topics) entirely onto the trainers. Yet, they offer virtually no structural resources, curriculum frameworks, or teaching tools to support this process.
Instead of educational backing, the registration process demands extensive administrative overhead:
Standards vs Bureaucracy
Yoga Alliance drug out my application for nearly a year. They didn’t understand the quality or delivery process of my training and in the end I dumbed it down to the point it no longer resembled my training at all and simply told them what they wanted to hear. – Sarcha Thurston link
Since publishing Registration, Certification, Accreditation: Why You Don’t Need to Pay the Yoga Alliance Fees, our inbox was flooded with emails from teachers and trainers expressing widespread support. Many offered to volunteer their time to help foster a transparent discussion about viable alternatives to Yoga Alliance.
This grassroots momentum led to the formation of a 39-member advisory board, which was active throughout 2019 to evaluate industry standards and explore paths forward. (See here for a breakdown of their core discussion topics and findings).
While the majority of educators who reached out shared standard frustrations over administrative overreach and fees, a significant number submitted stories revealing a deeper level of institutional harm.
Below are some of those firsthand accounts.
Have a story to share? If you have experienced challenges, unfair practices, or administrative hurdles with Yoga Alliance, we welcome you to reach out and share your experience with our community.
Yoga Alliance took nearly a year to approve a Registered Yoga School (RYS) application submitted by a highly qualified teacher trained under elite teacher Gregor Maehle. Remarkably, that exact same training program was accepted almost immediately by Yoga Australia. Furthermore, years prior, Yoga Alliance forced this same experienced teacher-trainer to repeat a basic training program just to gain registration — despite already actively training teachers for Maehle.
Yoga Australia has significantly higher standards than Yoga Alliance and usually processes most applications in around six months, after a close supportive process with the applicant. I submitted a training application to both Yoga Australia and Yoga Alliance. Yoga Australia approved the application within 48 hours without revision. Yoga Alliance drug out my application for nearly a year. They didn’t understand the quality or delivery process of my training and in the end, I dumbed it down to the point it no longer resembled my training at all and simply told them what they wanted to hear.
I am also a teacher who many years prior had to redo basic training to get registered with Yoga Alliance despite already training teachers for Gregor Maehle.
Yoga Alliance is structured to endorse training that maximises membership to the organisation rather than support robust standards in training and teaching. This, in my opinion, makes it purely a commercial enterprise entirely of zero value to teachers or trainers.
The organisation itself is mostly responsible for leading to a worldwide degradation of training standards in efforts to widen the potential membership net by allowing registration of 200-hour training that is delivered over very short time frames — as short as a few weeks. As a yoga school owner, I would never employ someone who trained for only a few weeks. I think we would all agree that this is grossly inadequate, even for basic training. I can’t see them ever changing this as it would severely limit their membership pool.
Having achieved a widening of the membership net of the organisation, Yoga Alliance are moving towards monopolising power as demonstrated in their making the training registration process deliberately rigid, unnecessarily long and complicated, and funneled.
By funneled, I mean that they only recognise the YA pathway – even though there are other organisations that do the same thing (and much better). If you don’t join the system at the bottom end, you are forever kept out of the system. I’d like to work to keep options open and to compare the standards that various organisations support.
Experienced, high-integrity studio owners have witnessed individuals graduate and register with Yoga Alliance who “could not teach a sun salutation” or grasp basic principles of yogic philosophy, physiology, or psychology. Despite decades of advanced training with elite teachers and scholars, veteran educators find themselves required to undertake further training with YA “approved” schools.
My partner and I operate a small yoga studio in the suburbs of Detroit called House of Yoga. We have had difficulties with Yoga Alliance and essentially understand it to be a money making venture wrongly perceived to be an organization that upholds standards.
We also understand that virtually anyone can become a “certified yoga teacher” [the common understanding] through Yoga Alliance as they have no way of verifying what training an individual really has.
We both believe in high ethical and moral practices and believe in teaching people how to be really good, sincere teachers. We have witnessed people who could not teach a sun salutation or have even basic understandings of the principles of yogic philosophy, physiology or psychology that had been certified by YA.
We’ve thought about doing an experiment where we register our cat “Buddha” as a yoga teacher haha. If the fee was paid, there’s no reason to expect there would be a problem.
We have both been practicing and teaching for nearly 20 years and have led many, many teacher training programs. We are having difficulty with the new regulations by the YA that in order to continue to provide trainings, we will soon have to have an RYT-500. We both have had much training from the best Hatha Yoga teachers and spiritual teachers out there today…. real teachers such as Mark Whitwell and yogic scholars such as Russill Paul, among many others.
But the YA process doesn’t take into account such quality and requires that we train with their “approved” schools.
A registered teacher fell victim to a fraudulent 300-hour teacher training program run by instructors who falsely advertised themselves as a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga School (RYS). When the student filed a formal grievance, Yoga Alliance acknowledged the deception but offered zero restitution to the victim, refused to credit the completed hours, and ultimately allowed the offending trainers to pay their fees and register without penalty.
After we published this report, the teacher notified us that Yoga Alliance finally stepped in to remedy the situation. Because justice was ultimately served, all identifying details have been removed from the statement below. This serves as evidence that speaking out about institutional harm can sometimes compel accountability and restitution.
I am currently registered with Yoga Alliance as an E-RYT 200.
I agree that the standards don’t represent teacher quality and that Yoga Alliance provides no real oversight of the standards.
I wanted to share with you a personal experience that showed me that Yoga Alliance also provides no ethical oversight of their teachers and schools, despite their bragging about how they protect teachers and the Yoga community.
I enrolled in a 300-hour teacher training program run by two teachers who were E-RYT 500. The enrollment material and program website advertised that it was a Yoga Alliance approved RYS-300. Upon finishing the program, I found out it was not.
I filed a grievance with Yoga Alliance, because mis-representing a program as an RYS is, of course, a violation of the Yoga Alliance rules. Essentially the two trainers running the program lied and took a ton of money under false pretenses, which is stealing. The Yoga Alliance code of conduct requires all teachers and trainers to abide by the Yamas, which prohibit lying and stealing.
In response to my grievance, Yoga Alliance acknowledged that the school and trainers lied. But rather than doing anything to help me, they told me I needed to enroll in a new program and start all over again.!
And, instead of punishing the school and trainers, they let them pay the registration fee to become an RYS-300.
Yoga Alliance punished the victim and rewarded rule breakers who lied and stole.
I have copies of the 300 hour program’s letter of engagement and printouts about the program from their website. And I have the grievance correspondence with Yoga Alliance including their reply.
If Yoga Alliance had helped me, the victim, all they would have received is goodwill. But by helping the school they got 600 bucks and annual renewal money.
Thank you for your interest.
A registered 200-RYT teacher abandoned plans to pursue an advanced training due to Yoga Alliance’s rigid rule requiring all 300 advanced hours to be completed with the same Registered Yoga School (RYS). For global expats and mobile professionals, this inflexible policy makes multi-tiered certifications financially and logistically impossible.
Editor’s Note: While the subsequent introduction of online training flexibility in 2020 may have altered these constraints, this account remains preserved here to document the historical impact of YA’s rigid administrative hurdles on the teaching community.
I’m a 200 RYT and write to Yoga Alliance about their requirements of having to use the same training provider to upgrade to RYT500. This might not be a problem for some people but for expats, trailing spouses, we move cities, countries, continents at short notice. 7 countries in 17 years and I’ don’t consider myself an experienced expat! Hence I completed my 200 hours in Geneva and would need to use the same training provider for my additional 300 hours. If I start my training in Geneva, Switzerland and do 100 hours then move to Sydney Australia, I would have to travel back to Geneva to complete my additional 200 hours. That’s a long way, a lot of time, very expensive, impractical and unnecessary IF Yoga Alliance allowed further training to be completed with different training providers who all adhered to the same competencies, training requirements. I was told I could not do this as: “Excellent question! The training must be done at a single RYS. This will ensure consistency in teaching and practices.” I therefore cannot risk starting my additional training to become a 500RYT in case we move. Very disappointing and inflexible response showing little understanding on behalf of Yoga Alliance. I welcome your feedback as others will have a similar issue with the inflexible system and lack of understanding of the problem facing teachers who move homes due to their work/lifestyle.
The widespread misperceptions surrounding Yoga Alliance prompt several considerations:
Ultimately, every individual teacher and trainer must choose their own path forward. Yoga Teacher Central takes this position:
Explore the links below for verifiable information on teaching standards, Yoga Alliance and other professional organizations, and related topics. These resources are also available from the Standards & Self-Assessment Hub.