Pride

Liz is already a doctor of physical therapy. Becky isn’t far behind — neither is Victoria. All three pursued their doctorates while keeping a serious practice. They’ve each thanked me, at different points, for fostering their curiosity. For never letting them forget what they were capable of.

Mudita. That’s the Sanskrit word for sympathetic joy — the satisfaction you feel in another person’s happiness. I feel it when I think about where these three are headed. Sometimes it moves me to tears.

Is this what being a parent feels like?

I’m not working with many full-time yoga teachers right now, and I couldn’t encourage the path in good faith anyway. If you want to teach yoga seriously in 2026, it has to live in your bones. No argument I could make would stop the right person from going. I know this because nothing could have stopped me. Many people tried.

The path is harrowing. It tends toward a certain satisfaction — and notoriously toward burnout. How do I keep the blood off my hands? I tell the truth and let them choose.

What I can’t tell them is that there’s a clear road ahead. The foundations of the practice are understood less than ever before, even as the culture has never been more saturated with its surface. Yoga got popular enough to be fully absorbed. It stopped being a zeitgeist. It became wallpaper.

The extractive consumption machine chewed up an indigenous insight practice whole and spat out scorched earth. Private equity has a way of doing that. It’s hard to make a living on scorched earth.

There’s no real pathway now from serious practitioner to working professional with a livable income. This isn’t a familiarity problem — gen-pop knows the words, has known them for two decades. It’s structural. The professional layer got hollowed out.

So knowing that three yogis will hold the highest accreditation in the healing arts — and be paid their worth — clears my conscience a little.

It won’t cost them their sadhana to be doctors. That’s not how it works. The practice lives in the body, not the credential. They’ll carry it forward the way it was always meant to travel: through embodied example, through people actually doing the thing. That’s the whole system, moving through them.