You Don’t Have to Suffer Under a Bad Teacher to Learn Anything

I was on a yoga ethics panel last fall, and something became clear to me around twenty minutes in. Not during the panel — during the prep. I kept being asked to think about whether yoga communities actually articulate basic norms out loud. Things like: don’t sleep with your students. And it became clear, fast, that most of the other panelists assumed they didn’t.

They assumed that norm was private. Aspirational, maybe. Muttered somewhere. But not said plainly, in the actual rooms where people practice, every year, to everyone new who walks in.

My community says it plainly. It’s not a big moment. It’s just a thing we do.

I was embarrassed by how much of the conversation’s practical weight fell on Greg and me — the only working teachers on the panel. Not embarrassed for myself. Embarrassed because of what it said about who gets invited to discuss yoga ethics. The people shaping the conversation were people who think and write about yoga. The people who actually run the rooms where the ethics have to hold were the minority. I was embarrassed at how necessary Greg was to bringing any relevance to it at all. The assumption that communities don’t say these things out loud, repeatedly, is genuinely wild to me. And the people most confident in that assumption were the ones furthest from the rooms.

That’s the specific version of a general problem.

The yoga world has a myth underneath almost every conversation about difficult teachers: that you have to study with an asshole to learn anything real. That the difficulty is part of the transmission. That the genius and the cruelty are packaged together, and if you’re serious, you accept the whole package.

This is groupthink dressed as apprenticeship.

The normalization of “I have to study with an asshole to learn dirt” is wild to me. Not because it’s false in every case — people do sometimes learn in spite of terrible conditions. But the “in spite of” has been quietly edited out. The suffering became the credential. The surviving became the proof of seriousness. And the teacher’s behavior stopped being a factor worth evaluating.

Here’s what actually transmits: presence, feedback, repetition, and care. Not care in a soft sense. Care in the structural sense. A teacher who gives you their real attention, who corrects what they see, who shows up the same way whether you’re new or not. That’s the rare thing. That’s what’s worth protecting.

What doesn’t transmit is charisma routed through domination. That produces obedience. Sometimes impressive obedience. But obedience to a form isn’t the same as understanding a practice, and you can’t pass on what you never actually received.

The credential distortion cuts both ways. The person who survived fifteen years under an abusive teacher has a story. The person who learned from three steady, honest teachers over the same stretch has a practice. The yoga world has consistently confused the story for the thing.

Part of what keeps the romance alive is that the difficult-master story is, genuinely, more interesting to tell. Pain is narrative. Consistency isn’t. The podcaster doesn’t make an episode about the teacher who showed up for thirty years without incident. The journalist doesn’t cover the lineage where “don’t sleep with your students” is boring to say because it’s never in question. Scandal is legible. Ethical transmission is not.

The post-Jois reckoning has been real. And it has stalled. Not because people don’t believe the accounts — most do. It’s stalled because the romantic narrative of the difficult master is still doing its work, just one layer down. The argument is slightly chastened now: yes, he was harmful, but. Yes, it cost people something, but. The “but” is the stall mechanism. There is nothing on the other side of it that holds.

Not the lineage. Not the adjustments. Not the level of practice he could produce in students who survived the conditions. You can learn primary series from a teacher who doesn’t touch you without consent. You can learn the count from someone who keeps their hands to themselves. These are not conflicting goods.

The practical alternative to suffering-as-learning isn’t gentleness. It’s structure. Clear expectations, explicit norms said out loud every year to everyone in the room, real feedback without cruelty, accountability that isn’t routed through charisma. That’s what ethical transmission looks like. It’s also boring, which is why it doesn’t get the panel invitations.

The greatest teacher you can have is one who is genuinely trying not to harm you — everything else is a myth that someone else benefits from keeping alive.