Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Teaching Yoga

Teaching yoga will change your life. It will continually bring you back to your earliest motivations to practice and add abundant clarity to the first questions you asked yourself about yoga. These questions are almost invariably philosophical and personal, the answers shifting amid the currents of our lives. Who am I? What makes me feel happy and balanced? How can I make things easier and steadier in my life? Even after years or decades of practice, most teachers’ motives are still evolving. Jim Frandeen, sixty-five, a yoga teacher for many years and a student since his early forties, just completed his fourth teacher-training program in part because, as he puts it, “the more I practice and teach, the more I realize there is to learn about myself and life—so here I am, feeling like it’s all just beginning.”

Students come to yoga for a variety of reasons. For many it is a way to relax and reduce stress from living in a world of ...