There’s something I think we get slightly backwards when we talk about studying Yoga or Ayurveda professionally. Naturally, we tend to focus on the end result. We talk about becoming a qualified Yoga Teacher or Ayurvedic Wellness Coach. We talk about training hours, the certificate at the end, what you’ll be qualified to do, whether you’ll be able to teach classes or work with clients, and perhaps eventually whether you could turn all of this into some kind of meaningful work. 

And of course all of that matters. If you’re investing in professional education, you should come out of it with knowledge, skills, confidence and a qualification that actually means something. 

But I think there is another enormous part of the value of studying Yoga and Ayurveda that we don’t talk about nearly enough. 

You get to receive the education too. 

You’re going to spend hundreds of hours learning about the body, the mind, behaviour, habits, nourishment, movement, rest, daily rhythms, philosophy, spiritual practice and what it means to live well. 

Why wouldn’t you turn some of that enquiry towards yourself? 

Why wouldn’t you use the time you’re spending learning these sciences to explore your own health, habits, mind, relationships, routines and spiritual life as well? 

Because if you really give yourself permission to dive into what you’re learning (rather than simply rushing through the modules, completing the assessments and collecting the certificate) there is this incredible parallel opportunity for personal transformation sitting right beside the professional qualification.

You can know a lot about wellness without actually knowing yourself very well. 

This is one of the strange things about living in the age of wellness information. We know SO much. We know about protein and hormones and nervous system regulation and gut health and sleep and strength training and meditation and circadian rhythms and blood sugar and breathwork. We know our doshas. We’ve downloaded the apps. We listen to the podcasts. We follow the experts. We save the posts. 

And I’m not particularly cynical about that. Some of these things are incredibly useful. I use plenty of them myself. There has also always been a “next thing” in health and wellness. That’s not new. What interests me much more is whether all of this information is actually making us more knowledgeable and capable of caring for ourselves. Because you can accumulate endless amounts of information about health without necessarily developing much understanding of yourself. 

The same thing can happen when we formally study Yoga or Ayurveda. 

You can learn the Sanskrit names of postures. You can learn anatomy and sequencing and teaching methodology.You can learn about Vata, Pitta and Kapha, the elements, agni, dinacharya, seasonal routines, food and lifestyle practices. But eventually, if you’re really studying these systems, the teachings have this wonderful way of turning back towards you. 

What does this mean in my life? 
What am I noticing in my body? 
What happens when I actually practise this consistently? 
What patterns do I see in my mind? 
What supports me? What depletes me? 
What am I doing simply because someone told me it was “healthy”? What actually changes when I begin paying closer attention? 

You don’t have to transform yourself before you can help somebody else 

I want to make an important distinction here, because I don’t want this idea of “embodiment before qualification” to become another impossible standard we place on people. You can absolutely study the sciences of Yoga and Ayurveda, develop professional competence, complete your training and become capable of sharing what you have learnt without first having personally mastered or applied every part of it to your own life. Of course you can. 

We don’t expect somebody to have personally experienced every condition, life stage or challenge their future students or clients might experience. And your own lived experience is not necessarily evidence of what will work for somebody else. In fact, I think we need to be quite careful about that. 

Your lived experience is exactly that: your lived experience. It gives you one perspective. It doesn’t automatically give you superior knowledge, and it certainly doesn’t make your experience universally applicable. 

That is precisely why we study. 

We need broader knowledge, theory, teachers; traditional texts, research and professional frameworks. We need to understand our scope of practice. We need to learn how to work with the person in front of us rather than unconsciously turning our own experience into their prescription. 

So I am absolutely not suggesting that you need to “heal yourself” before you have anything useful to offer another person. What I am saying is that there is an extraordinary opportunity sitting alongside all of that professional learning: let the education work on your life too. 

Your lived experience won’t teach you everything. But it will teach you something. 

Applying these teachings to your own life isn’t valuable because afterwards you’ll be able to say, “Well, this worked for me, therefore this is what my client should do.” Quite the opposite. If you study well, hopefully you become increasingly aware of just how narrow your own experience actually is. 
 
But your own experience can teach you alot about the process of change. You might discover how easy it is to understand something intellectually and how difficult it can be to actually do it consistently. You might enthusiastically overhaul everything for three weeks and then discover you’ve created something completely unsustainable. You might notice how your behaviour changes when you’re tired, stressed, busy or overwhelmed. You might learn the difference between knowing that something would probably support you and actually being ready to change. 

Good. There is something to learn there too. 

Suddenly behaviour change isn’t an abstract idea anymore. And I think those experiences can add enormously to the way we eventually work with other people. Not because you now understand their experience. But perhaps you understand a little more about being human. 

I didn’t begin with a career plan.

When I first began studying Yoga and Ayurveda, I wasn’t thinking about building the career I have now. There was no Live to Serve Academy in my head. I certainly wasn’t sitting there mapping out Yoga Teacher Training, Ayurveda courses and a business twenty-something years into the future. 

I was trying to understand things. 

I wanted to understand my own health, body, mind; why I felt the way I did, and why certain things helped and other things didn’t. And as my study of Yoga became deeper, I became interested in much bigger questions around who I was, what I was doing here in this life. 

So I learnt things and then I tried to live them. 
And then I learnt some more. 
Over time, what I was studying naturally started influencing the way I lived and structured my days. It affected how I responded to stress and how I understood my own tendencies. Yoga became much bigger than something I did on a mat, and Ayurveda became much bigger than knowing my dosha or following a list of healthy routines. 

They became frameworks through which I could understand my life. 
And then something else happened quite naturally. 

The more useful these teachings became to me, the more interested I became in making what I was learning useful to other people. 

That eventually became teaching. Teaching led to more study. More study led to different areas of Yoga and Ayurveda, coaching, training teachers and eventually building Live to Serve Academy. 

The professional pathway grew out of the personal one. 

And I think that is worth talking about, because sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves to know what something is going to become before we allow ourselves to begin. 

“But I don’t know if I actually want to teach…” 

I hear versions of this quite regularly. Someone is deeply interested in Yoga and wants to study it properly, but she isn’t sure whether she wants to become a Yoga Teacher. 

Someone has discovered Ayurveda and wants to understand it at a completely different level, but she can’t yet picture herself working with clients. 

And I don’t find that strange at all. Actually, I think it makes perfect sense. Because where else are people supposed to go when they reach the point where an introductory understanding simply isn’t enough anymore? There are plenty of valuable resources available. But sometimes you reach a point where you don’t want another introduction or singular point of view. You want an education. 

You want someone to take you through the material systematically. 
You want to understand how the pieces fit together rather than collecting fragments from twenty different places. 
You want teachers you can ask questions of. 
You want mentorship. 
An in depth index and understanding of the practices. 
You want assignments that make you think. 
You want like-minded people around you who are exploring the same things. 
You want enough time with the material for it to actually sink in. 

And this is one of the things professional-level Yoga and Ayurveda training can provide, even for the student who arrives without any certainty that she will eventually teach professionally. 

I think that's completely normal, and I encourage it. 

Maybe you want to become a Yoga Teacher. 
Maybe Ayurveda has sparked something in you and you can imagine working with people one day. 
Maybe you’re already working in health or wellness and want to add another dimension to what you do. 
Or maybe you just know that you want to learn this properly. That is enough of a reason to begin. 

Because these are Life Sciences.

This is also where Yoga and Ayurveda are quite unusual fields of study. They are not bodies of knowledge that only become relevant once you enter a clinic, classroom or professional setting. They are life sciences. The material walks out of the classroom with you. You learn something about the mind and then you have a mind to observe. You study rest, movement, habits, relationships, behaviour, environment, philosophy, meditation or spiritual practice and you have immediate opportunities to explore what those ideas mean in your life. 

I think that is a huge part of the value of studying these systems. And sometimes we undersell it because we are so busy trying to demonstrate the professional outcome of the qualification. 

Of course I want our students to graduate capable of teaching Yoga well. 

Of course I want our Ayurvedic Wellness Coaching students to have the knowledge and professional skills to support other people appropriately. 

Of course I want women who want meaningful work in this field to be able to build it. 

But I also think: 

You’re here anyway. 

You’re going to spend hundreds of hours studying this extraordinary body of knowledge. 

Give yourself the opportunity to receive it too. 

Don’t spend the entire training looking over your own shoulder towards the future person you’re going to help. 

Let some of it land here with you first. 

Your Own Life Becomes Part of the Classroom 

Once you begin looking at the training this way, your own life becomes this incredible place to explore what you’re learning. And there is just as much learning in the parts that don’t go perfectly. I actually think living these teachings tends to make us more humble about what we know. 

Bodies change. Circumstances change. Families need us. We age. Our responsibilities change. Our environment changes. What worked beautifully during one stage of life might be completely inappropriate during another. 

This is one of the reasons I love Ayurveda so much. 

Very often the answer is: 

It depends. 

And I know that isn’t always the satisfying answer people want! 

But it depends on you. 

Your constitution. Your current state. Your digestion. Your age. Your environment. The season. Your stage of life. What else is happening around you. What you’re actually trying to achieve. 

The more you understand this, the harder it becomes to look at another human being and simply hand them a generic list of things they “should” be doing. 

Information starts becoming lived knowledge 

This is what I mean when I talk about embodiment within professional education. I don’t mean embodiment instead of qualification. And I don't mean personal experience instead of knowledge. Both of those would concern me. 

Professional education matters. There are competencies to develop, techniques to practise, assessments to complete, professional boundaries and scope of practice to understand, and standards that need to be met. 

But I don’t think we need to separate all of that from personal practice quite so neatly, particularly in Yoga and Ayurveda. 

You can allow the education to serve two purposes at once. 

It can prepare you professionally to teach, coach and serve other people. 

And at exactly the same time, it can give you an extraordinary opportunity to examine your own life, deepen your practices, improve your understanding of your own health and mind, and perhaps go through a fairly significant transformation yourself. 

Live it. Learn it. Serve with it. 

This is really the thinking behind the way we’re approaching our Yoga & Ayurveda Career Package. We’ve brought together our 500hr Yoga Teacher Training, Ayurvedic Wellness Coaching training and Business on Purpose training because I wanted to create a pathway that doesn’t begin and end with collecting qualifications. 

You don’t necessarily need to know where all of this is going before you begin. 

Sometimes you begin because you want to understand something deeply. You give yourself the opportunity to live it. And then you see what grows from there. 

Our 2027 Yoga & Ayurveda Career Package Early Bird is now open for $4,500 until October 15. 

And one of the things I really like about opening enrolments now is that there doesn’t have to be this crazy last minute pressure to arrive in January and suddenly transform into a completely different person. 

You can enrol now and start slowly. 

You can come along to the live classes and mentoring. Begin exploring the course material. Start practising. Start noticing. Start applying little pieces of what you’re learning to your own life. Let yourself actually be the student for a while. 

Because personal transformation isn’t something we need to tack onto the end of professional training as a lovely bonus. And nor is it something you have to complete before you're worthy or capable of helping anybody else. It is simply an extraordinary parallel opportunity that exists while you’re learning. 

And if you’re reading this thinking, this is interesting, but I still have absolutely no idea whether I want to become a Yoga Teacher or Ayurvedic Wellness Coach, that is completely fine. 

In fact, you would be far from the first person to begin this kind of study without knowing where it will eventually lead. Maybe right now, you simply want the education, and that’s is enough. 

Start with my free Transform Your Life with Ayurveda & Yoga workshop. It will give you a much better feel for how I teach, how I approach these systems, and the bigger picture of what Yoga and Ayurveda can offer when we stop treating them as another collection of wellness things to do and start exploring them as sciences that can inform the way we actually live. 

Then you can decide where, if anywhere, you’d like to take it from there.