Understanding Scope of Practice: A Guide for Yoga Teachers

In this short course we will address the key professional responsibilities that yoga teachers must understand when working with students. We will briefly cover topics including safety protocols and injury prevention, legal protections and insurance requirements, appropriate referral practices when students need specialist care, and cultural sensitivity in teaching. It is important to grasp the distinction between offering guidance within a teacher’s scope of practice versus providing medical advice or making therapeutic claims that require professional qualifications. Understanding these boundaries protects both teachers and students whilst maintaining the integrity of yoga as a practice focused on self-awareness and discovery.

Four Essential Lessons for Professional Teaching

As yoga teachers, we hold a sacred responsibility to guide students toward developing their own expanded awareness through the ancient practices we call “yoga”. With this privilege comes the critical need to understand and respect our scope of practice: the professional boundaries that define what we are qualified to teach and where our expertise ends.

Yoga, in its truest sense, is a state of expanded awareness beyond the obvious, sensory, and material. For practical reasons, we also use the word yoga to refer to practices originating from the Sanskrit-laden Indian sub-continent that lead us to that state.

It is important to remember that while these practices can sometimes provide benefits that are physically and psychologically therapeutic, these benefits remain subordinate to yoga’s primary purpose: expansion beyond the physical self, contemplative awareness, and the simultaneous cultivation of calm and focus.

For example, the successful reshaping of a muscle or development of a physical skill, while on the surface being potentially therapeutic, principally expands one’s self-identity – the scope of their consciousness and perception of what is possible in life. As yoga teachers, our primary role is helping people learn and develop their own personal practice within this authentic framework. Understanding scope of practice ensures we honour both our students’ wellbeing and the integrity of this profound tradition.