If the Practice You’re Teaching Creates Dependency… Then What Is It, Really?

I’ve been sitting with a question lately, one that’s been tugging at me quietly for years, but lately feels louder, heavier, more necessary to ask: What happens when yoga starts to create dependency?

Not the kind of support that roots you deeper into your practice, but the kind that makes you feel like you can’t practice without a particular person, studio, lineage, or system. The kind that convinces you that the wisdom you’re seeking is always somewhere else, in someone else’s language, someone else’s approval, someone else’s certification.

And perhaps an even deeper question: Was yoga ever meant to work that way?

Who Decides What Yoga Is “Enough”?

I keep wondering when we decided that yoga needed a single voice to speak for it. When did we start believing that only one lineage, one methodology, one body, or one voice could hold its essence? And how did we get so far from its roots? A practice that was always meant to awaken us to our own inner knowing, to give us space for choice and to explore, that we started outsourcing that knowing to others?

There’s a subtle line between guidance and gatekeeping. Teachers can guide, hold space, and offer tools but when they start presenting themselves as the only doorway, that’s when yoga’s purpose begins to blur.

So I ask you (and myself): Are we practicing in ways that build sovereignty… or dependency? Are we expanding our capacity to trust ourselves… or are we handing that trust over to someone else?

Is Yoga Supposed to Make Us Need It?

Another question I return to often: What is yoga actually supposed to do?

Is it meant to become something we lean on so completely that we lose our balance without it?
Or is it meant to be a bridge? A practice that connects us back to our own breath, intuition, and strength, so that even when the mat isn’t beneath our feet, the practice still lives inside us?

If you stop going to class, do you lose your peace…or have you simply learned where to find it again?
If your favourite teacher disappears, does your practice unravel or does it deepen as you listen to your own inner voice?

These are hard, honest questions. And maybe they don’t have simple answers. But they matter.

Where Does Dependency Hide?

It’s easy to spot manipulation when it’s loud, when someone is overtly trying to control or limit you. But dependency in yoga often hides in much softer places.

It hides in the subtle suggestion that you’re “not advanced” unless you study under a certain teacher.
It hides in the pressure to show up to class even when your body is calling for rest.
It hides in the idea that you need another training, another certificate, another pair of leggings to be “legit.”

And when those messages repeat often enough, they can slowly chip away at our trust in ourselves.
So, what would it look like to question them? To notice where our sense of “enoughness” might be attached to someone else’s approval and to gently untangle it?

Scarcity Mindset: The Silent Partner of Dependency

Here’s another question that’s been sitting on my heart, because I sometimes fall into this fucking trap and have to weave a way out:
How much of this dependency is rooted in scarcity?

Scarcity mindset, that subtle belief that there’s not enough to go around truly shows up everywhere in the wellness world. There’s not enough space. Not enough certifications. Not enough respect. Not enough money. The market is oversaturated {I dislike this one a lot and that’s me being judgy as fuck. I can admit that} Not enough you. And so we cling. We overconsume. We attach ourselves to the teacher with the most followers, the studio with the most prestige, the program with the longest lineage, believing that proximity to them will prove our worth.

But here’s the quiet truth: scarcity and dependency are siblings. They feed each other. Scarcity says, I am lacking, and dependency whispers, So I must hold on tightly to anything that makes me feel full.

We stay in spaces that no longer serve us because we fear there’s nowhere else to go.
We keep signing up for trainings not out of curiosity, but out of fear that without another certificate, we’ll be left behind.
We keep returning to the same class, even when it no longer inspires us, because we’re scared we won’t find that feeling anywhere else.

But what if there is enough?
What if there is more wisdom within you than you’ve been taught to believe?
What if your practice, {hear me out} messy, evolving, uniquely your own is already enough without anyone’s stamp of legitimacy?

What would shift if you stopped reaching for yoga as something to complete you, and instead approached it as something that reveals you?

What If Teachers Were Just Mirrors?

I wonder what would shift if we, as teachers and guides, stopped seeing ourselves as gatekeepers and started seeing ourselves as mirrors reflecting back the strength, wisdom, and sovereignty our students already have.

What if we saw our role not as holders of answers, but as companions on the path?
What if the goal wasn’t for students to need us, but for them to remember they never did?

Maybe the most meaningful compliment a teacher could receive isn’t, “I need your class to feel balanced.” Maybe it’s, “Your class helped me see that balance was already mine.”

What Does Freedom Look Like in Practice?

I keep returning to this: if yoga is a practice of liberation of dissolving illusions and remembering wholeness…then shouldn’t it lead us toward more freedom, not less?

Right? I mean, maybe? Again I still keep returning to this.

Shouldn’t it build our capacity to stand on our own feet, to breathe through chaos, to listen inwardly and act from that place with or without a mat, a studio, or a teacher?

And if it’s not doing that… if it’s creating reliance instead of resilience, control instead of curiosity… then is it still yoga?

A Question to Leave You With

Maybe there’s no single answer to any of this. Maybe the beauty of yoga is that it invites us to keep asking. But I do think this is a question worth carrying with us as we practice, teach, and share:

Is my yoga helping me remember my own power or convincing me that someone else holds it?

And beneath that: Am I practicing from a place of scarcity or from a place of enoughness?

Because perhaps the most sacred offering yoga can give isn’t a sequence or a shape.
It’s the quiet, steady reminder that everything you’re searching for has always lived inside you and that you were never meant to need anything but your own breath to find your way home.

With love and darkness,

Ro

FIELD NOTE:

Poetic
At the heart of yoga is the practice of aparigraha releasing the need to hold, to keep, to control. Our job is not to create dependence, but to guide people back to themselves. And that requires svadhyaya deep self-study and ishvara pranidhana. Remembering that we are not the source, just the vessel.

Not So Poetic
Decolonize the way we fucking teach and practice. The cult like behaviour masked as community can really fuck people up especially when we forget that yoga is found on the fucking streets and inside your fucking heart.