Teaching cannot be learned from a book. It is passed from person to person.

What Mentorship Is

In the Iyengar tradition, mentorship is not coaching or tutoring in the conventional sense. It is a relationship — one that typically unfolds over several years — in which a more senior teacher accompanies a serious student through the deepening of their practice and the early development of their teaching capacity.

Mentorship begins informally, long before it is named as such. It begins when a student starts assisting in class, when a teacher starts offering more detailed feedback, when both parties recognise something worth cultivating. By the time a formal mentoring relationship is established, the foundation of trust and understanding is usually already in place.

Who Mentorship Is For

The mentorship program is for dedicated students who feel drawn toward teaching — not because they believe they have arrived at some level of mastery, but because they want to share what practice has genuinely given them and are willing to commit to the long process of learning how to do that well.

A prospective mentee should:

• Have an established personal practice that is consistent and self-motivated — not dependent on classes alone, but maintained independently at home.
• Be attending regular classes and workshops with certified teachers at Level 2 or above.
• Have begun observing and assisting in beginner classes — learning what it actually looks like to teach, not just what it looks like to practise.
• Be prepared to commit exclusively to the Iyengar method in their teaching — not as a restriction, but as a recognition that depth comes from focus.

For those for whom local mentorship is not available, the program can be conducted at a distance through a combination of intensive in-person sessions across the year and regular online contact with a mentor.

How the Relationship Works

A mentoring relationship has a natural structure, even when it does not feel structured.

In the early stages, the mentee is primarily an observer and assistant. They watch how their mentor teaches, how they sequence, how they respond to individual students, how they manage the energy of a room. They assist in class — helping students into poses, offering props, adjusting those who need it. This is learning through immersion.

As the relationship develops, the mentee begins to teach — first in supervised settings, then progressively more independently. The mentor provides ongoing feedback: not just on technical aspects of posture and instruction, but on the subtler dimensions of how the mentee is communicating, what they are noticing, where their attention goes and where it does not.

Regular study sessions with the mentor address yoga philosophy, the deeper purposes of individual asanas and sequences, pranayama, and the principles behind therapeutic applications. The intellectual and experiential dimensions of the practice are developed together.

The Rhythm of Mentorship

For those working with a resident mentor — a certified teacher in the same location — the relationship can be ongoing and continuous. For those working with a visiting mentor, the program follows a structured rhythm: four to five visits per year, each lasting five to seven days, providing eighteen to twenty-four hours of intensive training per visit, supplemented by regular online sessions between visits.

Either way, the pace of the relationship is set by genuine readiness, not by a calendar. A mentee who is not yet ready for a particular stage of development is not pushed — they are supported in deepening where they are.

What Mentors Offer

The decision to take on a mentee is a serious one. To be eligible to mentor, a teacher must hold at least Level 2 certification for a minimum of three years, and must have previously assisted an existing mentor for at least three years themselves. A mentor may take a maximum of eight mentees in their first group.

What mentors offer is not just knowledge — it is witness. They see the mentee's practice over time, through difficulties and breakthroughs, through the plateaus that can feel like stagnation but are usually integration. They hold a perspective that the mentee cannot hold for themselves, precisely because they are inside their own experience.

This witnessing quality — patient, honest, compassionate — is one of the most valuable things this tradition offers its students. And it is, at its best, what certified Iyengar teachers eventually learn to offer their own students in turn.

Beginning the Path

If you are interested in exploring mentorship, the first step is not an application. It is finding a certified teacher and beginning, or deepening, a consistent practice with them. Mentorship grows naturally from that relationship, when both student and teacher recognise that the conditions are right.