Recommended Reading:
Teaching Yoga: Exploring the Teacher-Student Relationship
Drawing on decades of experience in training yoga teachers, Donna Farhi offers the first book to set professional standards for yoga teachers. Teaching Yoga explores with depth and compassion a variety of topics both practical and philosophical, including how to create healthy boundaries; the student-teacher relationship (including whether a sexual relationship is acceptable); how to create physical and emotional safety for the student; what is a reasonable class size; how much a class should cost; and how to conduct the business of teaching while upholding the integrity of yoga as a philosophy, a science, and an art. A bonus CD features the author speaking about yoga ethics at a 2002 conference. Available on Amazon.com
Sex and the Spiritual Teacher: Why It Happens, When It’s a Problem, and What We All Can Do
Sex and the Spiritual Teacher looks at the complex of forces that tempt otherwise insightful, compassionate, and well-intentioned teachers to lose their way–and that tempt some of their students to lose their way as well. It analyzes why most of our current efforts to keep spiritual teachers from transgressing usually don’t (and in fact can’t) work. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests a set of practices and structures that can build community, encourage healthy student-teacher relationships, increase trust and spiritual intimacy between teachers and their students, and help authentic spiritual teachers stay happily monogamous or celibate. Sex and the Spiritual Teacher is for anyone who is or might become part of a spiritual community: students, teachers, clergy, lay leaders, and even casual visitors. It’s a reader-friendly, no-nonsense guide to making spiritual life safer and fuller for all of us one person, relationship, and community at a time. Available on Amazon.com
