A Teacher on Their Phone During Yoga Class? That’s Not Okay… or is it?

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered.

Our Response

Sometimes a teacher has to look at their phone because there’s an emergency. That’s not a failure of presence. This is a teacher living in the same world as their students. The practice has always asked us to meet reality as it is — not as we prefer it to be.

A teacher who can step out of the room for thirty seconds, handle something real, and step back in without collapsing the container? That’s actually a more advanced skill than never leaving the container at all. That’s pratyahara in both directions.

What you’re actually looking for isn’t a teacher who performs presence at the front of the room. What you’re looking for is relational honesty. A teacher who has done this enough — or done enough work with their community — that when the phone comes out, no one’s flinching. Because there’s a baseline of trust that makes the exception legible.

That gets built over time. Through consistency. Through naming it directly. Through showing up the same way enough times that one deviation doesn’t destabilize the room.

Now if that trust doesn’t exist — if the phone is out because the teacher is elsewhere habitually, energetically — then you’re looking at something different. The room might be designed more for drop-ins than for depth. Or the teacher is still working out their relationship with distraction, which is its own sadhana and one most of us are still in.

None of that makes them a bad person or a bad teacher. But it does tell you something about where they are in practice. And it should give you an idea of where you might need to look instead.

If you’re trying to figure out what good teaching looks like, the study guide on teacher-student relationships covers what you should expect. And if yin got you curious about the internal side of the practice, pratyahara is basically what yin is pointing at.