Yoga Instruction Online … Bogus or Brilliant?

Yoga instruction isn’t limited to the classroom anymore, thanks to the internet. The World Wide Web has opened up a whole new realm of yoga possibilities. Unfortunately, it has opened up a whole new can of worms too!
Along with informative sites by knowledgeable teachers, there’s also a whole lot of incomplete and misleading information being spread by inexperienced yoga enthusiasts. This cut-and-paste cyber world makes it simple for anybody to create a website on any topic, yoga included, and load it up with content that makes the creator seem like they are an authority … when in most cases, they are far from it.
The bottom line about yoga instruction online is, Buyer Beware!
Getting good yoga instruction online is definitely possible. But, just like in the offline world, you need to make sure you’ve found a teacher that is qualified. That’s not always easy, and it can be even more difficult to know what’s what and who’s who on the internet because, unfortunately, it’s not difficult to make a professional looking yoga website and polished yoga videos, even without knowing much at all about yoga.
Quite often the most knowledgeable yogis are positioned behind the most amateurish looking yoga websites, probably because they are not computer savvy nor inclined to create flashy, cool-looking modern sites. But they should, or else they run the very real risk of getting brushed aside and passed over by surfers in cyberspace for the more slick-looking productions of much less competent yoga enthusiasts.
Finding the right yoga teacher does take some work. It might be easier to assess someone face to face that it is in cyberspace. At least, in person, flaws and cracks can’t be easily edited away, and teachers need to be able to demonstrate in real time that they have successfully cultivated the virtues and disciplines of yoga themselves.
But most well established yogis have an online presence now too, and some are starting to provide some great new opportunities to learn yoga online as well. The internet is definitely no longer a place to be ignored by aspiring yogis. My advice, as always, is to do your research before diving in too deep. Remember that all is not necessarily what it seems on the World Wide Web … after all, that’s why they call it “the virtual world.”