Recent informal talks by Prashant Iyengar on teaching philosophy have led me to re-think the Teacher Study Program I proposed for Alcove Yoga this Fall. He has explained that his father, B.K.S. Iyengar ever thought of himself as a student of yoga. Others called him Guru, but in his own mind he was a student of yoga first, and teacher second. It was his devotion to his practice and his study that provided the insights he shared in his teaching. Of course, he had a guru, but his formal study with T. Krishnamacharya was only for a year or two. B.K.S. was an extraordinarily intense practitioner and his practices informed his teaching.This is not your ordinary teacher training program! You may have heard about the plethora of 200 hour yoga teacher training programs that exist in our culture. In those programs it is possible to have zero experience as a yoga practitioner and enroll in teacher training. Of course, the person with no practice except for weekly classes might be athletically talented, and so they say to themselves—I am as good as the teacher! I am better than the teacher; I should be a teacher! This happens rampantly in the West, where yoga is seen as exercise and teaching is viewed as a career path.That is not classical yoga. Although yoga asanas may look like mundane body exercises or postures, they are much more than that. They are vehicles to cosmic consciousness that provide considerable benefits to health and well-being.