Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857, Musée d'Orsay, Open Access
Over the last nearly four weeks, yoga’s main international professional organization, the Yoga Alliance, has been telling people that new things were happening. They said that membership was changing, and that new value, new offerings, and a whole new world of opportunities were within our reach.
As I have watched these changes actually roll out, there are three things I want to talk about. Information management, the value of experience, and a specific take on transparency.
This is not the first time I have focused my attention on the Yoga Alliance. In July 2026, I wrote an article about Yoga Alliance CEO pay. I will cover them again once all of the changes have been officially announced to the public; that will result in a composite article summarizing what has changed for members.
But right now, I want to address what I am seeing play out in the dissemination of this new information.
My first issue is with the tactic of dripping out information about changes that will take place in less than ten weeks' time. The second is something I discuss in depth in Issue 2 of the magazine—the myth that teaching experience and expertise translate to monetary compensation the way it does in other professions. And finally, for this article, we will discuss who decides what we should be tested on and how transparent that process really is.
Drip…Drip…Drip…Small Slices of Salami.
Many studies have been done in organizational communications and political science documenting what we are experiencing right now with the Yoga Alliance’s new announcement.
The first thing I wanted to dig into was the tactic of dripping out information one bit at a time. This is not your imagination, and is documented in Yoga Alliance's response communication to me when I sent them a list of questions I had regarding the 42-minute webinar they released regarding their research survey of 1,904 people done in 2024.
In response to my questions, I got this email:
Hi Rebecca,
Thank you for reaching out and for the questions you sent. We are sharing the details of these changes with members first and in phases rather than releasing everything at once. We're doing this to help ensure members receive accurate information, have time to understand the changes, and we can engage with questions as they arise based on the information that has been shared. We also want members to hear about the changes directly from us before the information is shared more broadly to reduce the potential for confusion. If your readers have questions about how these changes will impact their Yoga Alliance credential and membership, they can reach out to our team at info@yogaalliance.org.…
Thank you again for your inquiry, and please reach out if you have further questions.
Best,
<Yoga Alliance employee who has yet to officially confirm name and title for the purposes of publication>
Now, aside from the fact that none of my questions were answered, the telling thing I read is this sentence: “We are sharing the details of these changes with members first and in phases rather than releasing everything at once”.
That is a choice, and I was incredibly curious as to why they might make it.
Transparency, for any institution, is the best practice standard—unless you run the CIA of FBI. As things are changing in an organization (any organization), it can be useful to explain the why first, and then tell the changes, giving people specific dates when they will learn new information. This transparency leads to people maintaining trust with the organization that is changing.
A lack of clear reason and communication leads to a lack of trust. If people cannot trust the institution they are interacting with to be candid—it is very well documented that those changes have less of a chance of success.
Let me prove my point in two moves.
First, a 2022 study done by Sguera, Patient, Diehl, and Bobocel. They studied adverse organizational change in three studies, including surveys of 1,795 and 174 employees. Poor communication predicted greater intent to leave through increased cynicism, and the effect was strongest among people who identified most strongly with the organization. Without explanations, the most loyal people became as cynical as the least attached. (Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology)
We are already seeing this play out for the Yoga Alliance online. I am seeing post after post of people who were previously at worst apathetic and at best staunchly in support of some kind of standard, who are now saying they plan to leave the YA. The organization has given no reason or justification for the changes that were recently released, and this lack of communication has bred cynicism in the ranks of people in the industry who were previously invested in the system the Yoga Alliance provided.
Truth be told, our industry has never been at a lack for cynicism in general—a phenomenon that I find interesting and have been researching more about. This newly found resistance to institutional support found among the former supporters of the Yoga Alliance can be directly attributed to this drip method of information management and the lack of clear and transparent communication coming from them.
Which brings us to the second move. Salami.
There is a term in political science called salami tactics. The term is generally attributed to Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi, who talked a whole lot about taking power step by step.
Salami tactics are described as individual attempts at faits accomplis, which are, according to professor Richard Maass, “deliberate alterations of the status quo without the adversary’s prior consent.” This leaves the opposition to either accept the changes or endure the cost of reversing those changes. It is worth noting that this section describes tactics, and not the characterization of why anyone uses them.
We are not at war with the Yoga Alliance (although it may sometimes feel that way), but it is worth this discussion of faits accomplis, in regard to them asking people to lock in rates for the next three years of membership without explaining the benefits of those rates directly.
This small territory shift via marketing asks members to accept the small changes dripped out bit-by-bit, or risk the work (and possible grief and heartache in realizing something you believed in isn’t what you thought it was) required to reverse the decision.
The question remains this: do we trust the leadership of the Yoga Alliance to take an entire profession that is routinely undervalued and underpaid through a credentialing process? Do we trust the ethics, values, morals, and intelligence of that leadership team to both shepherd us through the process and also to listen to feedback and process it in a way that is truly beneficial to the collective?
The Yoga Alliance often says things like “We are listening” or “We are still listening”. At what point do we ask them to take their headphones off and actually do the work of engaging with the yoga professional community? We don’t need you to just listen…we need you to be in it with us.
And so far…it feels very obvious that they are not.
Do you all even know what we do?
<slides on light blue hoodie and sunglasses>
Do you even go here?
Our Value As Experienced Professionals.
When I first decided to take on the position of independent media in the yoga and wellness space, I attempted to work out what the people felt they wanted as yoga professionals. There is some discussion as to whether or not we are professionals, which I acknowledge. However, I know too many people who have built their entire careers and, to some extent, lives around being a person who works in yoga, and I won’t diminish their accomplishments with a fairly academic argument about whether or not we work for money or for the love of the game.
Like a lot of professions, we are both.
Money, and reasonable pay, is something that a lot of folks cited as needing to be addressed. There are so many yoga teachers who wish they could do this work full time, but cannot because the work won’t pay enough to cover bills, insurance, and extras like an emergency fund and retirement.
Besides income, the other major thing that people are looking for is something I tend to call gravitas. The ability for people in the outside world to take our work seriously. To feel like our effort, our work towards training and experience, is taken seriously by people both in the profession and by the outside world.
And the announced changes from Yoga Alliance have created serious erosion in this second area of concern.
If you’ve ever tried to make a living as a yoga professional, you may have noticed this. Most professionals don’t have to defend whether their work is real. We do, though, constantly. Yoga is among the professions that do real, beneficial work helping people, but it's spoken about in a way that demeans the professionals doing the work.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a member of the general public. What would you think a yoga teacher is like? Is she on time? Wearing shoes? Is there a particular scent that you associate with her? Or…on the other hand…is she welcoming of all people into a yoga space? Does this teacher care about your clothes?
Even if that isn’t the yoga professionals you know, I think we all can agree on what the general public would think those answers would be. This public perception can erode our ability to be seen as people who have serious training and offer a high-quality benefit with the work we do.
I realize that the collapse of the credentials into a couple of very specific certifications may be an easier sell for the general public of yoga students at large, surely, but what it does internally to us is something altogether different. Many people feel like their work to participate in the system assigned by the Yoga Alliance for years (the RYT 200, RYT 500, 200 E-RYT, YACEP, etc.) was a way to climb a kind of career ladder if a person were serious about yoga as a career.
And while I have written many times that yoga doesn’t have a career ladder, and that literally every portion of our perceived career advancement path is at best falsely advertised and at worst a myth, I find truly no satisfaction in this becoming clear for us in this one certification move from the Yoga Alliance.
Yoga therapists have been dealing with some version of this grief and heartache for the last couple of years as their faith in the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) was eroded. And to yet again see another organization choose not to see, acknowledge, or even attempt to understand the real working experiences of yoga professionals is so sad to watch. I know the good work that we do. They should too. It is quite literally their job.
Transparency And Who Decides.
If you were around and paying attention in the late 2010s, there was a conversation floating around circles of “who decides what is Yoga?”
While I am definitely not prepared to get into that discussion in this article, I think that debate set up the question many people are asking about these changes: who decides what makes us good enough? Starting first with the more specific question of who decided what is on the competency test?
Since Yoga Alliance hasn’t told us how it’s building the credential, I looked up the standards and compared them with what we’ve been told so far.
Good thing the Yoga Alliance keeps referencing the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (I.C.E.), and their adjacent organization NCCA (National Commission for Certifying Agencies). Together, they have built best practice standards we can look at to compare.
Since we have not been told what these are by the Yoga Alliance, I thought I would do some digging and see what the standards I could find state and see how that shapes up with what we have been told thus far.
This chart sums it up. (Sources: NCCA Standards for the Accreditation of Certification Programs; Yoga Alliance public materials as of October 28, 2026.)
The standard protocol for building a certification
What credentialing standards require, and what Yoga Alliance has said publicly about each step.
| Step | What the standard requires | What Yoga Alliance has said publicly |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Independent governance | The standardThe certification board has “autonomy in decision-making” over eligibility, exam development, scoring, and discipline, and includes at least one voting public member who isn’t from the profession. | Yoga AllianceNot addressed Nothing about a certification board or public member. |
| 2. Separation from training | The standard“Appropriate separation must exist between certification and any education or training functions.” Prep courses must be optional, can’t be presented as the only or best preparation, and can’t give candidates an advantage. | Yoga AlliancePartly addressed Offers a free, optional prep course and plans a learning platform. Whether they’re kept separate from the exam hasn’t been addressed. |
| 3. Job analysis | The standardA panel of subject-matter experts, mostly people certified in the field, defines the tasks and knowledge the job requires. A validation survey of current certificants or a representative sample confirms it. Repeated about every five years. | Yoga AllianceNot addressed Its Forum One research asked “what makes a good teacher” of 1,904 people, 68.5% of them practitioners rather than teachers. It hasn’t called this a job analysis or named an expert panel. |
| 4. Exam blueprint | The standardThe job analysis sets which topics the exam covers and how heavily each is weighted. | Yoga AlliancePartly addressed Topics are listed (teaching and leadership, ethics, safety, DEI&B). Weighting isn’t. |
| 5. Question writing and review | The standardA written item-development plan. Trained expert panels write questions, a separate panel reviews them, and items are screened for bias. | Yoga AllianceNot addressed Who writes the questions hasn’t been said. |
| 6. Standard setting | The standardA documented study that “relates performance on the examination to proficiency,” in which experts define the minimally qualified candidate and rate each question. Repeated after each job analysis. | Yoga AlliancePartly addressed A 75% passing score was announced. How it was set hasn’t been described. |
| 7. Reliability | The standardPrograms must “calculate and report estimates of score reliability, decision consistency, and standard errors of measurement.” | Yoga AllianceNot addressed Nothing published. |
| 8. Security | The standardExams given under “secure and confidential protocols,” with proctors who have no conflict of interest. | Yoga AlliancePartly addressed Online exam with two attempts. Whether it’s proctored or open-book hasn’t been confirmed. |
| 9. Recertification | The standardCertification must be time-limited and require periodic recertification. Lifetime certification doesn’t qualify. | Yoga AllianceMeets A three-year cycle, with 30 (RYT) or 40 (E-RYT) continuing-education hours from 2030. |
| 10. Discipline | The standardA “formal, published process” for complaints and enforcement. | Yoga AlliancePartly addressed A Restorative Accountability Framework was announced. Who runs it hasn’t been said. |
| 11. Accreditation | The standardOutside review against all of the above. | Yoga AlliancePlanned Yoga Alliance “plans to begin the multi-year process.” |
Sources: National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), Standards for the Accreditation of Certification Programs; Yoga Alliance public webpages and member emails, as of October 29, 2026.
Of eleven steps, Yoga Alliance has publicly addressed only a handful. On most, including who decides what we’re tested on, it hasn’t said. I and others have submitted questions to them. We have yet to see concrete answers.
While we wait for transparent answers on this, it is worth knowing how the full process is intended to work. Also, accountability of an institution starts with us having enough information about the process to keep them accountable throughout.
The truth is, Yoga Alliance will have to answer every line on this chart eventually, assuming it executes the plan they have stated they are going to start. So why not be transparent about the plans now? It seems to me that an entire industry of people who have more than a passing knowledge of things like the fascial system, deep anatomy and kinesiology, philosophical concepts that date back thousands of years, and how to keep the attention of a room full of tired, stressed, and sometimes even traumatized people might have something beneficial to offer.
Ask us.
We’d love to be included.
For once.
A Final Document.
The fantasy I have (as someone who is keeping tabs on this story, and reports online about it with some regularity) would be a full dossier of what the upcoming changes with the Yoga Alliance are. Specifically.
This, firstly, would save me the trouble of having to write one myself. Once we know for sure that all of the information and changes have been set forth to the public, I will write up a list of the changes, how to assess if they are positive or negative on both the macro and micro scale (that means both for the industry at large and for you personally), and a rubric to help you make decisions.
As of this writing, there is no such document I can find on their website, and most glaringly, there is nothing telling us the actual prices of the membership as of 2027. Yoga Alliance has published one price: if you want only the credential, it’s $150 every three years after the transition. What it hasn’t published is what the new membership costs, or whether members pay that $150 on top of it. So no one can yet say what it will cost to keep what today’s $65 covers.
There has been a lot of speculation as to “why” the Yoga Alliance is bringing about these changes. The speculation has ranged from the organization trying to compete with new organizations like the American Yoga Council (AYC) and the Global Online Yoga Association (GOYA), to the most common speculation lobbed online that it is “a money grab”. [For disclosure, the American Yoga Council is an advertising sponsor in the December issue of Inside Yoga Magazine.]
While I think all kinds of speculation are incredibly predictable results of a non-transparent change in policy, the thing I most worry about is the characterization that the Yoga Alliance is out to get us, or screw us over in some way.
The reason I say this is because it is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst to personify an organization or institution. Organizations aren’t people. They don’t have feelings or intentions; their leaders and boards make choices, and those choices can be questioned.
And the one thing that is the biggest killer of people organizing to advocate for institutional change is the thought that they might hurt someone’s feelings.
So remember, you cannot (nor can I) hurt an organization’s feelings. People within the organization can feel a particular way about something, but it is their job to put those feelings aside and act as best representatives of that institution. Ours is to represent each other. To make friends, create local and regional advocacy networks, and…get to work.
We take our power back by building collective networks together. Then we can decide to work with any institution for systemic improvements, or not. It then becomes up to us.
If they won’t include us upon request, this is how we make them include us through collective power.
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