I’ve noticed something creeping into more and more yoga classes over the past few years. The sharing circle.
I understand why the sharing circle is there. It often comes from a genuine place of care and connection, from a desire to create community and help people feel less alone. But the more I encounter it, the more uneasy I feel about how and where it’s being used.
I really hope that what follows doesn’t read like a takedown of yoga teachers, or any judgement on people who actively seek out sharing-based spaces. It’s simply a personal reflection, based on my own experience as a long-time yoga practitioner, a yoga teacher, and now a Yoga Therapy Institute Diploma undergraduate, on where I think some important boundaries are getting blurred.
When the teacher starts sharing
As a teacher, I’m very conscious that my role is to hold space for other people to feel whatever it is they feel. Not because I know what’s going on for them, but because they do. My job isn’t to process my inner life out loud, but to create the conditions where students can (silently) tune into theirs.
What I’ve been seeing instead is teachers opening classes with deeply personal disclosures about difficult weeks, relationships, mental health struggles, raw grief, or trauma. Sometimes it’s framed as ‘authenticity’, sometimes as ‘courage’, sometimes as reassurance that the teacher isn’t a perfectly sorted yogi but someone the students in the room can relate to.
I don’t doubt the sincerity behind it, but it does make me uneasy. Partly because of the confusion it creates around roles. If I’m holding space for you, who is holding space for me? And partly because of timing. We don’t know how anyone is arriving when they walk through the studio door. Some people may come in open-hearted and ready to receive. Others arrive holding everything in so tightly because that’s the only way they can keep going. Some are vulnerable. Some are guarded. Some are terrified. The point is we simply don’t know. That’s why beginning a class with the teacher’s own raw material can feel overwhelming. It asks people to receive emotional content before they’ve had any chance to feel safe with their own.
This unease I’m feeling about teacher sharing extends beyond the studio. I don’t use social media at all in my role as a yoga teacher. Not because I don’t understand its power (as a content and marketing professional, I understand it perfectly). But in this capacity, I don’t trust the slope for myself. That’s a personal choice, not a judgement on others. Plenty of yoga teachers use social media thoughtfully and responsibly (and their classes are probably a lot fuller than mine!). But interestingly, none of my regulars have ever questioned my lack of yogic social media presence or asked if they can see pictures of me doing yoga or read about elements of my personal life. You might read this as stuffy, uptight, overly private, old-fashioned even. To me, it’s about boundaries.
What concerns me is when deeply personal material is shared without clear intention or context. Who is this for? Why now? Who might it trigger, when they might have only been following you for class updates?
Offloading into the digital ether without containment is one thing online. Bringing that same impulse into a yoga classroom is something else entirely.
When yoga becomes something you didn’t sign up for
More troubling for me than teacher oversharing is the practitioner being asked (or even subtly pressured) to share in class. Yoga teachers are seldom trained counsellors or psychologists; we’re trained to teach yoga and that distinction matters.
Last year, I attended an evening retreat billed as a “Gentle Spring Reset”. Lovely! Couldn’t wait. I was particularly looking forward to it because I was bringing a friend to her very first yoga class and I love taking beginners to yoga. It’s a reminder of how vulnerable it can feel to walk into a room where everyone else seems to know what they’re doing. It keeps me careful as a teacher, and it’s always a joy when the beginner falls in love with the practice and becomes a regular whom I can go to classes and chat endlessly about hip rotations with.
We were met by a framed photograph of an ashram leader surrounded by candles and a long monologue from our tearful retreat leader about how this ‘guru’ had recently left his earthly body. (That’s always a red flag for me but I’ll save my unease about guru worship for another blog.)
We lay down.
We were then instructed to choose a traumatic event we had experienced in our lives, and then slowly relive it while using a breathing technique (the name of which I forget because I was already too wound up by this point to take in any information) to release chosen trauma from the body.
I lay there stunned. Not only was I being asked to flip through my filing cabinet of bad experiences to settle one just the one particular trauma (I mean, how to choose?) while lying on my back in a room full of strangers. But also I was acutely aware of my poor friend beside me. This was her first experience of yoga (happily it wouldn’t be her last). She had not consented to trauma work. And yet there she was, vulnerable, with plenty going on in her life, being invited to open something she might not have wanted to go near. I had prepped her for Sun Salutations, not this.
No amount of breathing was going to magically release trauma. What it did release, for me at least, was fear. Fear for my friend, for myself, and for everyone else in that room.
Afterwards, we were invited to share. I repeat: we were invited to share aloud the details of our chosen traumatic event and how we’d experienced it leaving our body.
My friend and I declined and that in itself left us with a sense of having failed the room. Others shared deeply personal experiences. I don’t know whether they wanted to speak or felt they should. I only know that I hadn’t gone there to hold space for other people’s trauma. I’d been hoping for cat/cow, some hip stretches, and a nice long Shavasana under a blanket.
But this wasn’t yoga. It was unsolicited, uncontained, unsupported emotional excavation offered by someone unqualified for any of it.
The illusion of choice in sharing circles
Another experience sits with me just as strongly, for different reasons.
An evening vinyasa class. Nothing unusual. I just wanted to move and feel my body working.
We began sitting in easy pose (seldom easy, as many of us know), and spent a good while here while the teacher told us about his week. He described confronting a rude customer at his day job and framed it as an act of courage, particularly in light of his recent mental health struggles, which I already knew quite a lot about (because, Facebook).
He then announced that we were all going to share something courageous we’d done that week, starting at one end of the room and working around.
By the time it got to me, my nervous system was on high alert. That week had been difficult. I’d reached some upsetting conclusions about a professional relationship but hadn’t acted on it and now in the room I was questioning my courage. I didn’t want to share what I’d had for breakfast, let alone my acts (or lack) of courage from the week. I certainly didn’t want to perform for a room full of strangers.
I said I didn’t want to share.
He persisted. ‘Perhaps you could be courageous now, and speak up?’ he suggested. Keen to get the spotlight off me, I mumbled some vague about speaking up. The rest of the class passed in a blur. I don’t remember much of the practice at all, only the feeling of wanting to leave.
This is what people mean when they talk about the illusion of choice. “You don’t have to share,” carries zero weight when the teacher holds authority, the silence feels awkward, and all eyes are on you. Let’s be honest, consent collapses quickly in those conditions.
Why this matters from a therapeutic perspective
Sharing can be powerful, relieving, and it can help people feel less alone.
But it can also be destabilising. After my ‘Gentle spring reset’ I carried things back into my life that were unhelpful to say the least. When sharing happens at the end of a class, there’s often no grounding afterwards. People leave with everything close to the surface, and nowhere for it to go. So what happens when they get home? What decisions might they make in the midst of all that resurfaced, uncontained trauma? How might they connect with others? How might they sleep? Eat? Work? Feel?
What Yoga Therapy teaches us about safety and sharing
One of the most important things I’ve learned through my Yoga Therapy training is that sharing unfolds in its own time. In my first module with The Yoga Therapy Institute (Yoga Therapy Foundation 100 Hours), the school’s Programme Director, Montserrat told us about a client she’d worked with weekly for many years before they revealed a significant addiction they had been living with. The therapist may well have sensed that something was unspoken in all that time, but nothing was forced. We’d been told, many times throughout Foundation that safety is everything in Yoga Therapy. That shared case study helped reinforce that idea a thousand times over.
In Yoga Therapy, we understand the wisdom body, the Vijnanamaya Kosha, as something that doesn’t need to be prised open. There is no prize for first place when it comes to self-realisation. And when it arrives, we certainly don’t have to rush to ‘reveal’ anything outwardly.
If someone shares something deeply personal in a first Yoga Therapy session, that isn’t a ‘win’. It’s something to be held with care and respect, not celebrated as progress.
Sharing also isn’t a once-and-done event either. When something opens, it needs somewhere to go. It needs continuity, safety, support over time. A general yoga class or even a weekend retreat, especially one filled with people who may never meet again, simply can’t offer that.
Containment without confession
One of the most refreshing yoga experiences I’ve had recently was at a chakra workshop. I went in slightly sceptical, as I often do, but it was the ‘oh-my-God’ kind of amazing that I still bore my yogi friends with months later.
After the first set of practices, we were invited to write down any observations. Nothing was said about later sharing, but looking back, my subconscious was clearly being cautious. What I wrote was careful, polite, full of what I thought I ‘should’ be thinking, ‘should’ be feeling, ‘should’ say out loud if I was made to.
Later, after more practice, we were invited to write again. By that point, it had become clear that no sharing would be asked of us. The energy in the room was different – more relaxed. Everyone was scribbling away furiously in their little notebooks. My notes became honest, raw, messy, real, ugly and beautiful.
Because it was private and because it was safe.
That workshop remains one of the most memorable yoga experiences I’ve had, precisely because nothing was forced into the open. I was free to feel whatever I felt, and I didn’t owe anyone any explanations.
My main takeaway for any future workshops I run is simple: one of the safest and most inclusive ways to open a yoga space is to say, clearly and up front, that sharing is not required. Full stop.
Clarity is kindness
Some people actively seek out sharing-based yoga experiences, and that’s absolutely fine. But those spaces need to be clearly named and explicitly opt-in, so people can make an informed choice about whether that’s what they want or need.
What troubles me is when sharing circles are slipped into general classes, vinyasa flows, spring resets, without warning, without consent, without adequate containment, and without a qualified person holding space. Even if the yoga teacher is also qualified in a psycho-discipline, the ‘clearly named and explicitly opt-in’ applies.
Yoga can be deeply supportive without public sharing. Knowing where the line is drawn is part of what keeps people safe. And safety, always, comes first.
