Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Hands off our yoga
Instructors aren't too serene about state meddling.
Yoga instructor Cathy Cannon stretches during the class at Uttara Yoga. The state wants to charge yoga instructor schools $2,500 for a license.
Photos by ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times
Yoga students Vanessa Best (middle) and Brendan Kerr follow yoga instructor Cathy Cannon at Uttara Yoga on Kirk Avenue in Roanoke during a noon session on Monday. The state is looking at regulating instructors of the ancient practice.
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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What does it take to get a yoga teacher mad?
That sounds like the beginnings of a pretty funny joke.
The punch line is regulation and taxation, and it's no laughing matter to people who teach yoga in the Roanoke and New River valleys and across Virginia.
A move by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to license schools for yoga instructors already has spawned a lawsuit and efforts to block yoga regulation in the Virginia General Assembly.
I am not making this up.
With all of the budget and other problems the commonwealth has on its plate, a state agency is talking about regulating an ancient tradition of meditation and exercise that's been handed down more or less orally for thousands of years.
Licenses for yoga instructor schools would cost $2,500 initially, plus an annual fee that depends upon a school's revenue.
Besides that, schools would be required to keep extensive paperwork that would be subject to auditing and inspection by SCHEV. Violations could result in fines.
"I think they're outlandish," says Anna Pittman of the potential regulations. She's been teaching yoga since 1988, and has offered yoga-teaching programs for the past 10 years. Her studio, The Breathing Space, is in the McCoy area of Montgomery County.
"For every miscalculation or discrepancy they find, there's a $1,000 fine," Pittman says. She told me she may quit teacher training and change her program into something beyond the ability of the state to mess with.
"I'm not going to start teacher training in Roanoke until this gets resolved," says Jill Loftis, owner of Uttara Yoga Studio in downtown Roanoke. "They just want money," she adds disgustedly.
Virginia is not the only state where this is happening. More than a dozen others are trying, or have tried, to worm their ways into yoga instruction.
SCHEV says it's merely complying with state laws that require it to regulate not only colleges and universities, but trade schools across the commonwealth.
Those include most institutions that offer instructional programs in just about any career realm. Bartending, barbering, smithery and ballroom dancing are but a few.
The point, says SCHEV spokeswoman Kirsten Nelson, is protecting students who plunk down money for career training programs.
One of SCHEV's requirements is that vocational schools must be bonded to prevent students from losing fees they've advanced to a school that ends up in financial collapse.
Nelson declined to discuss the yoga regulations in detail because of a lawsuit that's pending in Northern Virginia.
But "we view this strictly as a student-protection measure," Nelson says. "And it also lends credibility to the vocational institutions themselves.
"We got this charge in 2004 to certify all vocational schools. Part of our job is to identify vocational schools that need certification, to alert them to that fact, and to help them through the process," Nelson says.
Pittman, however, notes that hardly anyone teaches yoga for a living.
"This is not a career I'm passing on," she says. "Most people do this to enhance the quality of their lives. No one I know makes a living teaching yoga exclusively."
SCHEV initially intended to promulgate its regulations by the end of this year. That's on hold now because of the lawsuit three yoga instructors have filed alleging that licensing impinges on their First Amendment rights.
Meanwhile, Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, is planning to introduce legislation that would somehow exempt yoga studios that instruct teachers from regulation.
That is a very good idea.
If nothing else, it will raise the levity quotient in Richmond during the upcoming General Assembly session.
Imagine scores of slender and limber deep-breathers rubbing shoulders and joining in the anti-regulatory fervor of the fat cats who lobby for the tobacco, alcohol, gun and garbage industries.
That would be a hoot.
The yoga folks could only improve that ugly atmosphere.
Regulation often is a good thing. We should be happy the state regulates surgeons and dentists and structural engineers and occupations like that. Even tow truck drivers.
But teachers of yoga teachers?
"Yoga's not just about loose hamstrings," Loftis says. "It's a system of life, a way of living, a system for solving human problems."
How do you license instruction of that?
And who will the bureaucrats go after next?
