For most yoga teachers, becoming certified in Oncology Yoga looks like addition: new anatomy, new safety protocols, new vocabulary for talking about cancer and its treatments. What surprises many teachers is how much of the training is actually subtraction — letting go of sequences, cues, and assumptions that served them well in a general studio class or with past individuals but that, in front of someone mid-chemotherapy or three years past a mastectomy, no longer hold up.
This isn’t a footnote to Oncology Yoga training. It is the center of the training.
Unlearning Is Not a Failure of Past Training or Experience
The first time a teacher is asked to set aside a favorite sequence, a common phrases or cues – like ‘take a deep breath‘ – or a long-practiced modification, it can feel like a failure of a past training or experience. As if, something has gone wrong. That years of training and experience are being second-guessed. They aren’t.
Educational researchers Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki described two different kinds of expertise that develop from practice: routine expertise, which produces high efficiency and accuracy on familiar tasks but little flexibility when a situation doesn’t fit the pattern, and adaptive expertise, which comes from a deeper conceptual understanding — one that lets a practitioner recognize when their most practiced rules don’t apply, and invent something else instead.
Adaptive expertise is what is required for Oncology Yoga teachers. The ability to be flexible to support the student that is in front of them based on a wide variety of circumstances. Its the ability to identify that a sequence that’s safe and effective for a healthy 35-year-old may compress a tumor, overload a bone weakened by treatment, or push a nervous system already in overdrive. Recognizing that — and adjusting in real time rather than defaulting to what’s familiar — is not a failure of an original training or experience. It’s a more advanced form of it.
Growth requires discomfort. That’s true whether the thing being let go of is a habit, a favorite cue, or something closer to identity: the sequence you built your reputation on, the adjustment your own teacher gave you, the lineage you’ve practiced within for twenty years.
When Tradition and the Patient Disagree, the Patient Wins
Here is the harder version of the same idea: sometimes what needs to be unlearned isn’t a habit at all. It’s a piece of the tradition itself.
Every yoga lineage carries conventions that its teachers were trained to treat as correct — a particular alignment cue, a hands-on adjustment, a sequence considered foundational, a belief about what a “real” practice includes. Most of these conventions were built for and tested on healthy bodies. None of them were built with cancer in mind. When a lineage’s convention and a patient’s actual physiological or emotional need point in different directions, Oncology Yoga asks teachers to make a clear choice: the patient’s need comes first. Not the lineage. Not the tradition. Not the teacher’s own preference or training history.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It has already happened, at scale, in a closely related corner of the yoga world. When David Emerson and colleagues at the Justice Resource Institute’s Trauma Center — working alongside trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk — developed trauma-sensitive yoga for survivors of psychological trauma, they didn’t tweak the poses. They removed core conventions of mainstream yoga instruction: hands-on physical adjustments, directive alignment cues, a teacher correcting a student’s form. For trauma survivors, those ordinary teaching tools could re-create the powerlessness the practice was meant to relieve. Instructors were retrained to invite rather than direct, and to treat the student’s own internal experience — not the instructor’s eye for “correct” alignment — as the authority in the room.
Nothing about trauma-sensitive yoga rejects yoga. It’s a case of teachers built inside one set of conventions choosing, deliberately, to set those conventions aside because a specific population’s safety depended on it. Oncology Yoga asks for the same discipline, applied to a different set of physiological and emotional realities.
When Your Own Experience Isn’t the Patient’s Experience
Lineage and tradition aren’t the only things a teacher may need to set aside. Just as often, what has to be unlearned is something more personal: an assumption about what a cancer patient wants or needs, built from watching a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or even the teacher’s own diagnosis move through treatment.
That experience is real, and it matters — but it is a sample size of one. Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the mechanism at work here as the availability heuristic: people judge how typical or likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind, and a vivid, personally lived experience comes to mind far more easily than a body of statistics ever will. A family member’s illness can make an entire diagnosis feel like it has one shape, one emotional register, one set of needs — even though the population sitting in an actual Oncology Yoga class rarely resembles just one person’s story. The same dynamic is well documented in clinical medicine, where anecdotal evidence — including a clinician’s own case experience — is known to skew judgment away from what population-level evidence actually supports, precisely because a memorable case is so much easier to recall than a study.
This cuts in both directions. A teacher whose mother wanted stillness and quiet during chemotherapy may assume every student wants the same, and inadvertently under-challenge someone who experiences vigorous movement as a lifeline to their old identity. A teacher whose friend pushed through treatment at full intensity may assume that’s the standard to hold everyone to, and miss the signs of a student who is genuinely unsafe to load that day. Neither assumption is a character flaw. Both are the availability heuristic doing exactly what it evolved to do — and exactly what Oncology Yoga training asks teachers to recognize and set aside.
This is, in fact, already built into how y4c teaches research literacy: research evidence, clinical expertise, and the client’s own stated values and preferences are treated as three separate inputs precisely because none of them is sufficient alone, and clinical expertise “without research risks becoming habit or anecdote.” A teacher’s personal history with cancer is part of their clinical expertise — valuable, but only one leg of the stool. It has to be checked against current research and against the specific person on the mat, the same way a lineage or a habitual cue does. David Sackett, whose 1996 definition of evidence-based medicine still anchors the field, put the underlying principle plainly: practice has to integrate individual expertise “with the best available external clinical evidence,” because expertise on its own, however hard-won, isn’t enough to keep pace with what’s actually known.
The Body in the Room Doesn’t Know What Lineage You Trained In
There’s a second reason yoga tradition can’t be allowed the final word, and it’s less about philosophy and more about bones.
Skeletal structure varies from person to person — bone length, joint shape, torso and limb proportions, even which muscles are present are not standard across bodies. A joint’s range of motion is a direct function of the shape of the bones that form it, which means a single “correct” alignment cue, however central to a given lineage, cannot be equally correct for every joint it’s applied to. Teachers who work in functional anatomy have argued this for years: treating a lineage’s alignment rule as universal, rather than as a starting reference, risks the exact tissues — bone, cartilage, ligament, fascia — that Oncology Yoga is most careful to protect.
In a population where bone density may already be compromised by treatment, where surgical sites have changed the anatomy a cue was written for, and where a nerve or a lymph node basin may no longer behave the way it does in a textbook, this stops being an academic argument. The body in front of you sets the standard. The lineage supplies a starting vocabulary, not a verdict.
Holding a Lineage Loosely Isn’t the Same as Abandoning It
None of this asks a teacher to discard the tradition they trained in. It asks them to hold it loosely enough that it can yield.
The yoga world has its own name for this shift, distinct from Oncology Yoga but worth knowing: some teachers and scholars now describe a move toward “post-lineage” practice — away from systems where a single teacher’s or tradition’s alignment paradigm is treated as complete and universal truth, and toward practice grounded in peer knowledge, ongoing questioning, and the specific person on the mat. It’s a useful reminder that the tension between “what my lineage taught me” and “what this person actually needs” isn’t unique to oncology settings. It shows up anywhere a tradition built by and for one population gets applied, unexamined, to a different one.
Oncology Yoga teachers don’t need to resolve that tension in the abstract. They need to resolve it every time a new student walks in with a diagnosis, a surgery, a medication list, and a body that doesn’t match the sequence that was planned. The training asks teachers to notice the moment tradition and patient need diverge, and to already know, before that moment arrives, which one gets to win.
This Is Already a Recognized Standard — Just Not in Yoga
If this sounds like an unusually high bar to set for a yoga class, it’s worth pointing out that healthcare set the same bar for itself decades ago. Patient-centered care is the term for a model of medicine in which care is organized around the patient’s own values, circumstances, and preferences — not around a provider’s default habits, a hospital’s convenience, or “the way it’s always been done.” It treats the relationship as a partnership in which the patient’s perspective carries real weight, not as a hierarchy in which the provider simply prescribes.
Naming the parallel is useful for two reasons. It gives Oncology Yoga teachers a way to explain, to a healthcare partner or a skeptical colleague, exactly what makes this training different from a general 200-hour certification: it isn’t just more anatomy, it’s a different governing principle. And it gives teachers permission to stop treating “the patient’s needs over my training” as a radical departure from professional norms. In medicine, it’s the norm.
Growth Requires Discomfort — That’s the Point
Every student who comes to an Oncology Yoga class brings a distinct combination of physical, emotional, and energetic needs, and no lineage, however deeply practiced, arrives pre-loaded with the answer for all of them. What Oncology Yoga asks of its teachers is the harder, more valuable skill: the ability to observe, adapt, and — when the moment calls for it — set the script down.
That discomfort isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong in a teacher’s training. It’s the training working as intended.
FAQ
What does “unlearning” mean in Oncology Yoga training? It means identifying habits, sequences, and assumptions built for general or healthy populations and deliberately setting them aside when they don’t serve — or could endanger — someone navigating cancer treatment or survivorship.
Why would a teacher need to set aside their own yoga lineage or tradition? Because most yoga lineages were developed for and tested on healthy bodies, not bodies affected by cancer treatment. When a lineage’s convention conflicts with what a specific patient’s body or circumstances require, Oncology Yoga training asks teachers to prioritize the patient’s need over the tradition.
Does this mean Oncology Yoga rejects traditional yoga philosophy? No. It asks teachers to hold their training and lineage as a foundation and a starting vocabulary rather than a fixed script, so that the specific person in front of them — not the tradition alone — determines what the practice looks like that day.
A teacher has personal experience with cancer through a family member or friend. Doesn’t that count as valuable insight? Yes, and it’s not dismissed — it’s simply treated as one data point rather than the whole picture. Personal experience becomes part of a teacher’s clinical judgment, but it still has to be checked against current research and against the actual person being taught, since one relationship’s experience of cancer rarely predicts another’s.
