By Tari Prinster, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT | Founder, yoga4cancer (y4c)
I have been asked many things over the years by yoga teachers working in cancer care. Questions about lymphedema, about bone density, about what to do when a student is mid-treatment, and their protocol suddenly changes. But the question I am asked least often — and the one that concerns me most — is this one:
How do I take care of myself in this work?
That silence tells me something. It tells me that we have absorbed a cultural story about caregiving — that it requires self-erasure. That attending to our own needs somehow competes with attending to our students’ needs. To be a good teacher, we must empty ourselves and hand everything over.
I want to say plainly — that the story is wrong. And in oncology yoga, where we work with people facing the most profound challenges of their lives, it is not just wrong — it is dangerous.
The bridge must be strong. If the bridge breaks, no one gets across.
What I Learned the Hard Way
My first student death caught me completely unprepared. Not in the way I might have expected — I had thought about death intellectually, had practiced Savasana, had sat with impermanence in meditation. But the first time a student of mine died from cancer, I felt something I did not expect: panic. Before grief came panic.
I did not have a ritual. I did not have a practice. I did not have words. And I did not have a community of peers who understood what it felt like to stand in front of a class the following week, holding space for other people’s grief while trying to locate my own.
That experience changed how I built this training. And it is why I am writing this now.
Because what I know — after more than twenty years of working in oncology yoga, of training more than 3,000 teachers, of losing students and friends and colleagues to this disease — is that the teachers who last in this work are not the ones who feel nothing. They are the ones who feel everything and have built the containers to hold it.
Why Self-Care Is Different in Oncology Yoga
In a general yoga teaching context, self-care is important. In oncology yoga, it is a clinical necessity.
We are working with people who are navigating treatment, fear, grief, physical loss, and the very real possibility of death. Some of our students will not survive. All of them are living with uncertainty. They bring that into the room with them every single week.
Compassion fatigue in this field is not a sign of weakness. It is a predictable occupational outcome when teachers lack adequate self-care practices. Research on healthcare workers, therapists, and social workers is clear: those who support people in trauma and illness without tending to their own emotional residue will eventually burn out. Some will leave the field. Some will stay but gradually become less present, less effective, less able to offer the steadiness their students need.
We cannot afford that. Our students cannot afford that.
The Emotional Residue Problem
Here is something no one tells yoga teachers clearly enough: every class leaves a residue. Not always visible. Not always felt in the moment. But something accumulates.
When you hold space for a student who has just received difficult scan results, that stays with you. When you hear that someone who was in your class last month has died, that stays with you. When you watch a student struggle through a pose that was effortless for her six months ago, before her second round of chemotherapy — that stays with you too.
The question is not whether you will carry some of this. You will. The question is what you do with it.
In my own practice, I have found that the emotions that do not have a container of their own tend to leak into the places I do not want them: into the teaching space itself, into my relationships, into my sleep, into my own yoga practice. The goal of self-care in oncology yoga is not to become numb. It is to give your emotional life a proper home so that it does not show up uninvited in someone else’s.
Practical Self-Care: What Actually Works
I want to be specific here, because ‘self-care’ can feel like an abstraction. What I mean is concrete, consistent practice. This is what I recommend, and what I have depended on myself:
- A reset ritual after class. Not someday. Every time. It does not need to be elaborate. A short walk. Five minutes outside. A cup of tea made slowly and drunk without looking at your phone. The ritual matters less than the intention: this is the moment I transition from holding space for others to returning to myself.
- Return to your own mat as a student. This is non-negotiable for me. Not as a teacher rehearsing sequences. As a student, receiving someone else’s guidance, letting my body be led rather than leading. There is something restored in that reversal. Teachers who never receive tend to run dry.
- Peer connection. This is the one I see y4c teachers skip most often, and the one I believe matters most over the long arc of a career. Find another oncology yoga teacher — ideally in our community — and talk to them. Not about scheduling logistics. About the hard parts. About the student you are worried about. About the class last week that you are still turning over in your mind. There is no one else who will understand quite the way another teacher in this field does. That understanding is not a luxury. It is sustenance.
- Develop personal grief rituals. When a student dies, I need something specific to do with that. Over time I have built a personal practice around loss: writing, sometimes. Returning to my meditation cushion. A specific sequence I practice alone that has, over the years, become associated with grief and transition. Whatever your ritual is, build it before you need it. Do not wait for loss to be your teacher.
- Write. I am not talking about journaling as self-improvement. I am talking about using language to find out what you actually think and feel. Many of us who come to yoga are drawn to wordlessness, to the body’s wisdom, to what exists beyond language. That is real. But language is also a container. Some things need to be written to be released.
On the Scope of Your Role
There is something else I want to address that I consider part of self-care, even though it may not be obvious: knowing where your role ends.
Your yoga class is not a therapy session. You are not your students’ counselor, their nurse, or their confessor. You can hold space with warmth and steadiness. You do not have to hold everything.
Teachers who try to be everything to their students — who blur the professional boundaries between teacher and therapist, between practitioner and friend — are not serving their students better. They are serving them in ways they are not trained or equipped to sustain. And they burn out faster.
Part of what I teach in the y4c training is scope of practice: understanding what you are responsible for, and what falls to other professionals. When a student needs more support than a yoga class can provide, refer them. That is not a failure. That is professional integrity. And it protects you as much as it protects them.
Death Is Present in This Work. So Should You Be.
I chose a field where death is part of the landscape. Not as a failure. Not as an exception. As a natural part of working with people living with cancer.
For a long time in my early years, I thought the right response to that was to become harder. More stoic. To process less, feel less, let less land. I was wrong. The teachers I have watched burn out in this field are not the ones who felt too much. They are the ones who had no place to put what they felt.
Feeling is not the problem. Feeling without a container is the problem.
Build your container. Tend to it consistently. Reach out when it cracks. This work is profound and necessary and exhausting and beautiful. You deserve to sustain it for a long time.
Your students are counting on you to.
