Living vs Teaching Yoga: Why Embodiment Is the Heart of Our Gurukulam?

In a world saturated with information, it's easy to mistake knowing for being. We read, we listen, we learn—and often, we stop there. But at the core of our offering lies a deeper truth: there is a fundamental difference between teaching something and living it.

To teach is to describe and this philosophy is at the core of many of our traditional schooling systems and institutes.

To live is to embody, to become the teachings. This concept was intentionally created to be at the core of a gurukulam, the traditional yoga schools from thousands of years ago and also our living school of yoga and ayurveda.

And this difference changes your experience because embodiment goes beyond the space of our minds, it connects us to the subtle layers of our bodies, our consciousness.

Teaching Is the Map. Living Is the Journey.

Teaching often exists at a distance. It can be theoretical, intellectual, even second-hand. You can teach a concept without ever having lived it. You can repeat knowledge without ever having let it shape you. Many of us have been constructed to teach in this way because this was structured in much of the schooling we attended.

When you live something, it becomes inseparable from you. It’s no longer a concept—it's your breath, your posture, your presence. You don’t just talk about awareness, stillness, compassion, or resilience. You are it. You’ve been through the fire. You've sat with the silence. You've made the inner leap from thought to transformation.

Living is holistic integration. It’s the moment knowledge drops from the mind into the body, into the nervous system, into the cells and rewrites DNA. You feel it. You practice it. You carry it. You become it. To guide in this way requires intentionality, it requires deconstructing those constructs of teaching and education.

What is a Living Experience? What is YogiBeYoga?

We believe in learning through experience, not explanation. Because transformation doesn’t happen through information—it happens through integration.

You can't truly teach what you haven't lived. You can describe it, sure. You can outline the steps. But your words won’t carry the resonance of truth. They won’t land. Because they’re not coming from the experience—they’re standing next to it.

When something hasn’t been lived, it’s separate from you. It’s not in your essence. It doesn’t permeate your perspective. And your transmission reflects that separation.

Living collapses that distance and it is this living that overlaps with the original gurukulam, and more closely associated with “unschooling”, it is the reason our program is called YogiBeYoga to emphasize the experience of the Yogi becoming the teachings of Yoga.

Embodied Practice: Aligning Mind, Words & Action

This is why we center everything around embodied practice. Whether it’s movement, mindfulness, creativity, or leadership, we are committed to facilitating experiences—not just sharing content.

Because only through being the experience can real understanding unfold. It’s not about mastering language. It’s about aligning your life with the truth. And then you discover wisdom from that alignment of truth. And then this wisdom and truth can permeate through your mind, words and actions. You become the embodiment of a living practice.

This Is the Work

So we invite you—don’t just learn the map. Walk the terrain.

Feel what it means to be present in your body. To listen without needing to respond. To hold space without controlling the outcome. To live the values you speak of.

Teaching about the experience will always be limited. But becoming the experience? That changes everything.

Living is the teaching

Allow us to humbly guide this experience for you at our center, Pura Veda Gurukulam, in San Juanillo, Costa Rica, which we created from scratch to provide space for this transformation and living experience.