Best Books to Read Before you Begin your RYT-200 or RYT-500 Yoga Teacher Training in 2026
Signing up for Yoga Teacher Training is a beautiful commitment into your own yoga practice, self-development, and personal growth. If you have some time before you launch into your training, here are some books I highly recommend to anybody interested in boosting self-awareness and tapping into the time-tested teachings of yoga.
These 10 books won't just prepare you for your training. They'll prepare you for the version of yourself you're becoming. I've read every one of them and later in my life, have returned to most of them. They're not all 'yoga books' in the traditional sense, and that's exactly the point!
To give you a little bit of background on me, I have been working in the Health and Wellness space for over a decade after an early career in Investment Banking. I’ve been practicing yoga since I was in college, and have been teaching yoga professionally since 2020 in the San Francisco Bay Area and Tri-State area outside of New York City. I’ve shared the practice of yoga with thousands of students as a teacher and I have an RYT-500 and E-RYT 200 certification from Yoga Alliance.
When I’m not teaching yoga, I am working on a gratitude journaling app, Waveflow, that helps people spread gratitude with their friends and family Feel free to throw us a follow here in exchange for all of this free advice! yay haha.
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#1 The Yamas and the Niyamas
If you only have time to read one book before your yoga teacher training, make it this one. The Yamas and Niyamas come from the Yoga Sutra and offer ethical guidelines, the moral framework that underpins a yoga practice. Most RYT-200 hour trainings have to skim over these concepts in order to fit in all their teaching content.
Deborah Adele breaks down each of the ten principles (non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, and so on) in a way that's deeply practical and surprisingly personal. This isn't philosophy at a distance. It's an invitation to look at how you actually live, how you speak, how you treat yourself and others.
Reading this before your training means you'll understand the 'why' behind yoga in a way that makes everything else click. You'll also find yourself referencing it for years after.
#2 No Mud, No Lotus
The title says it: you cannot have the lotus without the mud. This quick read by one of the world's most beloved Buddhist teachers is about learning to be with suffering rather than run from it.
For yoga teachers in training, this is essential reading for two reasons. First, you'll be holding space for students who are going through hard things, and you need to understand suffering from the inside. Second, teacher training itself is often emotionally challenging. Old patterns could surface, vulnerabilities emerge. This book teaches you how to be with all of it.
As a yoga teacher, our own difficult life experiences are often the source of our compassion depth to support students in making positive changes. It's also a genuinely easy and beautiful read. You can finish it in a weekend and it will stay with you for years.
#3 The Hidden Messages in Water
It should be known that I am obsessed with this book and have been known to gift to EVERYBODY involved with Waveflow. This one sits outside the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's worth saying that upfront. Masaru Emoto's research involved photographing water crystals that he claimed were affected by human intention, words, and emotion. For sure, it’s a controversial take. As a meditation on the power of thought, language, and intention, it's striking.
Yoga teachers work with intention constantly. We open classes with it, we invite students into it, we build our sequences around it. This book, and whatever you make of the science, is a beautiful provocation to take your words and thoughts seriously. What if the energy behind what you say actually matters?
Read it with curiosity rather than as literal fact, and you'll find it genuinely thought-provoking. We might or might not have started talking to our plants in my household after I read this, and trust me when I say that our plants are looking vibrant and more alive than ever.
#4 The Five Invitations
I’m a big believer in beginning with the end in mind. Frank Ostaseski co-founded the Zen Hospice Project and has spent decades sitting with people at the end of their lives. This book distills everything he learned into five principles for living fully: don't wait, welcome everything, bring your whole self, find a place of rest, cultivate a “don't-know” mind.
It is, quietly, one of the most powerful books on presence I've ever read. And presence is the core skill of a yoga teacher. Not sequencing. Not cueing. Presence.
Reading this before your training will change how you think about showing up on the mat, in your life, and eventually in front of a room full of students who are trusting you to really be there with them.
#5 Atlas of the Heart
My Queen Mother Brené Brown spent years researching human emotion and connection, and this book is the result: a detailed, accessible map of 87 emotions and experiences that shape the human experience. From grief to awe to anguish to joy, she defines each one with precision and humanity.
Why does a yoga teacher need this? Because yoga moves emotion through the body, and you cannot skillfully hold space for what you cannot name. Students will cry in your class. They'll feel things they don't have words for. The more fluent and nuanced you are in the language of human emotion, the better teacher you will be.
This is also just a deeply useful book for being a human person in the world, especially if you're a parent, a founder, or anyone navigating a lot of emotional complexity at once.
#6 Mindfulness for Beginners
Meditation Teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn is the scientist who brought mindfulness into mainstream Western medicine, and this book is his most accessible entry point. It's short, clear, and grounded in both ancient wisdom and modern research.
Even if you already have a meditation practice, read this before your yoga teacher training to bolster your language and framework to teach mindfulness and get others on board. There's a meaningful difference between knowing how to meditate and knowing how to guide someone else into it. This book bridges that gap.
It's also a wonderful resource to recommend to your future students who are just starting out with meditation.
#7 Grit
This might be the most unexpected book on my list, and it might also be the most important one for getting through your first couple years of teaching.
Angela Duckworth's research on grit, the combination of passion and perseverance — makes a compelling case that long-term success comes less from talent than from the sustained commitment to keep going when things are hard. Teacher training can feel hard. Trying to land your first real teaching job can feel VERY hard.
Reading this ahead of time gives you a framework for those moments. You'll recognize the dip for what it is, and you'll be equipt how to move through it.
#8 The Four Agreements
I remember reading this book before my very own RYT-200 Teacher Training! Don Miguel Ruiz distills Toltec wisdom into four deceptively simple agreements: be impeccable with your word, don't take anything personally, don't make assumptions, always do your best.
For yoga teachers, these four principles are essentially a complete ethical operating system. 'Be impeccable with your word' maps directly to how you cue and how you speak to students. 'Don't take anything personally' is survival advice for teaching. Students will leave class early, make funny faces during class, occasionally give you odd feedback. 'Don't make assumptions' is the foundation of trauma-informed teaching. 'Always do your best' gives you permission to vary day to day.
This book offers great perspective so that you can feel in integrity with your teaching.
#9 Leaders Eat Last
I wish every Manager and person in a leadership position with read this book! I remember when I worked at SoulCycle this was a big one, and “servant leadership” was something that everybody was expected to embody.
Teaching is leadership. This book by Simon Sinek makes the case that the best leaders create environments where people feel safe, psychologically, emotionally, and physically. They put the needs of the people they're leading before their own comfort. Sound familiar? That's also a description of a great yoga teacher.
This book will change how you think about the front of the room. You're not there to perform or impress. You're there to create the conditions for your students to feel safe enough to go somewhere real.
#10 The Power of Now
This is one of my favorites! I remember this book helped me so much after the birth of my second child. I read it while I was early post-partum and it gave me such uplifting perspective to cherish each moment and stay positive through a challenging experience.
Eckhart Tolle's foundational work on presence and the nature of the thinking mind is, in many ways, the philosophical backbone of modern Western yoga.
The core teaching is that the present moment is the only place life actually happens, and that most of our suffering comes from living in our heads. In a yoga class, we use the breath, awareness of the body, and movement to bring people out of the past and future and into right now. Understanding Tolle's framework gives that work much greater depth and intentionality.
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My Closing Thoughts on the Top 10 Books to read before your RYT-200 or RYT-500 Yoga Teacher Training
The best yoga teachers are the ones committed to a life willed with continual learning, expansion and growth. Revisit these books at any time to bolster your teacher and get your mindset right as you continue on your journey though life.