Yoga teacher Amanda Bisk demonstrates an impressive pose. Source: Supplied

Yoga teacher and PhD student Gina Woodhill is worried that the rise of social media and narcissism, as well as a lack of regulation, is a challenge for the practice of yoga in Australia.

“There are people who go and do their 200 hours of teacher training and become very arrogant,” Ms Woodhill said.

“A lot of people get caught up in ego and showing-off on social media. To be a yoga teacher requires more humility than anything else.

“For people who take up yoga because it’s cool, social media can be very negative. Contorting your body into a pretzel on Instagram doesn’t mean you are doing yoga, that’s just your body type.”

Instagram is filled with photos of people achieving ambitious yoga poses. The hashtag #yoga has more than 12 million posts and #yogaeverydamnday has more than three million.

The industry is now currently worth about $10 billion a year but Ms Woodhill said that despite being a rapidly expanding industry, there was still a lot of confusion about what the practice really was.

While yoga has become popular as a form of physical exercise across the Western world, the Indian practice that it originated from, also has a meditative and spiritual core.

“Yoga is the science of health and well being, but particularly in Australia we’re very cagey about dealing with our minds and dealing with our spirits, we prefer to deal with our physical selves, it makes us feel more comfortable,” Ms Woodhill told news.com.au.

“When you get caught up in the acrobatics of it, you end up just practising aerobics, which can be beneficial but you miss out on the practice of yoga and its power to create deeper health and wellbeing in our communities.”

While Ms Woodhill said she was not necessarily opposed to people posting photos of poses, she said the public had to be aware that looking awesome in a picture did not necessarily demonstrate a teacher’s knowledge or understanding of yoga.

“If you go to somebody who’s got that arrogance, and the people around them are giving them that arrogance, and if their body has got a greater capacity, you are probably inviting injury.”

As a yoga teacher Ms Woodhill said she spent six months to a year getting her students to the point where they could perform a headstand, while other teachers were comfortable instructing their students to get right into it.

She said this could lead to the kinds of injuries that had been highlighted in a recent New York Times article.

It also confused people who were looking for good teachers because some of the best yoga practitioners in Australia did not have a huge social media following and were not that well known.

When people posted photos of advanced poses it also missed the fact that sometimes it was the simplest poses that could have the biggest benefits.

“With my body type I can do the splits and post a hundred photos of myself on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook but this doesn’t show my yoga practice, just what my body can do,” Ms Woodhill said.

One of the most misunderstood phrases in yoga was “come to the edge” or “come to your place of growth” which some people misunderstood as challenging people to push themselves to their physical limit.

According to Ms Woodhill the phrases actually refer to coming to a place of consciousness and examining your mental state.

“It’s asking you to observe what is really going on. You could be thinking ‘I should be able to do this but I can’t’, or ‘I know I can do this but I’m feeling lazy’. It’s dealing with your mental state and how you deal with things in your mind, that is being at your edge.”

Ahead of International Yoga Day on Sunday, Ms Woodhill is calling for more regulation of the yoga industry and better training of teachers.

“For a market that has so much financial value, there’s a lot of confusion about what is being bought and sold,” Ms Woodhill said.

“What are we actually buying and selling as yoga? What does doing yoga mean and what do people actually know about yoga?”

She said a governing body was needed where the requirements to become a yoga teacher were increased, so that the qualification had the depth of a three-year degree.

“If you’re not incredibly committed to learning the science around yoga the potential for injury is huge,” she said.

As part of her study Ms Woodhill is calling on Canberra based yoga participants or teachers to take a survey which aims to build an understanding of the local yoga industry. To participate, take the online Survey.