Yoga High

This past weekend I took a break from being the teacher and spent some time as a student. It was divine. As you probably know, Amber Shumake came to The Yoga Room and taught 3 workshops over the weekend. I’d been admiring her practice and her writing from afar via Facebook and Instagram for about a year, but I’d never met her in person.

I was really excited about attending her workshops, but I had no idea how much I NEEDED them.

The first one, Live Out Loud: A Journey to Your Core Desires, pushed me very far out of my Gentle Yoga comfort zone.The room was warm, the practice was strong, and the whole experience left me in tears, in a good way. Amber has a very special way of weaving a message through the practice and it really touched me to my core. The practice somehow made me realize, in my heart, that I am ok just as I am, I am good enough, and I need to do a better job of taking care of myself.

All during savasana, tears dripped out of the corners of my eyes, across my temples, and into my sweaty hair. It was bliss. I typically practice in a very gentle and cautious way, and I was surprised at how this strong, slow practice felt like I’d peeled off a thick layer of stress. I felt like I had a brand new body.

The second workshop, Attract Abundance, was about accepting the abundance of your own gifts in order to be able to accept abundance from the universe. This workshop was more subtly powerful for me. It was warm and sweaty and included a bunch of challenging inversions, not all of which I could do. But I have to say, after leaving this workshop I felt high for about an hour and a half. As in, I felt like I shouldn’t be driving.

Yoga is so powerful, so vast. So many teachers who each teach in their own unique style. There really is Yoga for EveryBody. Whether that yoga be strong, gentle, spiritual, technical, alignment-based, hot, flowing, air-conditioned, chair, restorative, meditative… The list goes on and on.

Get out there. Find your style. Find your STYLES. You can practice something different anytime, depending on what you feel your body and soul need.

Get out there. And find your bliss. Connect with yourself. Find your yoga high.

Benefits of a Therapeutics-Based Teacher Training

People often ask us what is the difference between our therapeutics-based Hatha Teacher Training and a regular Hatha Teacher Training that is offered by most studios. We think it's a really important question, so we opted to answer in this week's blog post. Our therapeutics-based Hatha Yoga Teacher Training is unique in that it teaches trainees how to make a yoga practice adapt to the needs of the practitioner rather than trying to get the practitioner to adapt to the practice. In our training you will learn how to safely teach a diverse set of students so that every single student receives maximum benefit from the practice.

 

As therapeutic yoga teachers we offer yoga for people who may have stayed away from the practice for fear of being too big, too inflexible, too weak, too afraid of the big poses they have seen in photos, too afraid of hurting themselves, or too intimidated by what a typical yoga practice might require.

One of the main tenets of our method is to teach mindfully and with intention. We constantly circle back to the questions:

• "What is my intention in teaching this posture, this breath practice, this guided meditation?"
• "Who do I want to affect and what is the best method to achieve the effect?"

Staying firmly rooted in this mindset helps teachers create classes that are adaptable to the broad spectrum of bodies and conditions we see in yoga classes today.

More and more healthcare professionals recommend yoga as an adjunct to plans of care and it is incredibly important for us as yoga teachers to be knowledgeable about how yoga can help, but also about how yoga can potentially hurt.

We teach how to design therapeutic sequences and how to adapt to the needs of various populations ranging from those who are perfectly healthy to those who are rehabbing injuries and surgeries to those with chronic medical conditions.

We cover anatomy extensively so that graduates can read bodies and offer appropriate modifications. And we delve into the many ways yoga props can help people access yoga poses they may otherwise find impossible.

We teach our trainees to strive not for fancy looking postures but rather for sensations, shifts, and positive changes.

We're so excited about your interest in our Teacher Training Program! We hope you can attend our next Open House on November 9th. Please note that we have filled 5 of the 12 available spots for our 2015 Teacher Training. Given our interest list, we expect our training may fill up before the Early Registration Deadline of November 15th.

If you're pretty sure you want to register, but would like to speak with us to get more information before making your final decision, we'd be happy to schedule a 1 on 1 session to talk to you about the training and answer any questions you may have. Just send us an email to get the ball rolling.

Warm regards, Emily

200 Hour Teacher Training Director