So, you wanna be a yoga teacher...
By Jonathan Wood, 200 RYT
Earlier this month Yoga Heights graduated a new cohort of yoga instructors. I am one of these new teachers and it’s still a little startling to realize that the journey my fellow yogis and I started 8 months ago has come to a close. Of course, it’s also a beginning as we move forward in our different ways to share what we’ve learned. There's so much I want to tell folks about teacher training...here's just a glimpse. If you want to know more, take a look here or come to one of our info sessions (more info below).
What is teacher training actually like?
Perhaps you’re envisioning a bunch of people sitting around in yoga pants, Om-ing and chanting. That not entirely inaccurate...but there is soooo much more.
There were twenty-some of us in this year’s cohort and we gathered on the first weekend of each month from October through May. Our lead teachers were Yoga Heights owner Jess Pierno and the incomparable Angela Meyer. Across the span of time we became a tight knit group of co-explorers on this deep dive journey into yoga. Together we celebrated our collective and individual discoveries.
We also moved. A lot. Each weekend included classes in yoga forms like Kundalini or Sivananda, as well as more general vinyasa flows. We broke down each of the yoga poses to understand them from the ground up. Learning the foundations of each helped us strengthen our own practices and also gave us the tools we will need as yoga teachers to help guide students with proper alignment and cues that make sense. For me, this included finally getting better at not confusing my lefts and rights.
In addition there were helpful lectures all the relevant topics, including anatomy and the skeleton, yogic history, how to assist students, and the practical realities of yoga instruction. We covered the Eight Limbs of Yoga, which are basically the guiding principles for yogis that have been handed down for thousands of years. While required readings where minimal, there were lots of useful articles and presentation notes to fill up my binder.
There wasn’t this one great big ah-ha moment where suddenly everything shifted into focus. In fact, across the months, it was like having 100 tiny ah-ha moments about some of the smallest things. This makes sense. When we pay attention to something for a long time, we begin to understand it better and better. And that’s what yoga is all about--looking at life evenly by finding the union of our body and mind.
Some other great stuff that happened: my sleep is more regulated, my caloric intake is more uniform across a week, I made a whole bunch of new friends who are some of the best people in the DC region, and my own yoga practice is more solid than ever before.
To learn more about Yoga Teacher Training visit our website or contact Jess Pierno. We have a two info sessions...June 2 from 12-1pm at Georgia Ave and July 10 from 6-7pm at Takoma.