![]() Sometimes, I find myself reciting the Gayatri mantra when I’m walking down the street or doing my grocery shopping. When I’m not in class, I’m either doing my readings and worksheets or thinking about sequencing and I have now had several dreams about internal and external thigh rotation, though I’m told this is fairly normal. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been living, breathing and even dreaming about yoga. I’m fairly certain our class contributes to more than half of the coffee shop next to the studio’s business. While we only have guided asana practice four times a week, there are readings, worksheets and lots of, how should I put this, digestion from the information overload. We meet six times a week from Tuesday to Sunday and get Mondays off. I’ve practiced asanas several times a week, consistently, for at least a year now, and while this prepared me well for the physical aspects of training, an intensive month-long course still takes a toll. Not every yoga teacher started as one (some of our lecturers used to be preschool teachers, one used to be a banker, and another was a former monk!) and teacher training shows that yoga is not necessarily just for the Lululemon, splits-loving, super-fit models you often see in the magazines and Instagram (not that there’s anything wrong with that either!). Regardless of whether you want to teach yoga or not, the training course is a great way to deepen your personal practice, meet other yogis in the community, learn more about the world of yoga and to challenge yourself.Įveryone who practices yoga comes from a different background and found yoga in different ways, and yoga teacher training truly highlights this. In fact, I would say that approximately 50% of our group of 18 students are not yet 100% certain that teaching yoga is in the cards (myself included). You don’t have to want to teach yoga to do a yoga teacher training course ![]() Understanding these aspects of the practice helps people to get more out of the practice, prevents injury and has serious emotional impact as well. I’ve also learned that I love yoga anatomy and didn’t fully understand the importance of understanding how the bones, joints, ligaments and muscles all work together in yoga. What I thought was a “simple” breathing exercise, chanting Om at the beginning and end of class, is more than just a competition to see who can Om for longer: it signifies and represents so much more – creation, preservation, destruction unconscious, subconscious, conscious and so on. At the beginning, physical asanas revolved mainly around sitting comfortably, for the purpose of meditation, and preparing the body in order to deepen meditative practice. “Modern postural yoga”, or yoga as we know it, is something that hasn’t been around since the beginning of time, and is actually a blend of gymnastics and the “classic” asanas. I had this strange idea in my head that we’d be spending eight hours a day practicing asanas, and I was pleasantly surprised by the diverse set of lecturers and lecture topics: yoga anatomy, philosophy, history, teaching skills, ethics, sequencing and much much more we have two-hour long guided practice four times a week, and do some practicing during teaching/asana clinics. There is so much more to “Yoga” than asanas and meditation, and most people (including myself) come into contact with yoga primarily because of the more physical aspects of the practice. I have learned a lot from practicing yoga, but what I really wanted to do today was to share some of the things I’ve learned so far from the six-days-a-week, intensive and challenging program, as well as thoughts and reflections from the first two weeks of my yoga teacher training, in no particular order: 1. I had about five weeks to sort out my relocation back to Asia, so thought to myself: if not now, when? I’m half way through the program and it has been intense, exhausting, but extremely engaging and I’m learning tons about “Yoga” and making new friends along the way: I am so happy with the decision to do my RYT 200 training at this particular school, and have some thoughts on t hings to take into consideration when you’re trying to choose where to do your YTT. I am currently two weeks into a month-long RYT 200 yoga teacher training program at the Yoga Garden in San Francisco. Reflections and insights from my RYT 200 YTT program. ![]()
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