What Makes a GREAT Yoga Teacher? Components of Yoga Teacher Training- LauraGyoga

Transcript

[Music] hey everyone it's been quite a while since I've done a yoga whiteboard so today I figured it was time to bring it back and this one has quite a lot of information on it when we're getting ready to do a new teacher training something that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how can we create better yoga teachers how come we create teachers who are more skilled and more effective and have a greater understanding of what yoga is I feel like that's one of my my personal missions is to create better educated yoga teachers and for me one of the specialties that I kind of focus in on is anatomy because I have more training in that then your average yoga teacher but that's just one tiny piece of really being a great yoga teacher so what I've broken it down into are these four categories that come up consistently and you can see I have represented them by these four different circles that intersect and overlap in so many different ways and this is still kind of a work in progress for me thinking about how things fit together in the big scope of being a yoga teacher but I'll go through some of the main categories to start the first circle here and these are in no particular order the first circle here I put the postures and the anatomy so think tangible physical studying the body systems talking about alignment what's happening in the joints when you're doing a certain asana and then that intersects with the next circle which is knowledge and understanding of the subtle body the parts of the body that we can't see or touch that we can't necessarily talk about in the most scientific way but I think are so integral to what we do as yoga teachers understanding how these practices cause changes in our energy we could talk about the chakra system not ease the concept of prana as that life force that animates us we could go into the values and just emotions in general and how emotion a lot of times is talked about as energy in motion like energy shifting and moving so that really ties in strongly to the subtle body and then we swing over to this next category which is yoga philosophy and there are so many different components that also go into the yoga philosophy but the Yama's and the jnanis are usually some of the first foundation work that we study the Yoga Sutras and some of the classical texts that are associated with yoga The Clash's system and just the overall idea of energy and consciousness there's a lot of overlap into those two sections so then we come up to that fourth major circle and this is the one that I think might not be quite as obvious but it's so integral to being effective as a yoga teacher and that is this idea of relationship and connection and we start from a foundation of working on our relationship to ourself using yoga in a way that we get to know ourselves better and our habits and our tendencies all of that is so helpful to understand first and then we are able to work on connection the connection that we have to the people around us the connection that we form with our students the connection that we have to the practice of yoga and maybe to our peers our other teachers or our other yoga students all of that stuff is really essential and I think as a yoga teacher you could be the best educated you could know everything about anatomy and the bone and be able to talk about every single Nadi and energy channel in the body and have the Yama's and the knee Yama's memorized but if you can't create that connection and that relationship to the student we won't be able to effectively use that knowledge to pass it on to help somebody else and that's such a big part of why so many people get into teaching yoga's we want to take this information distill it and pass it down to somebody else for it to be useful to them so this part is key to that whole process happening and that's also why I see yoga teacher training as being something that needs to be really experiential that whole process of transitioning from being a student to being a teacher you have to take a deeper dive into what do the postures do what effects do they have the meditation practices what effect do they have really spending a lot of time in personal practice to build a stronger connection between you and the practice of yoga and that will make you more effective at conveying it to somebody else so those are the four major spheres that I see the physical body awareness the postures in the anatomy the subtle body in the energy awareness the yoga philosophy and the text and then this sphere of relationship and connection skills all of them intersecting to that little point in the center that is where a really skilled and effective yoga teacher resides now you're looking at all of these different topics on the board and you're thinking okay well that's like probably three lifetimes worth of study and yoga is a very deep and a very wide field there's so much that goes into this and I think if you're new to yoga sometimes that can feel a little bit overwhelming because there is so much information but really I like to look at it from a point of feeling how exciting is that that we have so much that we can learn I mean there's no end to what we can read and what we can practice it's a never-ending source of knowledge and interest that we can just keep working with so try to think of it in that way and you would actually be surprised a few years of dedicated study you would really be surprised how much you can absorb when you are using resources that are effective and maybe you have a teacher who has studied all of these things and can effectively distill that and pass it on to you there's a couple different things that go into that now in terms of how we educate yoga teachers this is not all going to be instilled in you in 200 hours it's just it's too much 200 hours is your very basic platform on which to start building your skills it's like the day that you graduate from teacher training that's when your real education begins because now you have the foundation to build on and it's years and years and years of learning after that and working on your craft and I think one of the ways that we can support the profession and create better yoga teachers from the beginning is to encourage mentoring programs the teachers who have been teaching for long periods of time have gone through all sorts of trial and error and experiential learning of their own and that is so valuable to pass on to a new teacher who's just coming into the field and sort of trying to get their bearings of what this whole process is about to be in the role of a teacher so that's also why I support a lot of experience learning a lot of practical application getting out there and teaching because after you teach you can self reflect there's that spud Yaga that self study but what I like to do after I teach a class and I still do this almost 15 years and I'll teach a class and then I'll say to myself okay what went well and what could I have done better what am I going to work on next time and it can be all sorts of things like the way that I regulated the rooms temperature or the way that I greeted students when they were coming in or the music that I played or the way that I did my sequencing there's so many different things that I can tweak every time I teach to work on that skill so self-reflection is probably one of the best skills that you can cultivate as a yoga teacher so that you can do that continuous lifelong learning and continuously working on your skills is always something that we can work on so the area right in between here between a relationship and connection and the postures and the anatomy there are some things that I filled in there karmayoga being one of them cuz Karma Yoga is the yoga of service of it could be like volunteer work it could be just offering your teachings to somebody who is in need or could benefit from them a lot of yoga studios will pair up with different charities or do trips to other countries to offer opportunities to do volunteer work as part of karma yoga and that is using your physical body and using your skills to create relationship and connection with a positive outcome it exists right in that intersection between what we can do with her physical body and what is possible when we take care of ourselves and we're healthy so that we can go out and be of service and be useful a big part of that too is the self awareness because if we lack self awareness we probably won't be as effective when we go out to offer those skills and we won't be as good at taking care of ourselves if we don't understand our own boundaries and our own limitations in terms of when we need to take a break or when we need to step back and focus on self-care so that we don't burn out this seems like a strange topic as a yoga teacher like you kind of imagine being a yoga teacher is like always fun and wonderful and you just do yoga all day and you're so relaxed but there's actually a lot a lot of yoga teachers who have been in the field for years that start to get burnt out and they start to feel stuck and sometimes end up leaving the profession because they just feel like the hours that they have to spend teaching maybe to make enough money to sustain themselves is just too much effort for what they're getting from it and then they end up with burnout so that's definitely something to keep in mind because when we go through that process of educating a t-shirt a teacher and getting them into the field of yoga and putting all of this work in we want to make sure that that person is able to sustain themselves for a full career as a teacher we need those teachers who have been in the field for 30 40 years and have all that experience if we're burning out after 10 or 15 years we won't have teachers who make it to that end point so self care and recognizing your needs is the key part of making sure that you don't burn out a really big thing that we talk about in health care is that when you are starting to feel burnout and there's a lot of different symptoms that can be just kind of a lack of interest not feeling that spark of joy when you're doing what you're doing fatigue is a really common feeling lack of inspiration all sorts of things can really come from burnout but when you start to notice that starting to creep in one of the things that we can do is seek out continuing education take a class from a different teacher learn something new to infuse into your practice and that a lot of times can bring back that spark of energy and that kind of swings us down to the subtle body again understanding that energetic system and sometimes that that agni that internal fire starts to get dull and we need to have the self-awareness to recognize when that's happening and then knowing what can be done to reignite that fire bring it back to a healthy level where we feel that passion and that drive to share the teachings of yoga again and that brings me down to the kosha model the kosha model if you're not familiar with that are the layers of our being it's the model in yoga that we use it's really the foundation of yoga therapy to see how the layers of a person interact to create one whole functioning being it's the physical body it's our energetic body it is our mind and our intellect it is our wisdom it is our joy and then wrapped in all of those layers is our soul or the Atman and that's the model that we use to look at what a person is made of and one of the other things that I've really been thinking about lately is how in occupational therapy we we always think about the person in context so we're not just a person floating in nothing we are a person that exists in context in this layer of what our roles are what our external environment is all of those things are also going to have an impact on those inner layers so future video is going to be my personal view of what the expanded kosha model should look like so it kind of updates the modern view of people and the ancient view of people and melts those two together which is really what I'm always trying to do taking the modern science and the ancient wisdom and bringing those two together to be more effective so there's a lot going on here and like I said this is very much still a work in progress I think about this a lot in terms of different components of the skills that we work on is yoga teachers and where it would fit in or what I might have missed so I would love to hear from you if there's anything that you think should be added to this or any different components that you feel like are really key to being a great yoga teacher let me know in the comments I would love to hear from you thank you so much for being here and listening to this new Yoga board talk [Music] you [Music]