I feel blessed today. I awakened full of energy, eager to do my personal yoga and meditation practice, a practice that has been known to drag at times. Why such enthusiasm? The result of Continuing Education that led me to take the Yoga for Youth teacher training.
If you’re a registered yoga teacher you’re probably required to take continuing education courses. Today I let you in on my experience of a training that is like no other I have taken. Its a real jewel and it qualifies with Yoga Alliance and IKYTA (for the Kundalini teachers out there). Here’s why I recommend Yoga for Youth for continuing education:
Its taught by Krishna Kaur – a teacher who lives her yoga in a powerful way. Her teaching gets under your skin and wakes you up. She had everyone laughing and crying, singing and dancing, and most importantly – caring. Everyone in the course walked away feeling the power of yoga to change lives. Everyone departed with their heart open and ready to uplift others. Even though many of us didn’t really want to leave the tight community that had formed over five days. We were completely satisfied, like that way you feel after a great meal, when you want to linger for a while because your mouth savors the delicate tastes.
I’ve had the opportunity to take other courses with Krishna Kaur before, and whenever I have the chance to be around her I jump on it! I recommend this course for anyone who wants to work with youth, especially pre-teens and teens.
Are you a Human BEING or a Human DOING?
In many of the yoga trainings out there we sit and have someone tell us do this and do that. In the Yoga for Youth course we weren’t told how to teach, we were shown how to be a great teacher. A great teacher shows the student the potential of the student. The teacher aims to give the student the experience of their true identity once all the layers of false identity are peeled away and they can be themselves.
We did a lot of Kundalini Yoga and mediation to scrape away the shell. One of my favorite parts was a 31 minute meditation to let go of baggage instead of carrying it around. Very liberating.
The Y.O.G.A. of YOGA for Youth stands for Your Own Greatness Affirmed. How can a teacher help someone else feel their greatness if they don’t feel it themselves? The program helped me peel back many of my own layers, some I was unaware of, and lifted me as a teacher. I recaptured the beginner’s mind to feel the joy of discovery that a student experiences.
Finally, I was surprised by how quickly I bonded with my fellow students. People of all ages and experiences attended and the course threw us together like a pot full of boiling potatoes. Somehow all the bubbling and bumping around together helped us get cooked faster.
The Potential Dangers of Teaching
There’s a potential danger teacher’s face when they cease being a student. The danger surfaces when you start recycling the same old thoughts and experiences from one day to the next. You get trapped in a kind of “Groundhog Day” movie experience.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities.
In the expert’s mind there are few.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
By keeping up with continuing education teachers get a chance to experience the wealth of possibilities that only a student sees. It can be a very rewarding endeavor, especially if you can find a course like Y.O.G.A. for Youth and a teacher like Krishna Kaur.
What about you, what courses do you recommend for continuing education? Do you look forward to continuing education or do you dread it?
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Upcoming Events
Kids Yoga Teacher Training Weekend
Saturday November 19 and Sunday November. 20, Toronto, Canada
Early Registration Deadline is Nov. 12/11.
