Finally, you can end the class with a new song. This 10-week program includes a 24-page PDF workbook that will guide you through your study and provide you with information, knowledge, exercises and ideas for exploring the philosophy of yoga in your personal and professional life. Each week you will read a page describing a philosophy and then disseminating it to the world to see how it could help you in your communication, your relationships, your practice of movement and your self-care strategies. This 10-week program is designed for yoga, fitness and mind-body movement teachers of all backgrounds, and will introduce you to the foundations of the Vinyasa Flow philosophy, the Patanjali Yoga Sutras.
This professional development program is designed for yoga, Pilates, fitness and mind-body movement teachers who want to explore the philosophy of yoga and incorporate that philosophy into their daily lives and teaching. He also received advanced teaching training with Srivatsa Ramaswami, who for a long time was a student of Krishnamacharya himself. Exploratively delving into the text with teachers and a community with similar values and perspectives on yoga adds greater dimensionality to a better understanding and connection with philosophy. A longtime yoga practitioner, he left his full-time marketing job at an IT company to complete his yoga teacher training (YTT) with Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram.
You can choose to what extent you delve into these topics, but even if you have a light hand and begin to introduce some of the old elements of yoga through the class topic, you will surely be able to make your students think differently about the practice and you will also be able to expand their knowledge of yoga. What makes many teachers jump for joy when they fondly grab their favorite copy of the Yoga Sutras can make many students feel lost or out of place in a yoga class they attended for physical benefits or a weekly self-care ritual. For yoga teachers, it's no secret that many students are attracted to yoga because they want to gain strength and flexibility in their bodies and possibly master a new yoga posture, but focusing solely on asanas and the physical aspect of yoga can make classes feel empty or because they lack the comprehensive practice of yoga that goes beyond asanas. We invite you to read it as a preface to this blog, but you can also dive directly into this blog, which deals with ways to build a personal relationship with the philosophy of yoga to improve and deepen your existing yoga practices.
Many teachers decide that they want to make the leap from one student to another because they want to share the non-physical elements of the practice. At the end of the day, yoga isn't just a physical practice and asana is just one of the eight branches of yoga. All of this is included in your other yoga practices, in the physical, meditative and energetic aspects, as well as in what yoga means to you when you're off the mat. When I teach the Patañjali Yoga Sutras (and as is common among many yoga teachers), I start with the second book.
The yoga philosophy of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras talks about three important elements that should sustain this practice and, although he talks about them in the context of achieving “Samadhi” (interpreted in general terms as “happiness” or “enlightenment”), they can be applied to any situation.
