by Kara-Leah Grant Since stopping regular coffee drinking back in 2013, I have become fastidious about never drinking coffee before practicing or teaching yoga. Since I practice every day, and teach often, there are very rare windows when caffeine is an option for me. At a recent summer festival, I realised how deeply this belief I have about the importance of not having caffeine in the system when practicing and teaching was ingrained. A couple of hours before I was teaching a class, I … [Read more...]
How to Avoid Putting Someone off Yoga for Life in Your Yoga Class
by Kara-Leah Grant Yoga might be one of the faster growing pursuits in the West, but there's still plenty of people showing up to class, having one - or multiple - bad experiences and being put off for life. And unfortunately, that initial interaction with a studio and/or teacher can set the tone for the way someone will forevermore think about yoga and 'yoga people'. Yes, there can be difficult first-timers and it takes two people to co-create a situation. But in the yoga room, the onus is on … [Read more...]
I’m Afraid my Students are Going to Get Bored with my Yoga Sequences
by Kara-Leah Grant This came up in conversation this week - a new teacher expressing a fear that her yoga sequences weren't interesting enough and that she was going to be boring her students. She wanted to know how to make her sequences more interesting. However, there is a fallacy of logic here. The teacher has a fear arising - that of boring her students. Her approach to working with that fear is to ensure that the external circumstance triggering the fear is removed - bored … [Read more...]
Getting Out of the Yoga Studio: What I’ve Learnt Teaching Yoga in Prisons
This is the second article is this series looking all the ways in which people are excluded from yoga - reasons like social class, race, money, incarceration or general access. In this article Adhyatma shares how the Yoga Education in Prisons Trust (YEPT) got started, what the challenges have been and what she's learned from the experience. by Adhyatma, Yoga Education in Prisons Trust After I finish teaching my Yoga classes, the men in my class often come up respectfully and shake my hand … [Read more...]
How to Get your First Yoga Teaching Job
by Kelly Fisher, Urban Yoga Typically when you finish your first yoga teacher training it can feel as though you're bursting with equal parts fantastic information to share and uncertainty about how or where to share it. Unless you've completed teacher training with an organisation that rolls new teachers onto an existing schedule, it can be a challenge to figure out how you can get into teaching in your town. Often studios will want teachers with previous teaching experience and/or … [Read more...]
Leave your assumptions at the door and open to your full potential
by regular columnist Elissa Jordan, Adventures in Teaching I live in Brooklyn, Wellington. If you’re not familiar with Wellington, Brooklyn is at the top of a hill. A very long, steep hill. To cycle from work to home is just over 3km. Brooklyn hill makes up about 1.5km of uphill climb. It’s a monster. Why am I telling you all this? Because when I first moved to Wellington I spent weeks telling myself I couldn’t cycle up that hill. Finally one day I decided to give it a go. I got about a … [Read more...]
Managing fear when teaching yoga
by Elissa Jordan, Adventures in Teaching Am I good enough? Can I do this? No matter who you are or what you’re trying to do, questions like these can creep up from time to time. And the more aligned you are to your true purpose, the louder these questions can be. Why is that? Well, being true to yourself is kind of a big deal. What happens if you blow it? What happens if the one thing you want more than anything else in this life all goes to shit? These doubts and questions and … [Read more...]
How to answer: what exactly is the energy body?
by guest author Elissa Jordan It started with a story about a mouse in a toaster. Our second weekend in Nelson, as part of the Advanced Yoga Teacher Training with Jenifer Parker of Wellington’s Healium, focused on the energy body. Looking back over my notes from the weekend I see the conversation ebb and flow as only appropriate for a weekend focusing on energy. The movement of stories rode one energetic wave after the next - starting with that mouse in a toaster, and moving to a … [Read more...]