Advice for New Yoga Students.

Thinking of Trying Yoga? Here are some tips for you. 

Don't worry if you think you are not flexible enough. Yoga will help you with flexibility.

You get the same benefit out of Yoga as your super bendy friend. Its a personal practice.

Don't compare yourself to the person on the mat next to you. Your Yoga practice is the few square feet of your mat. You are there for the benefits to yourself.

Remember to breathe.

Honor your body.

Be present on the mat.   Leave the past and the future off the mat. 

Basic Yoga poses give you the best benefits. The hard Yoga poses are only useful on Instagram.
Get some basic pose knowledge before you venture into a public Yoga class. Look for beginner classes. There are also multitudes of beginner yoga videos on YouTube.

Pride will get you hurt. Humility will get you healthy. Practice Yoga within your comfortable and safe range of motion. The mentality of pushing it can cause injury.

You can achieve more than you think.  


 Namaste... 

Teaching Again..

Weeks 13 and 14 of training are now in the past.     The classes are now focusing Practicums  (where we teach the each other as a group and are critiqued) , practical items such as ethics and business, class sequencing,  and some final Yoga topics like teaching back bends.   With only four weekends to go,  the ending of training will be soon upon us and I will be unleashed to the world.    

From my perspective,  200 hours of training just scratches the surface of what there is needed to be learned.   The amount of information is enormous  and it is difficult to synthesize all of it.  I have been taking time to review anatomy as remembering all of it is very difficult.   I also have been working on a creating booklet of standard poses with steps to get in and out of the pose and cues while in the pose as a way of making sure I have a good mastery of each pose that I plan on teaching.  I see now that learning about and teaching Yoga is a lifelong experience, and I have been putting a half an hour aside each day to learn something new. 

I am starting up teaching free classes again.   I am excited to  teach and I am preparing as we speak.  I will focus on introducing students to a number of poses,  get them comfortable with those poses and then build on from there.     I have been working on how to introduce people to harder poses while still allowing them to be safe and in control.  It takes a great deal of time to build your first practices and I am really enjoying the work.    I am very happy that I took the teacher training plunge.   It was a great decision on my part.

Namaste.