Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed. How can your students learn to apply mindful breath awareness to life? The warm, balmy months of summer easily lend themselves to teaching Yoga classes in an outdoor environment. Traditionally, Yoga postures and breathing exercises were practiced outside, or at least within the natural confines of a cave, grove of trees or on the banks of a river. Most of the traditional sadhus of India practiced Yoga in tandem with either the dawn or the dusk hours. The reason for this was that practicing Yoga in alignment with the rhythms of the dawn and dusk hours helps to facilitate a deep connection to the natural world.

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed. Spring is a quintessential time to detoxify. This means detoxifying the extra items in your car, your closet and, of course, your body! Engaging in a systematic process of detoxification on a seasonal basis will help you to release toxic chemicals, emotions, and experiences from your body and mind. You may even find that you are confronted with a toxic work environment or a relationship that no longer serves your highest good. If this is the case, you may also wish to find a compassionate way to move on from those situations and/or relationships.

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed. One definition of fear is to be anxious about an unpleasant or painful event that you feel is likely to happen in the future. For instance, if you are pursuing your Yoga teacher certification, you may be afraid that you are going to fail your final anatomy exam because you have not spent an ample amount of time studying. This fear may be completely reasonable and understandable, or this fear may be largely exaggerated if you have spent an adequate amount of time preparing for the anatomy final, but you are prone to anxiety.

By Kimaya Singh Like any workplace, yoga studios must always have policies in place for dealing with harassment problems of a sexual, verbal, or physical nature. These policies should be made available to every yoga teacher and student that participates in classes at the studio. Having these policies already written out and readily available will ensure that appropriate action is taken swiftly if a harassment issue does occur between teachers or students at the yoga studio. If a problem does arise during yoga practice, the policies in place will ensure they can be handled efficiently, quickly, and legally. Every yoga studio should have some concrete policies in place to avoid confusion and disorder when dealing with harassment situations.

By Kimaya Singh Is Yoga a healing method? If you practice yoga on a regular basis, you know the benefits it provides. You know the light, uplifted feeling of exhilaration that sets in directly after a good yoga class, or the long, lean feel of your muscles after a good stretch. Perhaps you do a pose as the afternoon slump sets in to get you through the rest of the workday, or maybe you take a few deep breaths before giving a big presentation to clear your mind and focus. The health benefits of yoga training go much deeper than that. Yoga training has been proven to have positive healing effects for a number of common ailments, chronic pain, and diseases.

By Faye Martins Should there be chair yoga precautions before a class? For those with knee or hip problems, or decreased mobility, Chair Yoga can be a great modification, allowing practice to continue. Chair Yoga consists of poses and breathing exercises performed in a seated position or with the use of a chair, allowing it to be performed even in hospitals or nursing homes. Through Chair Yoga, the physical and spiritual benefits of a healthy practice are available to everyone.

By Kimaya Singh Yoga can be a great way for someone to recover from a variety of painful and debilitating injuries, such as pulled muscles, torn ligaments, and broken bones. The gentle, low-impact movements of yoga can help strengthen muscles, soothe the mind, regain full use of limbs, and reduce overall pain. However the practice, if done incorrectly, can exacerbate current injuries and even lead to new ones. It is all too easy for an inexperienced yoga practitioner to push him or herself too far or get into a pose incorrectly. As a yoga teacher, it's important to stay up-to-date on how to prevent student injuries in the classroom. There are many continuing education options for this topic, and they can help any yoga instructor avoid having student injuries occur in their classes.

By Sangeetha Saran As your class begins, you stand before your students and scan the room. Usually, you will see familiar faces, sometimes-even friends, but always there are a few newbies. It is important to have some techniques for quickly assessing those who may be prone to injury.

By Sanjeev Patel, CYT 500 As you know, there are as many reasons to teach yoga as there are for students to come to our classes. Not all yoga students want to know about healing or reduce pain in their bodies. Their reason is simple: They are young, fit, and more lucky than they realize. However, each of us will experience suffering of some kind during the course of a lifetime, unless we leave this life in an abrupt flash, while we are in the prime of our lives.

By Rachel Holmes Yoga is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and ascetic discipline that is commonly practiced worldwide. It involves breath control, hearty meditation, and subjection of the body to a number of specific postures for the purpose of balancing and aligning the body and mind. Yoga is usually practiced for its health and relaxation purposes. Attendance in yoga classes helps a tennis player prevent injuries. This is because it makes the player's body flexible in a number of ways and thereby improves performance and effectiveness at the court.

By Sangeetha Saran The decision to teach others is one that comes with responsibility. The decision to teach others comes with the highest level of responsibility. The field of yoga is changing so rapidly, that many teacher certification programs need to modify their curriculums accordingly in order to prevent injuries in classes.

By Rachel Holmes Yoga is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and ascetic discipline that is commonly practiced worldwide. It involves breath control, hearty meditation, and subjection of the body to a number of specific postures for the purpose of balancing and aligning the body and mind. Yoga is usually practiced for its health and relaxation purposes. Attendance in yoga classes helps a tennis player prevent injuries. This is because it makes the player's body flexible in a number of ways and thereby improves performance and effectiveness at the court.

By Faye Martins I know, we have plenty of guys out there teaching, taking Yoga teacher training courses, and practicing in the studio or at home. I'm happy to see an increase among men who teach Yoga or attend classes regularly. However, I see a few young mothers during the week that really need some downtime. For some, they have a supportive family unit. For others, it sounds like their unit has fragmented. I'm thankful that my parents always worked together for the sake of the family, but times are certainly different one generation later.

By Amruta Kulkarni, CYT 500 The most talented and experienced yoga teachers do a lot more than teach students how to achieve poses. They go well beyond the physical by teaching students how to be more mindful and aware of their bodies too. Body awareness is an intrinsic part of yoga. After all, the word "yoga" itself translates to mean, "to yoke," which is another way of saying "to unite." Without making students aware of this exciting benefit, though, they could easily miss out on it. Therefore, yoga teachers should make a point of explaining the concept of propioception to their students.

By Jenny Park The atmosphere in a yoga school contributes a lot toward the overall effectiveness of the class. If the studio environment is too cold, cluttered, smelly or generally unkempt, it will take away from the students' experience with yoga training. The school should address a number of concerns to keep the students comfortable and allow the yoga teacher to do his or her best teaching.

By Gopi Rao If you are considering a yoga certification course, you may want to understand diabetes and many other ailments. For those of us who already teach classes, all of the progress we have seen against diseases and suffering do not count in the eyes of scientific research. Science only recognizes its testing, studies and research as factual. At first, we might resent science for throwing out thousands of years of yogic research and claiming it is all biased information. For us to prove yogic methods work, yoga schools have to open the doors to medical and scientific scrutiny. We also have to be prepared to deliver proof and name sources of studies.

By Jenny Park Ethics and philosophy are covered in every Yoga teacher training intensive, but there is no guarantee an instructor will walk the straight line for life. Yoga is based on a foundation of principles including compassion, integrity, truthfulness, kindness, generosity, patience, forgiveness and helpfulness. The purpose of yogic methods is for students and instructors to learn to live a life that follows these virtues as closely as possible. It makes sense that those who choose to teach yoga would follow the yogic philosophies on a regular basis, incorporating them into their lives whether they are in front of a class or not. There are many wa

By: Virginia Iversen, M.Ed Springtime is upon us, and for many Yoga practitioners who live in areas that experience long winters, the increasing light and warmth of this season is very welcome. Just like the seasons in temperate climate zones, there are also different types of Yoga practices. Some practices are cooling, and other sequences of asanas are quite warming. For example, practices that are cooling and restorative are Yin Yoga and Yoga Nidra. Practices that are quite warming are Ashtanga and Bikram Yoga. Both of these types of flowing sequences will help to stoke the inner fire or agni of your students.

By Kimaya Singh Like any workplace, yoga studios must always have policies in place for dealing with harassment problems of a sexual, verbal, or physical nature. These policies should be made available to every yoga teacher and student that participates in classes at the studio. Having these policies already written out and readily available will ensure that appropriate action is taken swiftly if a harassment issue does occur between teachers or students at the yoga studio. If a problem does arise during yoga practice, the policies in place will ensure they can be handled efficiently, quickly, and legally. Every yoga studio should have some concrete policies in place to avoid confusion and disorder when dealing with harassment situations.

Through yoga, children learn to be aware of their own body and natural breathing. By way of the yoga postures, called asanas, presented trough imitating animals, objects and forms, they practice concentration and physical discipline in a fun way. They also learn mudras, mantras and pranayama, which are great tools for mental concentration and relaxation.