
I am currently settling back into daily life after an amazing time at La Hacienda in Andalucia, Spain, as part of my Laxmi yoga teacher training course. It proved to be a life-changing and invaluable learning experience and my mind is still buzzing with everything that I learned during my time out there.
My teacher training journey began last year when I embarked upon a yoga foundation course with the British Wheel of Yoga. This gave me the opportunity to explore yoga in a lot more depth and I enjoyed the course so much that once it was finished I knew that I wanted to teach and signed up straightaway for my teacher training course. The first task was to start ploughing through the reading list which comprised both ancient and modern yoga texts as well as books on anatomy and physiology. I was lucky enough to have started studying some of the books on the reading list on my BWY Foundation course so that made things a little easier but to be honest buying yoga books has become something of a pastime in recent years anyway and my shelves are fit to bursting!
Once I had completed the reading list, I was ready for the anatomy and physiology (A&P) section of the course led by Dawn Morse, which was held at the beautifully serene Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London. This was the part of the course that I was most apprehensive about initially given that Biology wasn’t my favourite subject at school but actually I now find the movement of the body and understanding bones and muscles and their interplay so interesting and I find it really enhances my yoga practice to know which muscles are being worked and to be honest it just seems like something we should all know really. Seems pretty important, when you think about it, to have an understanding of our own bodies!
[Photo credit: Guru Chris]

While we were out there we had to undertake a practical assessment teaching a beginners to intermediate class to our peers that we had to sequence ourselves using a number of guidelines from Sally and there was also an assessment on all the theory elements of the course. We had ample opportunity to work on our teaching skills either in pairs or in small groups so that by the time assessment day arrived I felt well prepared. Prior to starting the intensive part of the course I have to admit I did wonder how on earth I would be able to put together a class and take a teaching assessment in a relatively short space of time, but what I realised when I was out there was that we were all teachers already in a sense. The very fact that we chose to participate in a teacher training course already showed we’d had the “calling” and in addition everyone on the course had been practicing yoga for a long time and so already had an in-depth knowledge of the asanas and an idea about correct alignment, etc. For myself I’ve been practising and interested in yoga since my teens so a good two decades already! The point of the course is to help you to teach yoga safely and effectively and to reinforce correct alignment within each asana as well as how to modify these asanas for various injuries, health conditions, etc. We also discussed how to gently adjust students while holding the postures. I have taken away an invaluable amount of information from the course and do in fact feel ready to start teaching. It made me realise how much I already knew and gave me the tools to bring together the knowledge I already had with the new aspects I learned and then to put all this together to convey this safely and effectively to a class. More than anything, though, I actually really enjoyed the teaching. Despite being nervous and a little apprehensive, especially in case I forgot something or went blank, I loved standing in front of the class teaching one of the things I love to do most in the world. It felt like a privilege being up there and guiding people through their practice.
[Photo credit: Guru Chris]
