This program is approved by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Yoga Alliance for 14 hours of Continuing Education Units.

Description

Our Core Teacher Training offers an inspiring, heart-felt introduction to the field of service yoga.  The densely-packed 14-hour training focuses on a wide-variety of practical, hands-on skills needed to serve youth with yoga and meditation in the real world.  Areas for exploration and practice include communicating effectively, maintaining safety in the classroom, promoting healthy boundaries, choosing postures and exercises, handling challenging behaviors and situations, and collaborating with agencies.  Each day of training includes learning by doing, seeing, and listening through the following activities:

·       Yoga practice

·       Breathing exercises & meditation

·       Sample scenarios and group problem-solving

·       Short lecture-style sessions with Q & A

·       Break-out small group sessions

·       Role playing and skills practice

·       Student teaching and feedback opportunities

Street Yoga recognizes the extremely diverse ways in which people practice and teach their yoga.  Just as we see the unique traits that make each youth different, we also recognize that each trainee has a distinct relationship with yoga and his or her own individual preferences and beliefs about how to practice.  Because of this, Street Yoga does not promote a single methodology for bringing yoga to youth and does not supply trainees with ready-made lists of postures or sequences. Instead, we encourage our trainees to explore how to teach what they already know in a heartfelt and authentic way that will help them engage with youth.  We strive to build our trainees’ confidence as teachers, while also discussing ways to modify and adapt their teaching skills to better serve their target audience. Trainees will be encouraged to dig into their personal experience and motivation in order to draw out their courage and compassion as a teacher.  We welcome questions about trainees’ special interests or concerns and strive to make the training a rich learning environment.

Each of our trainers has been in the yoga service field for nearly a decade and draws on a huge variety of teaching experiences and environments.  The training experience is strongly informed by our trainers’ years of experience teaching in the following environments: residential behavioral treatment programs, foster care programs, homeless drop-in centers, elementary schools, transitional housing units, sexual abuse treatment programs, chemical dependency programs, runaway shelters, and detention centers.  While the training is open to people who desire to work with any population, please note that because we are a youth-centered organization, the training has a heavy emphasis on youth who have experienced homelessness, poverty, abuse, addiction, and/or trauma.

Requirements

Applicants are not required to have completed a teacher-training program.  However, because our training helps trainees understand how to use and adapt what they already know for the purposes of yoga service, all applicants are expected to have significant personal or professional experience with yoga and/or meditation.  Upon application, applicants will be expected to demonstrate that they have had a minimum of 30 hours of experience with yoga and/or meditation.  These hours may include any combination of personal practice, studio classes, and/or individual instruction.

Learning Objectives

After this training, participants will be able to:

·    Compare factors involved in teaching yoga in a nontraditional setting vs. a studio setting

·    Recognize the important role of body-based interventions in trauma recovery

·    Describe ways to creatively modify poses for various populations and situations

·    Demonstrate specific postures to address back care and core strength

·    Design a brief, population-specific yoga sequence using appropriate postures & breathing

·    Discuss potential behavioral challenges and strategies for dealing with them

·    Identify new tools or strategies for improved communication

·    Explain potential boundary issues with students and describe appropriate responses

·    Recognize personal sources of support for doing this work

·    Discuss ways of effectively approaching and partnering with social service sites

·    Define their own next steps in this work

All trainees also receive an in-depth, interactive workbook that supports the learning objectives, provides background material for the training, and offers take-home exercises and references for future use.

A Word from our Founder

 “What we do teach is how you can teach from what you do know, how you can take your yoga experience, your life skills, your passion to serve young people and weave that together into a practice that will bring the amazing benefits of yoga to the people you teach. One of the things we do is work on getting ourselves to see yoga not as 90 minutes on the mat in a studio, but so much more: it could be five minutes in a hallway with one kid, helping her breathe and calm down before she meets a probation officer. it could be working with 8 young people at a shelter and simply doing warrior pose, downward dog, some stretches, some breathing and a long savasana. could be working with staff to help them ground and center in their own breathing. there are so many ways we use yoga in our own lives without realizing it, and a big part of the training is to help you tease out all those glories and find ways to share them with others.”

–Mark Lilly, Founder and Trainer

* Please note, these states do not accept National CE approval programs and require alternate processes:  CA, MI, NC, OH WV

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Please note that trainings fill quickly.

If you have any questions, just drop us a line.

Thank you, Namaste.

Comments are closed.