Online Yoga School

The first guide to continuing yoga education is divided by career path.  It includes all of my personal continuing education courses.

It's important to share a bit of my thought process with you as you look through this.  In many ways, every single course could fall into every single category.  It depends how you use it.  Yet I realize the guide would not be very helpful if I checked every box for every course.  So I had to narrow it down.  

In my middle-of-night tango with Canva, I realized that the headings in my mind didn't have enough space so I had to narrow them down.  Studios was supposed to be specific to yoga classes. A lot can happen in the walls of a yoga studio, but for purposes of this guide, this category is referring to your regularly scheduled yoga class that takes place in a studio like setting and repeats itself weekly.  When deciding whether or not a continuing yoga educaiton course would set someone up in this career path, I was looking at whether or not the course prepared one to sequence a 60-minute practice.

Community includes so many things in my mind. This could be anything from a Senior Center, to the library to a community park.  Chair yoga might live here, but so might water yoga in a community pool or power yoga in a pavillion during the Spring.  These are often classes that might be one-time, pop-up yoga classes.  They might also be a series limited to a number of weeks or months.  However, in some cases they are long-running.  Considerations for whether or not a class would go in this category include how many props the teacher might need to bring (this knocked restorative out of the category), level of accessibility and whether or not students should have some existing knowledge base.

Corporate yoga, for purposes of this guide, is really all about going into organizations and corporations and putting together practices that they can do as a micro-community to help alleviate the types of stressors, aches and pains that come along with working in that space.  There are a few factors that play into whether or not a continuing yoga education course is well suited for the career path of teaching corpoate yoga.  One consideration is the volume of props that are required.  All movement is better with as many props and toys as possible, but some practices we can easily get by without props, while others we definitely need them.  Another consideration is whether or not this applies to generally everyone.  We all have to breathe.  We can all enjoy a nice yogic sleep.  But, not all of us are pregnant, for example.  Also, corporate settings might not want us to ask people to touch one another, so something like Partner Thai Yoga wouldn't be very helpful to you if you were only wanting to teach in a corporate environment.  Corporate environments generally call for widely accepted, beginner-friendly, accessible practices that de-escalate nervous system activation.

Retreats and festivals originally included workshops also, but I ran out of space.  If I had more space, workshops, retreats and festivals might each have their own category actually, but they also are similar enough to be grouped together.   Retreats can mean many things.  I've been to half-day retreats with henna artists and loud music.  I've also been to a silent weekend retreat.  Retreats can be rooted in ayurvedic principles, or they can be more spa-like.  I once went to a power yoga retreat for my birthday, and it really wasn't all that relaxing but it was wonderful all the same.  Anything we do can work at a retreat because we have the ability to theme our retreats however we want.  And, perhaps more imporantly, those coming to the retreat know exactly why they're coming ~ this is what they want.  This is very different than a community yoga class or corporate yoga environment.  Festivals are usually fun, but also require a level of accessibility IMO.  Workshops can include anything, much like retreats.  Anything we can do in yoga can take on the shape of a workshop.

Finally, we have the category of clinical career path on this guide to continuing yoga education.  In a perfect canva world, I would have figured out how to make space for more career path categories and this could have been broken down into different therapeutic settings.  We have talk therapy in the mental health field.  We also have recovery centers for drug and alcohol.  We have hospital settings or doctor offices.  We have one-on-one therapeutic yoga sessions.  We're grouping them all together here, and what we're looking for in a continuing yoga education course to help us in this clinical cluster of career paths is accessibility and safety.  Partner Thai Yoga doesn't work here because it may not feel safe to people, and partners may not be available.  Yin yoga requires us to find our edge, and that may not be a good fit in a clinical setting and isn't accessible to all.  I did put prenatal here, which could work in a clinical setting for all prenatal students which sometimes happens if you're networking with your local midwives or ob/gyn offices.