Yoga Teacher Training and more

Sunday September 16th 2007

Yoga Teacher Training Course - Victoria, London

Back in London for the next weekend of my yoga teacher training course. No surprises this time in respect of content as I had studied my timetable a bit better than last time!

I am just beginning to get to know a few more people now and can sit and chat before we start on the day. Most people are more or less up to date with the homeworks and everyone is saying they are doing very little actual yoga at the moment. One person I spoke to hadn't realised that we have our anatomy exam in November and that has set me thinking about the course in general. Overall I think the course is very good, after all I did quite a lot of research on such courses before I signed up to this one. But some aspects of it are quite unclear. I have studied all the paper work in great detail and feel happy I know what's what, but it does seem apparent to me that several other people don't have this degree of understanding.

Most of our day was spent on lectures. The morning covered the anatomy of muscles and circulation with Ivor - favourite quote "yoga only cures not doing yoga". I like Ivor a lot as a lecturer. Apparently Elena used to do virtually all the course herself in the past and Ivor is relatively new. I'm sure it's better to have a range of people involved. Myself and Claudia have our backs compared - apparently I have quite a lot of muscle surrounding my vertebrae, which is a bit of a surprise.

Lots more discussion of the course over lunchtime and I began to wonder whether it might be worthwhile for me to actually prepare some feedback for Elena on what I think of it so far. This might help me check I have everything straight as well.

The early afternoon session is on Vinyasa and Bhandas with Elena. I feel I know a reasonable amount about this subject and tried to contribute lots to the discussions. This was followed by another body-awakening session which I continue to find very difficult - the absence of structure and the playful nature of the practice just not suiting me at all. Still my notes were much better this time and I am working on finding a better understanding that suits me more for each type of practice.

At the end of the day, I stayed for a quarter of an hour with Elena chatting about a few of the points that I'd thought of during the day - that people don't know when the first exam is, my theory that not everyone has read the syllabus properly yet, etc. I was thinking more and more about proposing something more formally to Elena giving her feedback.

A quiet evening at Passfield Hall in Bloomsbury - the LSE hall of residency that I stayed in when I was a student in 1981/82. It has been completly refurbished since I was there but the room I have is tiny. It is narrower than my arm span and, oddly enough, higher than it is wide which looked kind of odd. If Emma had a room this size at college she would probably only be able to get about a third of her stuff in it.

I walked down to Victoria from Bloomsbury on the Sunday morning - about 3 miles and a nice route. I had a quick chat to Elena to see if she would be interested in me preparing some feedback more formally, which she is. She is quite right that if people don't read the material they won't know what is going on, but the fact that so many don't know is also a sign that perhaps more needs to be done to communicate this to them. For instance, my brief sample of four people this morning revealed three of them who didn't know that the anatomy exam was in November. Elena did cover a few of my points at various times later in the day, but I'd quite like to look at it all myself over the next week or so. I can see how annoyed she must be by this

Sunday was mostly spent with Elena. First up was a model for building up the teaching of sun salutations over a 10 week class. From what Elena say, I am sure she believes that we should already know this but when I asked a few people at break about it, they too are sure we haven't covered it so far. Elena's detailed teaching of this was one of the best sessions we've had so far as it gave a great structure for developing teaching over a 10 week programme.

Later that morning Elena took us through our first "hands on" session. I was her guinea pig for her demo and she showed us a few "inappropriate" methods before we were paired up to try it for ourselves. We had to do various hand placements and encourage our partners in savasana to breath into the hands. I was paired with Christina who seemed incredibly relaxed when I had my hands on her - indeed she suggested she might well have fallen asleep if it had lasted much longer. Oddly enough, she was really light when doing one of the placements on me and really firm the next time. This was the first tiny bit of adjustment we have done and will be one of the hardest things to learn I think. After all, Linda doesn't like doing them and she had taught over 1,200 classes!

Lunch outside sitting with Sarah. She is South-African and hopes to return there in a year or two after her wedding. I wonder if Yoga is big in South Africa? Like everyone on the course that I have spoken to so far, she is really nice. We are joined by Tracy, who lives quite close to me near Oxford and who I think is a massage therapist. I am continuing to ask people about the course and keep getting some interesting comments back.

Late afternoon we have a two hour lecture on Sanskrit from a lady who was involved in one of Iyengar's earliest ashrams in India. I am hopeless with languages and find the whole section on the various consonent and vowel sounds to be very confusing. Several people on the course - Christina, Claudia, Romana, Suzanne - are from overseas and already have the challenge of understanding the English. Maybe they find another language to be ok. Later we go through our list of asanas and our teacher explains the various parts of the name and how it all fits together. This is very interesting and few people are bothered when we overrun our finishing time - so now I know why Parsvottanasana is a side-stretch posture. I was also really surprised by the discussion of the posture svatikasana - which I discovered is the the origin of the word swastika in German. So one of the most interesting sessions so far despite my almost total lack of understanding of the rules of pronunciation.

So that was our third weekend - loads of stuff I now need to do. Try to get the next homeworks out the way quickly, sort out my notes on the various body awakening sequences, think about anatomy revision (maybe do that when we are in Spain at the end of October), write up some of the other notes I've accumulated. And so on.


Friday September 14th 2007

Longworth

An interesting development first thing when I have a call from Tim, who is the property agent dealing with the replacement property I found in Provence after our first choice wouldn't let us use their place. He had spoken with the owner and had a look at Linda's website and they both seem very excited about what we are trying to do. We talk for about 45 minutes on all sorts of ideas that we could explore together.

For instance, there is the recurring point about food provision for such big groups. Tim said he would be able to find a chef who could come and cook on one or two nights each week something more authentic than I can do. Or he could also sort out a local restaurant we could all go to for a night. He has someone he knows who does "off the beaten track" trips in the area we are in and maybe we could hire them to take people out. And all the other activities like cycling, walking, horses, water sports, etc are things he could also help us with. He even asked if we would be happy for them to use us in their own marketing.

So that was another very promising development I thought. Funny how quickly I can swing from feeling disappointed by one development to feeling really fired up again as another opportunity presents itself.