Yoga Immersion and Teacher Training
Aimee Bohn, Yoga Instructor and leader of the Midtown Athletic Club Yoga Immersion and Teacher Training Program, takes over the blog today to discuss why you (yes, YOU) should consider enrolling in this wildly popular program, which begins next month. When I first started discussing the idea of creating a yoga teacher training program at Midtown with Mind.Body Director Randi Lattimore, it immediately became important to both of us that our program offer something different than other trainings available in Rochester and around the country. We both recognized that there were a lot of people practicing yoga at the club who wanted to do at least one of the following:
- Deepen their practice, get better on the mat, and improve physically
- Learn more about yoga than is possible in a 75-minute class
- Explore areas of yoga that extend beyond postures and flow; for example, meditation, mindfulness, nutrition, breathing exercises, and restorative yoga.
The Midtown Yoga Immersion and Teacher Training, which kicks off on October 11, not only sets the foundation to begin a yoga teacher career, but it also allows you to improve your yoga skills for enjoyment purposes in a rich and transformative yoga learning environment. The first half of the Midtown Teacher Training is unique because it's dedicated to participants' individual practices and becoming better yogis for their own sakes. We focus on elevating the understanding of yoga all-around, which graduates have found very rewarding. This component is critical if you’re going to teach, because you teach what you know. This means that you first have to know the subject deeply yourself. The opportunity to deepen self-awareness also sets apart the Midtown program from others. First and foremost, we seek to train people to identify and understand yoga as it has evolved as a part of their own lives. Whatever inspires a person the most, lights her or him up inside, and makes that person want to return to the mat again and again is what we call her or his mission as a “sharer” of yoga. You don’t have to teach yoga. But everyone who loves something, be it cooking, or art, or a sport, ends up sharing that passion with the people around them. In our training, we take the time to seek out what each of us loves most about the practice that we’d like to share with those around us. That may be teaching yoga, but it also extends beyond that. Our participants are incredibly varied in their professions, their interests, and what they’d like to get out of the training. And the beauty is that by not offering a cookie-cutter program where every person is trained to be alike and share yoga in a formulated way, we really empower people to discover and define who they are in relation to the yoga. When this happens, wonderful synergies occur! Our past graduates have included doctors, business people, school teachers, retirees, wellness coaches, stay-at-home moms and dads, psychiatrists, social workers, a college chaplain, and many others, all of whom are finding outlets for sharing what they learned in the training. Some went on to bring yoga to inner city schools or to incorporate yoga into their family life. Others created Couples Yoga workshops. One of our recent graduates offers community classes in a mental health setting, and a few have incorporated yoga into social justice outreach. Others went on to teach stand-up paddleboard yoga, teach in their workplace, and the list goes on! I've noticed that many people sign up just to get better on the mat, and one of the most gratifying things for me as a teacher is watching these people learn so much more from the training. The training groups become wonderful collectives of friends who support each other in their personal transformations. Some changes are small; others are life-altering! You never really know what’s inside of you until you take some dedicated time to inquire. The Midtown Teacher Training won’t teach you to become versions of your instructors. Instead, the program will teach you how to access the best self that you’ve always been and to bring it out into the world so it can be shared and expanded. We hope you'll join us. Head here to find out more about the program: http://bit.ly/1CJt4PI. Questions? Contact Randi Lattimore, Mind.Body Director, at randi.lattimore@midtown.com.