Posts In: learning

by Laura McCorry

Yoga doesn’t care if you have tattoos… or not.

Yoga doesn’t care if you wear glasses or dye your hair.

Yoga doesn’t require a specific gender or identity or weight or mobility…

Yoga means union.

Yoga means all are welcome, just as you are.

Yoga means following the breath, this moment.

Yoga means small glimpses of the oneness of the universe.

Yoga is for you. And me. And everyone.

Because we are all one.

Yoga One Teacher Training – January 2022
Go deeper – Become ONE

Checking in with Yoga One Teacher Trainee, Courtney Barrow

What’s one thing you’ve learned already that’s changed your perspective on yoga/life?

I’ve learned how to be patient. Be patient with your body in yoga and enjoy where you are at the moment, not where you wish to be. That same thing applies in life. Be stuck in traffic. Wait in the one long line at the grocery store. Be patient and just enjoy the moment.

If you could describe Yoga One Teacher Training in three words, they would be: Knowledge, Strength, and Love.

by Olivia Cecchettini

“The Alchemist”

by Paulo Coelho

Summary: Slow down and be present while reading this book. Just like the cover, there are signs, messages, and hidden treasures throughout.

This is the story of a shepherd boy named Santiago who leaves his home in search of buried treasure in a far away land. Along the way, he encounters signs and clues that help him in his search. An old king tells Santiago, “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.”

In the end, he realizes that playing it safe is often more threatening to his freedom than taking a risk. This book is a reminder that we as human beings want the same things and no matter where we are on this planet, we are more alike than we are different.

Why I LOVE It: Six months after graduating college I had planned on taking a big trip. This was something I had always dreamed of and I was in the process of making it a reality. During this time, I ran into an old friend who mentioned she was attending the University of Santa Monica studying for a Masters in Spiritual Psychology. Hearing about her studies, I felt a spark ignite. I knew I was meant to be there. The only problem was classes started the same month I had planned to leave on my trip. I decided to enroll in the program.

During my two years there, I longed for that trip and sometimes resented my school for it. But the patience and insight I learned throughout that time is priceless. I learned to let go of control and attachment to my plan. Huge for me!! I also realized that when we surrender to the greater plan of the universe and trust our intuition, magic begins to unfold.

The Alchemist teaches us that life is about the journey, not the destination. Whether that journey is inward or outward it is all the same. We are all One. We each have our own inner calling which is always transforming and growing.

Recommended For: Everyone!!! This is a book you can read over and over again. It will speak to you in different ways and spark new insights at different times in your life. My hope is that if there’s something your heart has been whispering for you to do, DO IT! Don’t wait for the perfect time, or when you have more training, or after you pay off a credit card. Find a way to do it now – even if it’s just the baby step of writing your goal down on paper. There is so much power in bringing your dreams out of your head and into the physical world. Be BOLD with your heart! We are all in this together.

Olivia Cecchettini
Contributing Writer

Olivia’s yoga journey began in 2003. She is certified in Vinyasa, Hatha, and Aerial Yoga and holds a Masters degree in Spiritual Psychology. She believes the mind, body, soul connection is sacred and encourages her students explore and expand within their own bodies and consciousnesses.

by Olivia Cecchittini

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

by Don Miguel Ruiz

Summary: Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, “The Four Agreements” is a book that connects the reader to simple yet powerful tools that can transform their consciousness. Using everyday life concepts combined with a compassionate heart, Ruiz connects the reader to their own inner light. Each agreement moves out of the mind and into the heart space, taking readers from needless suffering to creating more joy, inner peace and freedom within their own lives. Here are the Four Agreements: 1. Be impeccable with your word 2. Don’t take anything personally. 3. Don’t make assumptions. 4. Always do your best. They are simple but if practiced with intention they can truly transform your life.

Why I love it:  I love this book because it is easy to read and simple to process but the affects of Don Miguel Ruiz’s words run deep. They continuously stay with me and bring me back into alignment time and time again even years later.

Recommended For: Anyone and everyone! We are all connected – as we deepen our understanding of ourselves, we create space for others to do the same. Our relationship with others is an outer reflection of our relationship with ourselves. As we surrender to the lifelong lesson of  healing, learning, and growing these simple agreements create mindfulness to live with integrity and joy.

Don Miguel Ruiz’s book is a roadmap to enlightenment and freedom.” — Deepak Chopra, Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

Olivia Cecchettini
Contributing Writer

Olivia is a yoga teacher based out of San Diego. With a love for people, life, spirituality, reading, and, of course, yoga she spends her days connecting with students and nature. Getting outside whenever she can to enjoy all the beauty this life has to offer.

It’s the end of our 2013 Yoga One Teacher Training course and we’re so proud of our new graduates! They not only have the technical knowledge to begin their next journey teaching but also the mental and emotional strength and awareness needed. Teacher training is such a vast experience, filled with learning and growth both on the mat and off. We wanted to honor this place of newfound knowledge and their first eager steps of teaching others by checking in with our recent grads for their thoughts on the following questions:

What excites you the most about teaching yoga to others?
Do you have any fears? If yes, how do you move beyond them?
If you don’t plan on teaching, how did YTT deepen your personal practice?

Janssen: 

What excites me most about teaching yoga is the opportunity to take something so amazing, weave myself into it, and then take this wonderful combination of wisdom, love, and openness and show others how they can make it something they love as well. It will never just be me teaching because there is always something to be learned, and I love learning!

I am plenty scared that I’m not good enough or prepared enough or that I’m going to put myself out there and fail. But what always stays with me is the quote, “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars.” That has never been more true or more applicable. 

Dina: 

Do I have fears? Absolutely! What if I forget what pose comes next in my sequence? What if my students don’t like me? What if I can’t demonstrate a pose? What if nobody shows up? Or worse, what if a pregnant woman shows up? Ah!  The list of “what ifs” goes on and on. The best way for me to overcome these fears is to breathe, practice, be present in the now, not what could happen in the future, and enjoy the ride. Enjoy the ride of guiding yogis through a beautiful, safe practice. Everything else will follow.

Romy: 

I’m not still sure if I will teach, there is so much information to learn and to feel confident about. If I decide to teach, it excites me to be the channel for others to find their inner strength, happiness, and peace. I would like to help others in their transformational path to balance, freedom and awareness.

Of course I have fears, but I diminish them by moving into the “fear'” itself. Not letting my mind over-think the “fear” so it doesn’t get bigger and stronger with my own thinking of an unreal result. It is much easier to conquer the fear than to live with it, you just need to take that first step and move into it.

My personal practice has benefited greatly with the training. Not just with my practice on the mat being conscious and aware of my movements, breath, alignment and how differently I was doing things; but with my yoga practice off the mat as well by taking all the good to my daily life (just being, breathing, being aware, balanced, patient, tolerant, healing… so many things). This journey has helped me conquer areas of myself that I was afraid of, healed my emotions, and allowed me to know myself better, to accept myself and to be a better person. There is so much room for being a better person, and this training is just the beginning. I see things in a different way, in a better way.

This will be a two-part series, check back next week to hear more from our amazing graduates.

We’ve learned a lot these last 7 weeks about yoga. We’ve learned about anatomy, philosophy, asana, pranayama, and how to be more mindful yoga practitioners and teachers.

What is also becoming inescapably obvious is that we have learned each other as well, and this has been a subtle but significant aspect to our learning process.

What started out as a group of strangers is now a supportive group of friends. We’ve seen each other’s personalities, strengths, and weaknesses, and have come to admire each other for continuing to show up to our individual and collective practice.

We each bring different histories and struggles to our mats every day. We’ve brought these since Day 1. The only difference is that we now appreciate where we are coming from.

This is the beginning of community and this is the essence of connection.

One of the teacher trainees is a man named Kim. The first week of training I had the opportunity to work with Kim, and I noticed he rocked back and forth on his feet quite a bit while standing. When I asked him if he had difficulty in standing poses, he said yes. When I asked why, he said simply that he had some nerve damage to his feet.

The last few weeks I’ve seen him quietly use multiple props and the wall for support in many poses. He always has an easy smile and while some poses seem challenging to him, he never seems to be over-efforting.

It was only when Kim shared with the class how he had fallen off of a second story building onto a two-by-four and become paralyzed from the waist down that I began to appreciate the true beauty of his yoga practice and the powerful potential of yoga.

Kim taps into his will to survive every day. It allows him to do what many people would call impossible.

It makes me wonder, Are we tapping into our will to survive? Are we even tapping into our will? What are we calling impossible that would become possible if we stopped limiting ourselves?

When we tune into our potential instead of our pain, we find our current limitations are merely a starting point.

This is just one example of how we have learned from each other through this training. We’ve learned to be sensitive to other human beings, whether it be through the words we choose or our physical touch.

As I disembark from this life-changing journey, I feel supported by a community of friends and teachers and well-equipped to follow my own yogic path.

The amount of knowledge and wisdom our teachers have shared with us will be sinking in for months to come. The words of Abraham Lincoln sum up my attitude as I step out of the world of teacher training and into the world of teaching yoga:

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”

 

Read Monique’s full article here.

We asked our Yoga One Teacher Trainees for their reflections from week four of the course.

Janssen: What I love the most about teacher training is how immersed I feel in all of it – it’s like my whole life starts on Fridays!

Lynne: What I like most about TT is getting to spend hours and hours and hours with inspirational people in an inspirational space for eight weeks without losing my inspiration for it.

Amy: Being a student!  I love all the information I am learning.

Kim: I love the group support by all the trainees. Everyone gets along well. After a weekend together and what seems like a short four days in between, everyone is happy to be back together the next weekend, focused on the asana, meditation, anatomy and philosophy teachings.

Anna: As a beginner yogini, Teacher Training has commenced my yoga life in right posture, with all the information I need to maintain health and balance!

Romy: The awareness it has brought to my own practice, my life, myself, that everything is BALANCE. Love and Balance!

Dina: The best thing I have loved about training is what kind of person it is shaping me to be. Of course, learning so much about yoga, alignment, philosophy, and anatomy has been an incredible and vital part of the program but truthfully, I am better for having taken part in this journey. I think about everyday items differently and am becoming a more understanding person.

I leave each weekend feeling more inspired than the last to teach with even half as much love as my teachers and it always amazes me how beautiful and thoughtful our world can really be.

Amy, Michael and Diana have put together a program unlike any other and I feel blessed just to be able to learn from such gifted, gracious yogis. Oh, and the beautiful yogis, fellow trainees, are incredible people too!

Ask anyone who’s been through the process and they’ll tell you that Yoga Teacher Training is a unique experience. You walk into a room full of people who love yoga, eager to learn and deepen their practice and whether it’s three months or years later when you get your certification, you say goodbye knowing that you’ve come to the true beginning of your journey.

We’ve just embarked on Yoga One’s seventh annual teacher training course led by Amy Caldwell and Diana Beardsley. Everyone involved is very excited and they all have such marvelous stories – we can’t wait to share some of them with you here on the blog!

One of our students, Monique Minahan, will be blogging about her experience over at Intentblog.com, you can check out her first post here:

THE STORIES

It’s a fairly large group of yogis (about 20 or so) participating in this training. On our first day we were asked to share our story. Why we were there, what brought us to yoga.

I’ve had my own experience with the healing powers of yoga and have read about how it can cure everything from heartache to backache, but I’ve never heard a real person, sitting a few feet away from me, express how yoga had kept them alive or healed their body or become their “religion.”

Everyone had a different story. Some had been practicing for years, others not so long. As everyone told their story, we all felt there was something we could relate to in it. It was all human and all heart, and that is one strong common thread.

Listening to the stories reinforced to me the power of listening and the power of being heard.

Has anyone ever asked you for your story?

The How did you become who you are story. The Where do you want to go story.

The one where you spill your guts and free your mind.

Have you ever asked someone for their story?

While holding on to our stories can trap us, releasing our stories can free us. Releasing takes many forms, but I believe a healing component is to feel heard and to feel seen.

We cannot always fix someone’s problem or make them feel better, but we can listen to them and we can see them, as we would love to be seen and heard. When we do, we honor both the human and the being in them, and we tap into both aspects in ourselves as well.

THE PRACTICE

We all learn basic alignment from our yoga classes. The longer we practice, the more we start to think we’ve got it down pretty good. We know our yoga, we know our body.

The detail I’ve learned in just a few days has already improved my practice. Concepts that I thought I had a good grasp on before are being broken down in all their intricacies, allowing me to see their many parts in sharp relief.

They say the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. I guess that’s the process I’m going through here. Learning how to put what I feel in my body into words serves to highlight subtleties and nuances I had overlooked before.

THE PROCESS

Now that I’ve started this journey, I can’t believe I ever contemplated not starting this journey. It’s that amazing, informative, mind-blowing, and completely worthwhile.

It’s an intense but invigorating process. As we dive deeper into all aspects of yoga, external and internal, I expect to face my own mental walls, tight spots, stubborn areas, and fears. I hope to experience a breaking down of old patterns and a breaking through to what awaits me on the other side of this journey.

Check back soon for another installment and more fun inspirational stories!