Becoming a Yoga Instructor by Elizabeth Greenwood

Author:Elizabeth Greenwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Aspiring yoga teachers today need not cloister themselves in monastic isolation to hone their skills. Nor should they grant a guru absolute authority. But echoes of the ancient master-student dynamic do still remain.

On a sweltering summer morning, a few hours before Abbie will begin teaching the third day of a thirty-hour Katonah training program at The Studio, she and five apprentices huddle around a table for a meeting. The apprentices are women of all ages and backgrounds, with two commonalities: they have fallen in love with Katonah yoga (and have the toned bodies to prove it) and have committed to a yearlong curriculum under Abbie’s tutelage. A couple of them are already certified yoga teachers. Over the course of the year, they will meet with Abbie one-on-one and as a group, complete her weekly reading and reflection assignments that delve into The Material, practice teaching private classes to Katonah’s roster of seasoned instructors, support The Studio through housekeeping tasks (like serving snacks during teacher trainings), and eventually teach community classes.

Abbie’s is not the only apprentice program in the city, but those offered at other places typically target younger teachers, and many charge upward of several thousand dollars for the privilege of one-on-one mentorship and doing chores around the studio. Abbie’s program is free. She finds the idea of “charging people who aren’t yet making a living through teaching” unconscionable, and, like the ancient gurus of yoga, she feels a vocation to pass on what she’s learned.

This particular morning, Abbie wants to go over the structure of private sessions. All the apprentices will practice giving a one-on-one class to a Studio teacher in the coming weeks. Many people who seek out Katonah yoga for private instruction are in pain or experiencing other bodily trouble—injuries, autoimmune diseases, slow recoveries from long bouts of illness—as The Studio has gained a reputation as “the yoga hospital.” Abbie assures her apprentices of how much they can glean from working with people for whom yoga poses are a challenge. As always, she urges her students to see the big picture: “Someone will tell you their shoulder hurts and you’ll realize that it’s not their shoulder hurting them, it’s their life hurting.”

The apprentices present case studies they’ve already encountered while working with, as Abbie calls them, “difficult bodies.” Linsey, a young woman who’s training to become a doula, sips on a brown smoothie in an enormous Mason jar and talks about running a prenatal session for women who never had an exercise regimen prior to getting pregnant. For this student, even the restorative poses Linsey thought would come easy were a challenge. “She couldn’t even lift her hips one inch off the ground to do a supported bridge,” she reports. Abbie tells her she should have gotten this client to go on her hands and knees, because anyone can do that. “You don’t fix a body from where it’s wrong,” Abbie counsels. “Show her what she can do. Let the right angles of the geometry support her body.

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