“And now the teaching on yoga begins.” Sutra I:1*

Spring (in the Northern Hemisphere) and Autumn (here in the Southern Hemisphere) remind us to grasp and savour every hour and every day. The tender vulnerable green shoots, the cheeky bird that flits by catching insects on the wing, are all the more wonderful and joyous because we were present in that moment. As Patanjali declares in the first yoga sutra “now” is the only moment that we can truly experience the delight of being unified.

In the same way, every step that we take in a lifetime of learning and growing as yoga teachers, is an opportunity to be seized with both hands. The sooner we set out the more enriched we, and our practice, ultimately become. This is true whether we are new to teaching, or, like myself, have been teaching for over thirty years. It’s with that same sense of expectant urgency I invite you to join me and register now for our next The Art of Teaching course. Beginning May 18th, 2022 and running through to December 7th, 2022, delivering your course material and live engagement every fortnight.

If it’s something you’ve been thinking about, this is the time! Especially as the next course after that isn’t scheduled until early 2024 - many, many crisp mornings and sun-dappled afternoons from now.

Participants in the recently completed cohort of The Art of Teaching have told us that it was more valuable to them and more professional than trainings that have cost over double. From beginning teachers to experienced professionals they say they felt inspired, reinvigorated, and had gained a sense of renewed confidence.

The unique mix of experiential and theoretical helped demystify what great teaching is; making artfulness in teaching something that can be learned through drawing on specific teaching techniques; pacing, pausing, layering information, and building from simple to complex.

As the seasons have changed, so too the world around us. With many of us having moved to livestream and online teaching formats, or pivoting back and forth between distanced and physical space teaching.

In today’s environment, evolving our teaching skills and practice has never been more important or more pressing. Purposeful class planning, intelligent sequencing, and articulate instruction have always been at the heart of good teaching. Now, these skills have become exponentially more important.

As Spring follows Winter, with new challenges have also come new opportunities to reach out to a global yoga community and to share the guiding principles of the shared-inquiry model for teaching that underpins The Art of Teaching.  Helping students to access their own perception and interoception proving just as successful in digital teaching as it is in physical spaces.

I look forward to sharing with you, very soon, this contemporary pedagogic model, honoring and encouraging the self-sovereignty of the student to make their own choices and delight in their own discoveries. 

Namaste,

Donna

*Sutra I:1, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, translated by Alistair Shearer