Yoga Teachers: Remember that brand new business opportunity we discussed? The pieces are almost ready. Your feedback now can make them even better. Providers, coaches: I think you may be interested.
Curriculum & manual for 30-hr & 100-hr trainings to integrate yoga techniques with other disciplines + the research providers need to incorporate yoga techniques into their protocols.
Dear friends and colleagues,
In October, I wrote to you and asked, “Can you imagine the impact of having more health and wellness providers, coaches and educators who integrate yoga tools with other disciplines?”
Over the past few decades, I’ve noticed more and more blending of disciplines, such as integrating breathing practices into counseling sessions and meditation into primary education. I’ve personally taught yoga to teens before their counseling sessions and perhaps you, too, have done something like this. Maybe you’ve utilized yoga tools while working in other disciplines like these:
Counseling or education — Providers who utilize yoga techniques teach clients body awareness, breathwork, and mindfulness techniques that they can take with them.
Cancer or stroke recovery — Yoga teachers have worked in multi-disciplinary teams to bring clients the well-researched benefits of Hatha Yoga or Restorative Yoga on recovery from cancer and cancer treatment.
Life coaching or addiction recovery — To live a healthy and balanced life, particularly during active recovery from addiction, requires effective and sustainable practices. Coaches empower clients with mindfulness techniques, mantra meditation, yoga philosophy, vinyasa yoga, and Yin Yoga among other tools.
Herbal medicine or energy healing — The integration of meditation and visualization techniques can support client protocols.
Athletic coaching or physical therapy — More often than not, physical pursuits lead to physical imbalances and mental blocks which are overcome with asana and yogic breathing among other tools.
Any discipline — Many disciplines can benefit by incorporating yoga techniques.
My Pieces & Your Pieces
In that October post, I expressed that “I’d like to help more people to effectively integrate yoga tools with complementary disciplines” and asked for your feedback.
I proposed a training that prepares attendees (providers, coaches, educators, etc.) to confidently and safely integrate foundational yoga tools into their personal practice and into their work with clients.
I suggested that I bring the curriculum and manual and you bring the in-person teaching and mentorship.
What Happened Behind the Scenes
I received just enough in-depth responses to know I was on the right track and to continue ahead while also being inspired to develop additional parallel projects and new partnerships. In short, I embarked on a bunch of stuff.
But it was pretty hard. The conversations expanded my vision, and I found that I needed to think about multiple projects at once in order to address the business pieces that need to underpin them all. I came to the conclusion that a number of administrative, technical, business, and marketing steps that I had been fuzzy about needed to be made concrete. And so I focused on that stuff, which was time-consuming, not-fun, and expensive.
But the great news is that, three months later, I’ve executed on virtually all of it and I’m now back to the fun part.
So as I close in on launching my pieces of the puzzle (probably in phases), I wanted to again seek your feedback.
Status Update: Training Structure
I’ve settled on two lengths for Integrated Yoga trainings: 30 hours and 100 hours. You are welcome to conduct trainings of any ‘ol length you’d like. This is just a template to provide a structure that can help us think about what it is we’re trying to do.
The 30-hour length is the result of a “bottom-up” approach where I examined the knowledgebase in search of a minimum that could serve as an introduction that provides adequate preparation and groundwork for providers to:
Satisfy their curiosity and learning desires with a minimal investment while getting a solid sense for the material.
Be “prepared enough” — especially if they are already experienced practitioners — to begin integrating yoga tools.
Set the stage for a more complete training for those interested in going deeper.
The 100-hour length is the result of a “top-down” approach where other experienced teachers and trainers have a sense that this is the right length for adequate preparation considering such factors as the amount of time in a 200-hour teacher training that are devoted to things not relevant in this case (e.g. teaching arts related to class management, asana focus, and so on).
Q: If you have any thoughts on the structure, I’d love to hear them.
Status Update: Program Components
I’ve been working on these pieces for the 30-hour and the 100-hour trainings with the 30-hour program being nearly ready to test.
Program FAQ
Curriculum, learning objectives
Trainer support: presentations, lecture notes
Trainee manual
Q: If you have the time in the next month or so to test the training in exchange for a discount and extra collaboration, let me know.
Feedback Requested from Yoga Teachers but also from Wellness Providers
My first questions relate to research on the impact of yoga. Ideally, both providers and teachers would provide feedback so we can have the optimal materials at your fingertips.
Here’s why I think research is really important.
The training doesn’t include research; it includes the philosophy, anatomy, and yoga fundamentals that allow you to execute.
But research is likely the piece that will inspire a provider to realize the unquestionable fact that yoga tools are every bit as evidence-based as acupuncture, herbs, vitamin D, red light therapy, and other vital and effective tools.
It seems to me that seeing this information with your own two eyes can prompt movement from having a general sense that yoga tools are always a nice idea to actually committing to incorporating them into health and wellness protocols.
I’ve incorporated visual samples of research summaries into the FAQ such as these:
Q: Do visual summaries like that help? Are a few enough? What about the less-visual, but more-detailed summaries I show below? How do you want to receive those?
The visual summaries take a lot of time to create. (But we have a number of them from the PowerPoint presentations we offer.) They may be compelling in a way that helps, but they provide less information than we provide from the Research Hub at WellnessResourceCenter.net. There, research summaries are provided in the context of other research, like this:
A provider whose clients are seeking to prevent or ameliorate cognitive decline would presumably be inspired to click the link for more details which are provided in bulleted summaries like this:
Every research summary includes links to the original research, plus third-party reports when available. For example, the summary of the 2019 review includes quick access to the following publications. While the research itself is mind-bendingly powerful, if you also show these reports or screenshots of them, they make quite an impact.
Yoga Improves Your Memory, Decision Making, and Emotional Intelligence, a New Study Shows link
Brain Benefits of Yoga Comparable to Aerobic Exercise link
Experts Review Evidence Yoga Is Good for The Brain link
Experts Agree Yoga Is Great for Your Brain: A Review of the Scientific Evidence link
Experts Review Evidence Yoga Is Good for The Brain link
Q: What format, what scope, and what quantity of research do you need to understand the effects of yoga on health and specific conditions?
I have more questions I could ask but since this has gotten long, I’ll stop for now. I can either send another post later or just ask whoever engages on this topic if they want to provide more feedback.
I hope you’ll hit reply and give me your topline thoughts.
Sincerely,
Shelly Thorn
I would absolutely love to explore this more. Yoga is often recommended by our practitioners in training but they need the foundations to build confidence in their recommendations. www.deepeningrootspractitioner.com