Follow the Leaders

A trip to India isn’t a must for all yoga instructors

Ever wondered how the person leading your yoga class learned how to perfect their sun salutations? Did they travel to India and spend years studying with an ancient yogi, or take a weekend-long training course? While instructors in the former category do exist (and, one hopes, instructors in the latter are few and far between), it’s more likely they received training approved by an organization such as the Yoga Alliance, an American non-profit that keeps a registry of teachers and schools that meet its standards, which means a minimum of 200 hours of training.

“It’s been pretty fast and loose in the last 20 years. The last 10 years or so, things have been a little bit more regulated,” says Jules Pane, whose Ajna Yoga offers 300- and 500-hour teacher-training programs approved by Yoga Alliance. “What was happening is there would be weekend teacher training . . . then people would be thrown into teaching from there and it just wasn’t really that safe all around.”

Not that Yoga Alliance is the only option; some specialized yoga forms, such as Iyengar or Bikram, have their own teacher-training programs that aren’t necessarily certified by Yoga Alliance (Victoria’s Iyengar Yoga Centre offers an extensive three-year teacher-training program), but do meet standards established by the governing bodies of those particular yoga disciplines.

“That’s important for people who are graduating, that they graduated from a school that’s registered by somewhere that’s recognized, so you know they’ve met certain minimum requirements for how to look at different bodies, anatomy, sequencing, that kind of thing,” says Pane.

What else do people who decide to become yoga teachers need to know when looking at where to get certified? “I think they need to look at what they want to teach afterwards, so what’s important to them, things like the style,” she says. “People have to love yoga, for sure. A lot of people take the training and they think, ‘I’m going to get to do yoga the whole time and I’m going to love it.’ We do a lot of theory, yoga philosophy, a lot of practice teaching as well and going over the alignment and how to really work with different bodies.”

Pane’s Ajna Yoga, which is one of several teacher-training programs available in Victoria, offers three-month intensive programs in hatha and flow yoga. “They graduate learning how to teach both styles,” she says. They also focus on working with injuries. “You want to know what they can do to still practice safely and strongly.”

Off the Mat

Reaching beyond the studio settings

There’s something incongruous about the idea of kindergarten kids doing yoga, what with yoga being—in its purest form, at least—about the pursuit of a higher spiritual plane through prescribed physical movements, and kindergarten kids being, well, crazy. And yet, three times a week in Francine Spahan’s aboriginal kindergarten class at Craigflower Elementary School, her gaggle of five-year-olds assume a series of poses which, allowing for the occasional bursts of giggling, looks an awful lot like yoga. Guided by flashcards, this exercise in concentration and discipline meets the daily physical activity requirements laid out by the provincial education ministry.

“They are pretty focused,” says Spahan of her mini yogis. “I mean, there are a few that are a little more active than the rest, for sure, but they do the positions. For instance, one of them is frog, and it’s really tempting while they’re sitting in that position to jump around and leap like a frog, so they do that for a little bit and then we kind of steer them back.”

The arrival of yoga in local schools is one of many ways that the ancient practice has escaped the confines of the usual studio setting in recent years and become an integral part of general wellness initiatives across educational, occupational and clinical organizations.

Down at VIHA’s out-patient detox centre, yoga is offered as part of the withdrawal management services for people trying to kick drug and alcohol addiction.

“We’re trying to approach things from a holistic perspective,” says Stacy Jensen, the detox centre’s social programs officer. “And we know that people’s recovery success is higher when they’re working on all aspects of their life, and yoga is just one of the things that we do.”

Jensen adds that the first round of yoga while getting off their vice can be something of a shock to clients who haven’t been treating their bodies well for a number of years. “We know that exercise is an important aspect of any recovery plan—simply the releasing of endorphins and getting to do something in a social atmosphere is really beneficial, especially for people that may have physical concerns because of their use, or haven’t exercised in a really long time—and so it feels good to use their bodies in new and sober ways.”

For folks just climbing aboard the substance-free wagon, volunteer instructors leading the classes keep things mellow. “It’s meant to be client-centered, so they can do as little or as much as they’re able to,” says Jensen. “We’re trying to keep it as simple and accessible as possible.”

Accessibility is something we heard from Cool Aid Society Downtown Community Activity Centre director Donna McKenna about the occasional yoga sessions her facility offers for its regular clients and anyone who walks through the door, which strive to escape the trendy trappings of yoga’s current cultural incarnation.

“[People] literally can just walk in without any expectation of cost or commitment, and that’s a big thing for anybody who’s feeling particularly marginalized—they don’t often have what it takes to wear to participate and there’s no way they’re affording Lululemon pants, put it that way,” says McKenna. “But it’s a chance for them to come in and get top-notch quality instruction from people who want to promote the healthfulness of yoga to people who may never get the opportunity to experience it otherwise.”

Meanwhile, up the income ladder a few notches, the provincial government has embraced yoga for its employees, offering up board room space for instructors like Michelle Schroeder to come and put B.C.’s bureaucrats through their paces over the lunch hour. Anyone who’s ever held an office job knows that days spent in a swivel chair can do strange things to one’s body.

“It’s the not moving, and it’s the constantly looking at the screen. I can see how the shoulders get really tense, because a lot of the time we project with our chin, which creates a lot of tension in the neck, and that creates so much tension in the upper body,” says Schroeder. “And if you’re not sitting properly, then your spine and hips get really tight, and just doing that day after day I can really see how that takes a toll on your body if you don’t wind up stretching or don’t have a regular fitness activity where it just gets the body moving.”

Schroeder adds yoga in the workplace is about acknowledging that healthy employees are more productive employees.

“It’s giving them a little refresher throughout the day, and then a lot of them can go back to work and finish their work and they feel rejuvenated and refreshed and they’ve had a little bit of movement so their body can withstand sitting at the computer for another five or six hours.”

Meanwhile, back in Francine Spahan’s aboriginal kindergarten class at Craigflower Elementary, a lesson in why we all might do well to adopt a little yoga into our routines:

“One of their favourite positions is called [. . .] the do-nothing doll, and so it comes with a little rhyme that says, ‘Nothing to think, nothing to do, doing nothing is good for you,’ and then they just lie still and quiet for a count of 50 and it just allows them to be quiet and still, and then, that’s how we end it.”

Sounds like good advice for us all. M