So I did it, I qualified, yeah! Wow what a whirlwind month it has been but what an amazing one at that, I still feel slightly in shock that I did it and finally committed to it but also feel overwhelmed how quickly it went and without any hiccups, it was a blissful, inspiring and mind opening month and I am so thankful to Denise and Bex for the experience I had, I wanted to commit myself to writing a full post in relation to my training experience as feel it’s so important to spread the message of the importance of yoga, without it being a stereotypical hipster thing to do, I remember I told one friend I was thinking of training whilst travelling and his reply was ‘you and every other fucker’ ouch! I could totally see his point though and even more so when away, the ongoing conversations had through India of people studying here and there, the schedules sounded hardcore though and not the yoga I wanted to be able to share with others, I couldn’t find the right training I wanted to commit a month too, nothing inspired me and I kind of decided that maybe it just wasn’t the right time to train, which was fine, I kind of stopped looking by the end of India, I chose to enjoy my yoga practice for what it was and the right course would come up one day.
We when we arrived in Ubud we chose to stay a week and relax, I had read about the Yogabarn when researching yoga studios before coming away, so decided to go and attend a few classes there. I signed up for a few amazing workshops, and saw a Yin Yoga class that I fancied, I have only done one Yin class on my 30th birthday last year, I remember the teacher in Vietnam gave me the choice for the class that morning and I chose a Yin practice, it stayed with me as it was so relaxing and really made me feel a therapeutic sense of ease that was just truly beautiful, however when returning to the London I hadn’t found any classes nearby so therefore had just enjoyed that one experience, how lucky I thought trying it again in Ubud.
I can literally say going to Denise’s class changed my life, I can’t fully explain how or why, maybe it was the tennis balls (I will get to that), the information shared on the practice we were doing, the way she taught or the Yin practice whatever element it was I left that class so moved and energized for change that I knew I had to train with her and share the knowledge she had with others, luckily for me she was running a course two weeks later, after a discussion with Sam, I was signed up to her course by the next day and ready to start training on the 18th June.
Denise’s training, One Song Yoga, is put forward as not your average training course, stepping beyond the physical and commercialization of the spiritual and offering the key to transformation of your own mind and body, it covers 4 different styles of yoga Power, Vinyasa, Hatha and Yin. When reading the leaflet and talking with Denise I just felt this course differed from any other I have read about or heard about and I felt it really sat with my principles of yoga practice in current society and would marry well with my previous counselling training.
My reasons for wanting to train in yoga is to bring this into my counseling/therapy work as I feel it can be a real benefit to clients I work with, I also feel Yin Yoga holds such important principles in allowing people to relax in their yoga practice and encourages people to take time out to actually slow down and be with themselves for 90mins, it works with the connective tissue and moves stuck energy that for some people can be causing such trauma in their lives, for me to bring this into therapy work will make great changes for the client, allowing them to start to understand their body more on both a physical and emotional level.
Denise first class I took worked with both Myo Fascial and Yin, the Myo Fascial Release is a soft tissue therapy for the treatment of the skeletal muscle. The Yin Yoga being more a therapeutic meditative style of yoga that works with the connective tissues, the poses used in Yin Yoga work by moving energy through the body to improve organ health and emotional well being, with both of these practices combined together in one class you can maybe see why I had a life changing moment in Denise’s class.
The training started on June 18th and I was delighted to find it was a small class of only 10 people, we talked about what we wanted from the course and a small bit about ourselves, it was so interesting hearing peoples reasons for doing the course and although some were to be able to teach a lot were about their own yoga journey and practice. It was explained to us how the course would run and how we were able to choose which classes we wanted to par take in, both our teachers teach at the Yogabarn therefore we had a number of different classes in power yoga, vinyasa yoga, yin yoga, acro yoga and restorative yoga, I was so pleased to hear the diverse range we could chose to work with and although I planned to try all I knew my preferred choice would be the more yin, restorative, therapeutic style classes, however I did par take in a few vinyasa classes as this was the style I practiced at home.
That morning we took our first two classes of power and yin and after 3hrs of yoga I was so excited to be lucky enough to do this for the next 28 days.
The course definitely opened another range of emotions I had carefully tucked away, it was challenging in ways that is hard to understand unless you’re in that physical and emotional journey of yoga, I remember one vinyasa class with Bex, I went into Hanumasana and just broke down crying, I really understood the term ‘crying your way through hip openers’. When learning about this reaction and why this happens I started to understand our chakras more and how hip openers open our second chakra, Svadhisthana who’s identity is emotion and can develop between 6 months and 2 years, wow, my mind blew learning this and related so much to my own life changes around that age. From working with Erickson’s stages of developmental I was now working with a whole new psychology system which related to our bodies and yoga, I was drawn to learn more and was recommended a book called eastern body, western mind which has now become my travel companion for learning more about this sacred chakra system (Denise informed me to wait till the course has finished before delving into this book as it will be a life informing read).
We carried out a whole day related to the chakras, no one knew how the day would go but we were told to wear bright colours and bring a friend/partner/husband. How the day worked was we went through different yoga asanas and set activities to open up each chakra and allow the energy to move through (obviously if energy is stuck they won’t necessarily just move, it’s can take time) but this was a way of looking at certain asanas and things we can do to start that process and engage in what it is like. We worked from our 1st chakra to our 7th chakra and went through a whole range of emotions dancing and grounding ourselves, flowing through sun salutations, playing on slack lines and silks, backbends, placing our hands on others hearts, sharing innermost secrets to mantras and chanting, the energy felt in the room was beautiful and it was a day I will never forget, it was a day that made me understand more about each chakra and its importance but also a day at where I looked into myself and saw were my energy could be stuck and the benefits of using chakras as a tool in looking at how people are impacted, but also using yoga as a tool for moving through this, the two marry together in such a complete way and I can’t wait to take this new information home and use it in my therapeutic work.
The course covered so many different areas of yoga practice that every day I was yearning for more, Bex took us through the history of yoga and took us back before Pantanjali and his Raja Yoga about 5000 years ago, we talked about what Yoga was and how mantra is the oldest form of yoga practice, Bex talked of the practices of the shamanistic and their out of body experiences, the ascetics who went out into nature and on their own having no attachments to basic living and the vedics who believed in fire rituals, mantras, dharmas and breath work. We moved through the years of pre classical yoga and how the Bhagavad Gita become such an important text, this then led us to the knowing of Pantanjali and the yoga most of us now know and love. This was all such information for me and my mind was so eager to take it all in, from this we started to move towards our yoga philosophy and Pantanjalis 8 limbs of yoga Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi, for me seeing asana and pranayama as 3 and 4 was mind boggling as although I knew it, in our current world of yoga, we jump straight to the asanas before anything else and don’t even know about the other areas of yoga, this information and new knowledge just stood strong in my belief how yoga is more than just moving our bodies in certain ways and yoga can be found in many forms not just the poses.
From one amazing thought blowing information gaining subject to another we moved into yoga therapy and talked of the types of yoga that can be used as a therapeutic tool but also the benefits of yoga to an individual and ourselves, the list we came up with was endless and secured my knowledge again of why I was here learning this worthy and precious skill. We learnt about thai massage (and its origins) and the art of touch and Bex explained how we can bring this into our yoga sessions and the benefit this can have to students by having a ‘safe touch’ experience. The yoga therapy session resonated so much with me and I was already starting to know the type of yoga teacher I hope to be.
We were taught human anatomy by a leading French Ostepath, my mind was opened again to the biology of the body and the way we work, taking me back to school but with a deeper insight into the importance of learning and wanting to know the information to be able to put into practice when working with human bodies. I loved the way Francoise taught us, teaching us how Ostepaths look at the whole body, not just isolated areas, sharing her wealth of knowledge and experience allowed us to understand certain elements of the body in relation to yoga practice and how we can help others who may attend classes with aliments but also avoid aliments and understand them in our own practice. We discussed the importance of fascia again and how it’s a subject rarely covered but is as important as muscles, Francoise sharing how Myo Fascial release work being so important to the human body.
We took work home and learnt then presented information about different Hindu deityies like Saraswati, Ganesh, Shiva, Vishnu, Rama, Kali, Brahma, Sita and Hanuman and how they came to be the gods and goddess worshipped by many. We took time to look at certain deities in relation to yoga and how certain asanas found their names in relation to the deity’s tales. It made me want to head back to India and make more of an understanding about the gods and goddesses worshipped there.
Our work led us to our yoga for the hands, mudras, linking these again to our chakras and how certain mudras can help release certain energies. We learnt the sacred chant of the Gayatri Mantra, one of the most oldest and powerful of Sanskrit mantras, the power of Om, the resonant sound of the universe.
We covered the different types of yoga in our modern day world and looked at the history of Yin yoga and due to it being new to the yoga world, only being founded by Paul Grilley in the 1990’s.
As the weeks passed by our teaching started to focus more on us as teachers and we learnt adjustments in certain asanas, attended real classes our teachers were teaching to assist and then started putting our adjustment practice into reality when adjusting people in classes giving them a deeper experience of the asana. We started to learn our own ways of sequencing and put these into practice by demonstrating in class with the eventual move to teaching in real class ourselves.
I was so scared to teach a real class and was so pleased I could teach a yin class as this being the area I wanted to teach back in the UK. I had put together a 30minute sequence for the class ending with shavasana, Denise took the start of the class and I took over with 30mins left, I counted 46 people in the studio and we were in the main studio upstairs, the whole experience was incredible, I was moved by the experience shared and by the energy felt in the room, it gave me the strength and sense of real security about how passionate I was about yin yoga. I looked over to my teacher, her smile overwhelmed me and gave the courage to carry on and even bring students out of shavasana, ending the class with a collected om.
My feedback was great, and I felt a great achievement that all my learning was going in and I was able to teach a class of 46 people and teach it well enough to be given praise.
We had a number of sessions in our learning group where we did 20min sequences and 1hr sequences and were given feedback in the form of Haiku’s (Japanese form of giving feedback). We looked at how we work with students in our classes and talked of double loop learning, using strengths to encourage our students and not put them off, it was all becoming so real and soon I was going to be leaving this training qualified to empower and share this art form with others.
With the course coming to an end and our learning shared with others both in a public and class forum I was feeling more confident with what I would be taking away and more confident in sharing the practice with others without feeling I have to be able to carry out every yoga asana to be a ‘good teacher’. My focus was now about what I could share and not what I can do, as Denise shared in one of her thoughts for the day ‘we can’t give away what we don’t have’, my confidence in my own ability was strengthening and my sense of self identity as a yogi was holding true to my own beliefs and values, my own niyamas.
The course came to an end with the beauty of a butterfly mandala, made out of an array of vibrant and stunning flowers and we discussed our writing assignments as a collected group, we shared our highs and lows and self discipline to carry on but overall our bond as a group and our collected sense of sharing as teachers.
I couldn’t have asked for a better training experience, I feel equipped to teach, I feel ready to learn more, as like life, yoga is a forever learning experience.
The vast knowledge of two empowering teachers has allowed me to develop and grow into the yoga teacher I have always dreamed of becoming and I am forever thankful for that experience, my time in Ubud will never be forgotten and I will ensure my practice gained will be shared worldwide.
Wahe Guru
We when we arrived in Ubud we chose to stay a week and relax, I had read about the Yogabarn when researching yoga studios before coming away, so decided to go and attend a few classes there. I signed up for a few amazing workshops, and saw a Yin Yoga class that I fancied, I have only done one Yin class on my 30th birthday last year, I remember the teacher in Vietnam gave me the choice for the class that morning and I chose a Yin practice, it stayed with me as it was so relaxing and really made me feel a therapeutic sense of ease that was just truly beautiful, however when returning to the London I hadn’t found any classes nearby so therefore had just enjoyed that one experience, how lucky I thought trying it again in Ubud.
I can literally say going to Denise’s class changed my life, I can’t fully explain how or why, maybe it was the tennis balls (I will get to that), the information shared on the practice we were doing, the way she taught or the Yin practice whatever element it was I left that class so moved and energized for change that I knew I had to train with her and share the knowledge she had with others, luckily for me she was running a course two weeks later, after a discussion with Sam, I was signed up to her course by the next day and ready to start training on the 18th June.
Denise’s training, One Song Yoga, is put forward as not your average training course, stepping beyond the physical and commercialization of the spiritual and offering the key to transformation of your own mind and body, it covers 4 different styles of yoga Power, Vinyasa, Hatha and Yin. When reading the leaflet and talking with Denise I just felt this course differed from any other I have read about or heard about and I felt it really sat with my principles of yoga practice in current society and would marry well with my previous counselling training.
My reasons for wanting to train in yoga is to bring this into my counseling/therapy work as I feel it can be a real benefit to clients I work with, I also feel Yin Yoga holds such important principles in allowing people to relax in their yoga practice and encourages people to take time out to actually slow down and be with themselves for 90mins, it works with the connective tissue and moves stuck energy that for some people can be causing such trauma in their lives, for me to bring this into therapy work will make great changes for the client, allowing them to start to understand their body more on both a physical and emotional level.
Denise first class I took worked with both Myo Fascial and Yin, the Myo Fascial Release is a soft tissue therapy for the treatment of the skeletal muscle. The Yin Yoga being more a therapeutic meditative style of yoga that works with the connective tissues, the poses used in Yin Yoga work by moving energy through the body to improve organ health and emotional well being, with both of these practices combined together in one class you can maybe see why I had a life changing moment in Denise’s class.
The training started on June 18th and I was delighted to find it was a small class of only 10 people, we talked about what we wanted from the course and a small bit about ourselves, it was so interesting hearing peoples reasons for doing the course and although some were to be able to teach a lot were about their own yoga journey and practice. It was explained to us how the course would run and how we were able to choose which classes we wanted to par take in, both our teachers teach at the Yogabarn therefore we had a number of different classes in power yoga, vinyasa yoga, yin yoga, acro yoga and restorative yoga, I was so pleased to hear the diverse range we could chose to work with and although I planned to try all I knew my preferred choice would be the more yin, restorative, therapeutic style classes, however I did par take in a few vinyasa classes as this was the style I practiced at home.
That morning we took our first two classes of power and yin and after 3hrs of yoga I was so excited to be lucky enough to do this for the next 28 days.
The course definitely opened another range of emotions I had carefully tucked away, it was challenging in ways that is hard to understand unless you’re in that physical and emotional journey of yoga, I remember one vinyasa class with Bex, I went into Hanumasana and just broke down crying, I really understood the term ‘crying your way through hip openers’. When learning about this reaction and why this happens I started to understand our chakras more and how hip openers open our second chakra, Svadhisthana who’s identity is emotion and can develop between 6 months and 2 years, wow, my mind blew learning this and related so much to my own life changes around that age. From working with Erickson’s stages of developmental I was now working with a whole new psychology system which related to our bodies and yoga, I was drawn to learn more and was recommended a book called eastern body, western mind which has now become my travel companion for learning more about this sacred chakra system (Denise informed me to wait till the course has finished before delving into this book as it will be a life informing read).
We carried out a whole day related to the chakras, no one knew how the day would go but we were told to wear bright colours and bring a friend/partner/husband. How the day worked was we went through different yoga asanas and set activities to open up each chakra and allow the energy to move through (obviously if energy is stuck they won’t necessarily just move, it’s can take time) but this was a way of looking at certain asanas and things we can do to start that process and engage in what it is like. We worked from our 1st chakra to our 7th chakra and went through a whole range of emotions dancing and grounding ourselves, flowing through sun salutations, playing on slack lines and silks, backbends, placing our hands on others hearts, sharing innermost secrets to mantras and chanting, the energy felt in the room was beautiful and it was a day I will never forget, it was a day that made me understand more about each chakra and its importance but also a day at where I looked into myself and saw were my energy could be stuck and the benefits of using chakras as a tool in looking at how people are impacted, but also using yoga as a tool for moving through this, the two marry together in such a complete way and I can’t wait to take this new information home and use it in my therapeutic work.
The course covered so many different areas of yoga practice that every day I was yearning for more, Bex took us through the history of yoga and took us back before Pantanjali and his Raja Yoga about 5000 years ago, we talked about what Yoga was and how mantra is the oldest form of yoga practice, Bex talked of the practices of the shamanistic and their out of body experiences, the ascetics who went out into nature and on their own having no attachments to basic living and the vedics who believed in fire rituals, mantras, dharmas and breath work. We moved through the years of pre classical yoga and how the Bhagavad Gita become such an important text, this then led us to the knowing of Pantanjali and the yoga most of us now know and love. This was all such information for me and my mind was so eager to take it all in, from this we started to move towards our yoga philosophy and Pantanjalis 8 limbs of yoga Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi, for me seeing asana and pranayama as 3 and 4 was mind boggling as although I knew it, in our current world of yoga, we jump straight to the asanas before anything else and don’t even know about the other areas of yoga, this information and new knowledge just stood strong in my belief how yoga is more than just moving our bodies in certain ways and yoga can be found in many forms not just the poses.
From one amazing thought blowing information gaining subject to another we moved into yoga therapy and talked of the types of yoga that can be used as a therapeutic tool but also the benefits of yoga to an individual and ourselves, the list we came up with was endless and secured my knowledge again of why I was here learning this worthy and precious skill. We learnt about thai massage (and its origins) and the art of touch and Bex explained how we can bring this into our yoga sessions and the benefit this can have to students by having a ‘safe touch’ experience. The yoga therapy session resonated so much with me and I was already starting to know the type of yoga teacher I hope to be.
We were taught human anatomy by a leading French Ostepath, my mind was opened again to the biology of the body and the way we work, taking me back to school but with a deeper insight into the importance of learning and wanting to know the information to be able to put into practice when working with human bodies. I loved the way Francoise taught us, teaching us how Ostepaths look at the whole body, not just isolated areas, sharing her wealth of knowledge and experience allowed us to understand certain elements of the body in relation to yoga practice and how we can help others who may attend classes with aliments but also avoid aliments and understand them in our own practice. We discussed the importance of fascia again and how it’s a subject rarely covered but is as important as muscles, Francoise sharing how Myo Fascial release work being so important to the human body.
We took work home and learnt then presented information about different Hindu deityies like Saraswati, Ganesh, Shiva, Vishnu, Rama, Kali, Brahma, Sita and Hanuman and how they came to be the gods and goddess worshipped by many. We took time to look at certain deities in relation to yoga and how certain asanas found their names in relation to the deity’s tales. It made me want to head back to India and make more of an understanding about the gods and goddesses worshipped there.
Our work led us to our yoga for the hands, mudras, linking these again to our chakras and how certain mudras can help release certain energies. We learnt the sacred chant of the Gayatri Mantra, one of the most oldest and powerful of Sanskrit mantras, the power of Om, the resonant sound of the universe.
We covered the different types of yoga in our modern day world and looked at the history of Yin yoga and due to it being new to the yoga world, only being founded by Paul Grilley in the 1990’s.
As the weeks passed by our teaching started to focus more on us as teachers and we learnt adjustments in certain asanas, attended real classes our teachers were teaching to assist and then started putting our adjustment practice into reality when adjusting people in classes giving them a deeper experience of the asana. We started to learn our own ways of sequencing and put these into practice by demonstrating in class with the eventual move to teaching in real class ourselves.
I was so scared to teach a real class and was so pleased I could teach a yin class as this being the area I wanted to teach back in the UK. I had put together a 30minute sequence for the class ending with shavasana, Denise took the start of the class and I took over with 30mins left, I counted 46 people in the studio and we were in the main studio upstairs, the whole experience was incredible, I was moved by the experience shared and by the energy felt in the room, it gave me the strength and sense of real security about how passionate I was about yin yoga. I looked over to my teacher, her smile overwhelmed me and gave the courage to carry on and even bring students out of shavasana, ending the class with a collected om.
My feedback was great, and I felt a great achievement that all my learning was going in and I was able to teach a class of 46 people and teach it well enough to be given praise.
We had a number of sessions in our learning group where we did 20min sequences and 1hr sequences and were given feedback in the form of Haiku’s (Japanese form of giving feedback). We looked at how we work with students in our classes and talked of double loop learning, using strengths to encourage our students and not put them off, it was all becoming so real and soon I was going to be leaving this training qualified to empower and share this art form with others.
With the course coming to an end and our learning shared with others both in a public and class forum I was feeling more confident with what I would be taking away and more confident in sharing the practice with others without feeling I have to be able to carry out every yoga asana to be a ‘good teacher’. My focus was now about what I could share and not what I can do, as Denise shared in one of her thoughts for the day ‘we can’t give away what we don’t have’, my confidence in my own ability was strengthening and my sense of self identity as a yogi was holding true to my own beliefs and values, my own niyamas.
The course came to an end with the beauty of a butterfly mandala, made out of an array of vibrant and stunning flowers and we discussed our writing assignments as a collected group, we shared our highs and lows and self discipline to carry on but overall our bond as a group and our collected sense of sharing as teachers.
I couldn’t have asked for a better training experience, I feel equipped to teach, I feel ready to learn more, as like life, yoga is a forever learning experience.
The vast knowledge of two empowering teachers has allowed me to develop and grow into the yoga teacher I have always dreamed of becoming and I am forever thankful for that experience, my time in Ubud will never be forgotten and I will ensure my practice gained will be shared worldwide.
Wahe Guru
(A few favourite snaps)
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