Marlborough Express

Is your yoga teacher good?

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Aspiring yoga teachers can also head offshore, to India, Bali and other destinatio­ns, to sign up with yoga training schools, some of which also run online courses. However, some yoga teachers and studio managers are concerned about the lack of rules around who can teach yoga, or what yoga training is taught here or offshore. It can be random who turns up at the front of a class.

Power Living New Zealand coowner Justine Hamill says: ‘‘You don’t know what is legit. In India, for example, there are some great places to train and there are also some places that are milking money out of Westerners, and you wouldn’t know.’’

The issue sparked some studio managers to get together with Sport Institute New Zealand recently to try to get studios and teachers regulated – talks that are ongoing.

Teaching yoga for more than six years, Hamill advises anyone looking at training to be a yoga teacher to look for a Yoga Alliance stamp on the programme. It’s an organisati­on that many New Zealand studios sign up to. The 200 hours to train to be a yoga teacher is not a magic bullet number but the Yoga Alliance recommende­d standard.

Says Hamill: ‘‘The problem is that people can do an online course for $20 and then go off and become a yoga teacher.’’

When she started teaching yoga a decade ago, yoga teacher and writer Kara-Leah Grant recalls that most of the official yoga training was taught by visiting overseas teachers.

Author of the Yoga Lunchbox, an online yoga website, the Mt Maunganui yoga teacher first trained with a visiting yoga teacher. To become certified, though, she headed to Los Angeles in 2011 to complete 200 hours of teacher training with one of the world’s most renowned vinyasa teachers, Shiva Rea. Along with practising and learning yoga, Grant had to do a written and practical exam, write book reviews, and submit teaching videos showing before and after postures.

‘‘But the thing about teacher training is it just starts you on a path of being a teacher. It took me two years to be able to fully integrate and transmit what I had learned from Shiva into my practise.’’

Grant wrote an article about the proliferat­ion of yoga training courses here, which she says are one way for studios to make enough money to keep their doors open. ‘‘People are signing up for them. A new one in Golden Bay starting in October is full already. It’s demand-led and supply-led.

‘‘But a teacher training course doesn’t make you a teacher.’’

Brooke Penny has just returned from a month-long yoga teaching workshop in Bali and is now teaching yin yoga at Wellington’s Empower Studio. ‘‘There is stigma. `Oh, you go to Bali for a month and come back a yoga teacher’,’’ she says.

The former marketing manager has completed about 750 hours of teacher training, including the recent 200 hours at a small studio in Bali, where she did advanced, level two training with six others. To get her latest training certificat­e, she has to teach yoga classes for 100 hours.

When looking for an advanced course in Bali, Penny considered a bigger school, Santosha, which teaches up to 60 students for about $3000. With two schools in Bali and one in Australia’s Dolphin Bay, Santosha is run by an exprofessi­onal surfer, Sunny Richards. Santosha also teaches its 200-hour, Yoga Alliance-certified programme online.

However, Penny decided she wanted something more intimate: ‘‘I was looking for a connection with my teacher’’.

‘‘I know another woman who did 300 hours at a school in Bali and she had mixed reviews. Picking a course out of a brochure or off a website is like choosing a hotel the same way. You’re better to get a recommenda­tion.

‘‘Having said that, some of my favourite teachers aren’t even 200 hours registered, but they have spent months in India practising and learning. People who live and breathe yoga off the mat, who have the essence of yoga in all their cells, they make the best yoga teachers,’’ she says.

 ??  ?? Lizzie Dixon discovered yoga after being ill for a long time.
Lizzie Dixon discovered yoga after being ill for a long time.

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