Is your yoga teacher good?
Lizzie Dixon beams as she sits on the mat, urging the 45 people who have piled into her yoga class to leave the day behind.
For the next 75 minutes, the former Christchurch woman shares her joy of yoga with the men and women who shift their limbs into downward dogs, warrior and other asana poses.
Dixon is just one of hundreds of teachers around the country who are leading classes like this one. More than two years ago, Dixon trained to be a yoga teacher, describing the 200 hours she spent with Power Living’s senior yogis as ‘‘the most profound experience of my life’’.
For $4899, along with airfares to Bali, she says: ‘‘It was physically incredibly demanding, like drinking from a fire hose. We got taught a specific set of alignments to keep bodies safe. It also taught me how to teach.’’
The final part of the course was a week of full immersion in Bali, learning about yoga, anatomy, meditation, physiology, and selfawareness, from 7am till 11pm daily.
The sparkly redhead found yoga when she was desperate. Undergoing tests to check why she was suffering chronic pain, someone suggested she try a yoga class.
‘‘I spent thousands of dollars and was a medical mystery as I had terrible migraines, and chronic neck and back pain,’’ she recalls. She discovered, through yoga and self-discovery, that her health suffered due to the trauma of losing her mother when she was just 16.
When looking for a training course to impart her own yoga joy to others, Dixon had plenty of options to choose from. In the past decade, there has been an explosion of yoga teacher training courses around the country, as a growing number of studios cater for the Western desire to practise yoga.
Studios promise to train certified yoga instructors who can teach yoga anywhere in the world. In Christchurch, teacher Donna Farhi will run two workshops next year over 19 days, totalling 220 hours, for $4950.
One of Auckland’s best-known yoga teachers, Vincent Bolletta, runs training courses all year with other senior yogis in the city for a range of prices, while you can train elsewhere in Auckland and in Queenstown.
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.