Is Yoga Teacher Training Worth It?

The truth is that anyone can start teaching yoga and many have, without any training at all. But you’ll want to be the best teacher you can be and you’ll want to run a successful yoga business, so you’re going to need some help with that.

Here are the top five reasons for doing a teacher training course:

1. The support of a senior teacher: someone who can teach you all about yoga philosophy - what it’s about, where it comes from, how to tell the difference between genuine yoga philosophy and more recent interpretations that may not be authentic. Someone who loves yoga in all its forms and has a long-standing practice of their own, someone you can trust, someone who is enthusiastic and wants you to be the confident, authentic teacher that you really want to be.

2. The support of your fellow trainees. You’ll meet like-minded souls, who will support and encourage you during the course and beyond. These are some of the closest friends you’ll have in yoga - they get what you are doing and why, they are exactly as enthusiastic as you are about yoga and they genuinely want you to succeed. They’re on the same jounrney you and they’ll celebrate your successes and comiserate with you when life gets challenging.

3. You’ll choose a course with a teacher who has an amazing knowledge and understanding of anatomy and physiology so that when you teach your students, you do it with the confidence to help them grow into a deeper yoga practice, whilst keeping them safe .

4. You’ll have the backing of the awarding body - at Oak Tree Yoga Teacher Training School that is Yoga Alliance Professionals, a world leader in overseeing teacher training courses (none of your ‘learn it all in two weeks’ charlatans here) from whom you’ll go forward with a qualification that is highly respected the world over.

5. A mentoring relationship after you have finished the course. At Oak Tree Yoga Teacher Training School we continue our interest in you and your teaching, maintain our friendly teaching community and stay in regular contact for as long after the course as you wish. That way you can feel supported and confident in those scary early days of setting out as a teacher.

Oak Tree Yoga Teacher Training runs yoga teacher training courses in Berkshire every weekend a month for 11 months.  Click here for our latest trainings.  We want you to be the best teacher you can be – 75% of our teachers are teaching within one month of completing the teacher training course.  Excellence starts early on during your training, so choosing the right course is crucial.

Graduates, 2021

Am I Doing Yoga Wrong?

1. It's not possible to do yoga wrong. Yoga is a simple thing really: just move your body, stretch a little in a few different directions and think about deepening your breath while you do that. Five or ten minutes a few days a week is enough to make a difference.

2. Yoga clothes, mats and props are just there to give you something to buy and someone else some money for selling them. There's nothing wrong with that, but you can do yoga on your carpet in your pyjamas. Sometimes its better that way.

3. The only thing to ask yourself when you are finished, is DO I FEEL A BIT BETTER? If the answer is yes, well done, you've just done yoga

4. Only modern yogis focus on yoga postures as we see them on Instagram, for centuries yoga was about sitting quietly, feeling grateful, calming your breath and being aware of yourself and your body in this moment. So if you just feel like sitting quietly, looking at your garden or favourite view and breathing calmly for a few minutes - that's yoga.

5. Are you the kind of person that doubts yourself and your abilities? Perhaps this is why you think you are doing yoga wrong ... because you often think you are missing something or that you're not very good at stuff. This is just mental chit chat. There is only one of you in the whole world and there will never be another: learning how to be you - confidently, calmly, positively you, will stand you in good stead for all of life. So when you hear that little voice telling you this isn't what yoga looks like, thank it kindly for its input, then ignore it and carry on doing your thing.

Make a commitment to yourself to try a little yoga for a few days for a few weeks and see how you feel at the end of it. Hopefully better. You've got this.

Sarah x

How do I start doing yoga from home?

One of the reasons that yoga has been around for thousands of years is that it really works - it really does make you feel calmer, stronger and more flexible in body and mind.

It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything you don’t want to believe in, it’s not a religion and you don’t even have to go to class. You don’t need any equipment, you don’t need to be bendy already and it doesn’t matter if you are fit or not, or what your body shape is.

All you have to do for yoga to work is do it.

At Oak Tree Yoga we are passionate about yoga, it’s what we do and we want to share it with as many people as possible. So we do online classes in our Facebook group every Tuesday at 7pm and we have an in person yoga class every week on Thursdays at 7pm in Wargrave, Berkshire.

If you don’t want to pay for classes, you can find sequences here for you to print out for free and do at home and guided meditations here to help you calm your mind.

You only need to move your body a little, to find out a little more about how your breathing can become more calm and centred, to take a few minutes out of every day to move your body and settle yourself.

Most importantly, be kind to yourself. When you do yoga from home nobody is looking, but you - can you accept your body as you find it? Can you let this moment be enough? Can you switch off your inner crtitic for just a little while so that you can move your body and deepen your breath and emerge feeling brighter, better and more positive about yourself and the world around you?

So how do you start yoga from home? You just begin and once you’ve begun you carry on, with an attitude of gentle kindness towards yourself and curiosity about where your beautiful life is taking you next.

Sarah x