yoga teacher training – my mistake

I tell everyone yoga teacher training (YTT)  is the best the therapy you never knew you needed because if you are present with your honesty and desire to do well for your students you will clear away mountains of mental clutter.  My previous two YTTs were amazing.

For my 17-week 200-hour level I there was a place of personal honesty I had been hiding from for a while.  Every avenue of my life became easier to connect with for the better.  I get angrier faster (and let go of it  just as quick) and laugh harder now as a result of that experience.

For my 36-hour prenatal/postpartum/fertility course I arrived at a place preparing me to have a child.  I had held on to the emotional scars of finding my baby brother dead for a long time even with bereavement counseling as an adult.  I was finally ready to experience the sometimes heartbreaking journey of parenthood.

So I entered another YTT in September.  It was for another prenatal yoga certification.  When I received my 36-hour certification the Yoga Alliance (the only loosely standardizing body for yoga) did not have a prerequisite for this course.  I had asked them when they would develop it and they were even more than a year behind their estimation.  My first prenatal course was with a teacher, De West, I trust as a mentor who I want to be like someday when I grow up.  She is not engaging in creating this kind of course because it is mostly arbitrary.

I am however taking this course because I want the 500-hour designation to be an E-RYT which will allow me to teach other yoga teachers one day and really combine my pedagogy background that I attained while training in science as a PhD student.  So I decided to take the 86-hour course through a studio I already work at as a prenatal yoga instructor.  Taking it there means I get a discount and will have an easy time meeting some of the requirements (e.g. I finished my teaching requirements in less than a month with my regular teaching schedule).  However it does not mean I will be learning and placed in a mentorship program with people I truly consider mentors.  Oh well, life is jumping through hoops, right?

This course requires 2 4-day teaching intensives, 10 observation hours, 10 teaching hours, and 10 elective hours I am trying to complete with obtaining a childbirth educator certificate.  I still have one more 4-day teaching intensive to attend in April.  Everything I write from here on out will mostly be a reminder for myself to take with me going into the next intensive.

Basically I fucked up.  I entered a program I was unsure of because the price was right.  Big lesson to anyone looking at YTT programs – know the school you are working with.  This is a new certification requirement so NEW programs are popping up.  This was the first time this intensive was run and I did leave a lot of feedback for the instructors.

I am grateful I already had my 200-hour knowledge.  Most people at our intensive did not.  They were told to get it by the following August to get their certificate.  I felt this knowledge base was expected so others may have missed out.  We did not spend much time on specific poses for trimesters, complications, and modifications based on these situations which is one of the core strengths of seeing a prenatal instructor in a studio versus using a DVD.

Now 4 days is not a long time to do everything so I can cut the instructors some slack here with that but instead we focused on two time-consuming psychotherapy exercises that were very poorly facilitated and I really regret doing them.  On our third day together we relived our births.  Most know this is a powerful exercise and when done in therapies it is followed with some rigorous deconstruction and grounding.  Instead we turned to the person laying next to us to talk  (the person we met less than 72 hours prior).  Like everyone, I had some shit stir up and did not leave that exercise resolved or even feeling like I wanted to stay in the room.  On our last day we went round-robin to everyone in the room for a 3-minute exercise where we stared face-to-face for one minute, then one person talked up what they appreciate of the other for a minute while the other was silent then they switched for the last minute.  For me this was an exercise I could have done with my classmates after a 17-week program – not a long weekend.  After a  long weekend I still didn’t know everyone’s name.

I will not do these types of exercises again come April.  I already voiced that to the instructors.

For me I had A LOT come up in the birth exercise and actually got hurt from it physically.  In between the third and fourth day something in my back and hip went out of alignment when I tried to sleep at night among lots of bad nightmares.  My hip and back pulled on my knee in a bad way.  My back, hip, and knee ended up being so messed up I had to see a chiropractor for a few visits.  Had about 2 months of pain.  Missed 2 races.  And as it is I am taking my recovery slow because I strained some stuff in my knee as a result of all that unresolved fun.  Poorly facilitated psychotherapy is nobody’s friend.

This was my bad in not following my gut in saying no to the psychotherapy exercises in an environment I did not feel completely confident in.  I entered this 86-hour training for 2 pragmatic reasons – to work towards my E-RYT and improve my prenatal teaching.  The feedback I got was off target – the area I can really improve was not anything a mentor pointed out to me.  I only learned one cueing prompt in the four days.  I left feeling bad for abandoning my toddler for a program that was not really beneficial for that period of time I was away and then getting hurt with an injury that lasted a couple of months.

I did it wrong.  Please learn from my mistakes.

Going forward I will be wiser in the next 4-day session and not do anything I feel uncomfy with. My observation hours require 6 hours with my assigned mentor and I am trying to do the other 4 with the woman I consider my true mentor.  And I am working my butt off to improve my teaching and knowledge base while in this program.

I hate to say it – but in the next 4-day I will not be as open with my heart to the experience.  This YTT taught me to trust my intuition and return to common sense in uncertain situations.