The 10 Commandments of Finding the Right Yoga Teacher Training

1 ) Find a Spiritual Teacher

Avoid taking training from teachers that emphasize their teaching on the physical aspects of yoga only. It is important to have a teacher who can give you a full understanding of the spiritual (as opposed to religious) aspect of yoga. The teacher should not be a scholar who knows his/her information from reading books and taking workshops. The teacher’s teaching must arise from direct experience. Such a teacher will be able to deal with all of the spiritual concerns that the student may have with no hesitation.

2 ) Make Sure to Experience Direct Transmission

Do not settle for teacher training run by novice teachers who show the teachings of their master from a DVD. Do not settle for the said “master” to only occasionally appear in the course. Every student in the course needs to have direct contact and experience with the spiritual teacher, as the transmission of the knowledge and wisdom often happens on the energy level.

3 ) Bigger is Not Better

Often you see teacher training with 60 to 200 students in a course.

In an intense 200h course, as a result of the intense practice, students often go through physical, mental, emotional and spiritual crisis and may face multiple challenges. As a result of being in a large impersonal course, the student and their needs get lost in the crowd.

4 ) Avoid Religions, Cults and Worship

Avoid trainings with even a hint of worshipping the spiritual teacher. Yoga practice is a process to transform the novice to become a free master and not to become a sheep, following without knowing.

5 ) Practical Teaching

Make sure there is plenty of actual hands-on teaching experience for you during the course so you don’t end up with theoretical knowledge but are unprepared to actually teach. Knowing the asanas (yoga postures) inside and out won’t make you know how to teach them. Yoga teacher training is not a yoga boot camp of doing the asanas all day. You need to learn communication, the psychology of the mind, body language, how to correct by using hands-on techniques, and how to give mental and energetic support to your students in the future.

6 ) Yoga is Not Gymnastics

Remember that 90% of your students out there are beginners! Most of the people in the West are dealing with physical limitations and health conditions. Avoid vigorous acrobatic styles of yoga. Choose a style of yoga that can walk beginners safely into the practice. Otherwise you will join the endless number of yoga instructors who make the students feel (after their first class) that they are not flexible enough to practice yoga.

7 ) Restrictive Yoga Facilities

Avoid styles that constrict you and your students to a specific teaching facility environment (hot rooms or facilities with too many yoga gadgets). The essence of yoga practice is to be able to conduct it in any place and any time. Your students should be able to take the teaching you convey and practice on their own anywhere without dependency on a facility.

8 ) New-Age Yoga

Be careful of flakiness and new-age nonsense.

Knowledge of energy and the chakras is powerful, but there is much more to the yoga practice than just the chakras.

9 ) Connection With the Teacher After Course is Done

Make sure that the teacher will be available to you to answer questions after the course has ended and to guide you in your first steps of your teaching if needed. You should be able to find spiritual support from your teacher outside the course as your practice must continue after your certification.

10 ) The Power of Transformation

Let your heart, not only your mind and wallet, be involved in the search for the right teacher and teaching. Avoid being influenced by trends and burgeons. The teacher is the vehicle for the teaching that may resonate in you forever.

True teachers will expand your capacity to receive wisdom that arises from beyond your programmed mind.

Namaste,
shakti mhi

Please click on the below links to view insightful satsangs with shakti mhi posted on www.youtube.com:

Examining Self Perception - http://youtube.com/watch?v=GhEgVDc1uiE

Inner Silence - http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nk-aG6z0zbQ

Below is writing by shakti, on her feelings about “Hot Yoga”:

To say hot yoga is Yoga, is like saying that electric shock therapy calms the mind. Yes, it calms the mind, but by leaving the owner of the mind as a cooked vegetable.

~ shakti

Dear shakti,

i am writing you seeking spiritual
guidance.

recently, i have found out that i have substantial hearing loss in one ear which is permanent and also severe ringing in that same ear, which is also permanent.

i have coped well for weeks thinking that is was temporary but now that i know that it is permanent, i am having a tough time.

do you have any thoughts on how i can find acceptance with this?

namaste,
b

shakti’s response is below in red.

Dear B

shakti

(this was originally posted in May)

I was watching the beautiful movie ‘India’ and within the motion pictures I heard a whisper that was meant only for my third ear; “go and shave your hair”. After the movie ended I departed from my friends saying that I had to leave to do something and headed over to see Luke, my hairdresser. The last time I shaved my head, my body was 23 years old and I was living in a small ashram outside of Toronto.

At that time I asked my teacher, Swami Aruntiti, to shave my hair and she refused. I had long hair all the way down to my waist and she wasn’t sure I was ready to let go of it and deal with the consequences of carrying a bald female head. But I was stubborn and after a day I was sitting on a chair in the open fields as Aruntiti cut my long youthful hair and placed it in my hands. I remember how heavy it was. As I looked at the hair laying in my hands I had a clear sense that I was not this body. That was the turning point for the split personality of a young spiritual person that realized she was not her body yet living in a world with such an identification with physicality.

So there I was 21 years later carrying my long hair, still attached to my head, to Luke, a wonderful and spiritual being. I knew that the person that would have the tools to cut my hair (I mean scissors and a shaver) should have at least a bit of spirituality in him as my teacher Aruntiti had already disappeared into full seclusion somewhere in Europe many years ago. Luke was clearly the one but he was in extreme demand to the point where you needed to make an appointment with him weeks before you wanted to see him and I didn’t have one, and it was already 5pm.
Something inside me said don’t worry, keep moving what ever has to be done will be done.

When I arrived to the salon Luke was surprised to see me and when I asked if he was available he mentioned that he had just had an unexpected cancellation. Coincidence? I don’t believe in those anymore. When I told him that I would like him to shave my head he recoiled in horror. As he tried to make sense of the nonsense words rolling out of my lips, I repeated myself again. In the next few minutes the small but elegant salon went through a small invisible earthquake. The word of the sacrilegious act I had requested was like a brush fire through a dry savannah.

I was asked to sleep on it, maybe even go home and come back in 6 months after giving the crazy idea some good thought. “But it is just hair”, I kept saying, “and I would like to let go of it now.”

It took some convincing on my part but after a while my long, thick hair began to fall to the floor as I heard Danny, Luke’s partner in crime, mumble “I don’t believe she is doing it. I don’t believe she is doing it” as if I were just about to commit an elegant suicide. I looked at the mirror thinking; “I lost my face”, but inside, I felt the same.

A few women gathered around me as if at a wake looking at me with bewilderment as though a new alien species had landed in the heart of the city.

The sense of freedom was tremendous; no more hiding behind the veil of my physical appearance. I am what I am, straight forward. It is what it is and it feels great, light and empty of meaning.

“Oh my god!” I heard my students, my teachers, my neighbors, my friends, my sister and people that I am not even sure I know, saying as they looked at me, with mesmerized eyes.

“Are you Ok?”
“Are you sick?”
“Are you doing Chemo?”,some asked with concern.

“You are so brave”, they announced as though I had just come back from a rough battle where I lost my look.

“I would never be able to do it…”
“I am not ready to do it yet…”
“I am still attached to my hair…”, some of them apologized as if they were expected to join my hairless new army.

For a while it was great to touch my naked skull. Now clearly I could feel the lovely box I was dwelling in, my precious temple, my naked frame.

If in my youth just changing my hair style gave me the feeling that I, myself had changed, now nothing felt different in my essence as it could not be touched.

“Why did you do it?”, was the question of the week.

This was my way to welcome the process of aging that has started to breeze into my body for quite awhile.

This is the freedom of “being” beyond the eyes that are looking at me.

Namaste
shakti