How We’re Different
We teach yoga as a modern system of self-improvement that is highly adaptable to all people who want to make improvements in their lives. Although it was developed thousands of years ago, the process of using what is at hand: the body and mind- as a platform for positive change- is as necessary and functional today as it always has been.
We found a need for a training like ours, so we created it. Our programs are the end product of our faculty traveling all over the world, certifying thousands of actively teaching yoga teachers.
Through our graduates, American Yoga School is proud to be shaping the future of safe and effective asana practice around the globe and into the next century.
Where it started.
The most important feature of our program is that, from the first days of its creation, we’ve based everything on the firm belief, borne from personal experience, that asana (poses), can not only be beneficial to the body, but that it can also be profoundly instrumental to finding real happiness.
That is quite a claim, we know. But, it’s true. It happens when yoga is practiced well, following a few simple, but not necessarily easy, guidelines. To learn the tremendously positive practice of authentic yoga, you need a great teacher. Creating great teachers is what we are all about.
Online Content
One-hundred percent of our materials are available online, and constantly updated, so that you don’t need to buy or carry books, and so we save trees. As an American Yoga School graduate, you will have lifetime access to all of our most up-to-the-second updates and revisions to our content.
Real-Life Experience
In our training, you will teach actual students- not other trainees. Instead of being ready to teach your first actual class when you graduate, you will already have taught several.
After copious preparation, you’ll teach! In the Level One training, you’ll teach segments of our Foundations class; Level Two students will teach entire classes. And it’s all open to the public. Classes will be followed by verbal and written feedback from our faculty (and also by peers in the Level Two training), following clear criteria so that you develop teaching skill that works.
Multiple Points of View
Each training is taught by our entire faculty as opposed to one or two teachers. This gives graduates multiple perspectives and, more importantly, insight into how a teacher’s voice can be unique while adhering to the same essential core principles.
Clear and Authentic Content
Our deep understanding of the key elements of yoga philosophy has allowed us to separate the necessary elements of authentic yoga practices from the cultural (Indian, new-age, vegan, etc.) elements that are sometimes confused with or combined with yoga practice.
Tight Focus on Safe and Effective Asana
While we have respect for all personal practices, and encourage curious students to explore, in our trainings we focus on asana as a valid, complete practice that uses the readily available physical body as a gateway through which we access the deep practice of yoga as a science of the mind.
200-Hour Foundations of Yoga Teacher Certification Program
Contact us if you’d like to talk about the program.
Overview
Upon graduating the Level One Training, you’ll earn a Yoga Alliance 200RYT Registration. In this course, you’ll begin teaching real students so you leave ready to be hired. You’ll be fully prepared to start teaching.
Throughout the Level One Training, trainees build a deep understanding of the foundations that support transformative asana practice because we focus instruction on the following simple foundational principles:
- Through personally experiencing the challenges, triumphs and plateaus of the process of deepening your own practice, you learn better how to guide others through their own. In this course we teach you to start from where you are and, by fully grasping the present, creating a better future.
- You can only teach what you know. So we focus more than half of the training on the asanas themselves with a heavy emphasis on precise alignment for effectiveness and safety.
- Likewise, we provide you with a practical, accessible and necessary awareness of the anatomy of asana. The objective for our anatomy course is that you know what you are talking about when you tell your students what to do with their bodies. It is here that you learn how to work in asana and why it’s important to be aware of risk and how to avoid it without fear.
- For a physical practice to be called a yoga practice, there are a few requirements. We aren’t big on rules at YogaPoser, but we do think you should know what makes what you practice and teach something called yoga. So, we’ve created a user-friendly, holistic application of the yoga philosophy that transforms physical poses into tools for learning how to live life better.
Our experience is that with these tools, graduates can teach confidently and creatively in their own unique voice while staying true to the deep purpose of yoga practice.