• Application & Tuition

........................................................................

The Piedmont Yoga Studio’s Teacher Training and Advanced Studies program:

Beginning and Ending Dates: September 8, 2011 to June 28, 2012
Program Director: Baxter Bell
Program Coordinator: Caryn Dickman
Faculty: Baxter Bell, Ann Dyer, Mary Paffard, Richard Rosen, Vickie Russell Bell, Yoko Yoshikawa
Location: 3966 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611
Mailing Address: Piedmont Yoga Studio, P.O. Box 11458, Oakland, CA 94611
Voice Mail: (510) 652-3336
E-mail: pys@piedmontyoga.com
Website: www.piedmontyoga.com
Studio Director: Richard Rosen

Piedmont Yoga’s 200-hour Deep Yoga training program began its first 10-month cycle in September 2007, when it was known as Advanced Studies. We’re now ready to begin our fifth cycle, having graduated more than 75 students from the previous four programs. Our faculty and staff are especially eager to begin this year’s program because we’ve all put in many hours of collaborative work/meetings, e-mails, and more meetings!--to revise and enrich the curriculum. At the first in this series of faculty get-togethers we asked ourselves two questions:

Is Deep Yoga the kind of program we would like to attend if we were still students? What we would like a graduate of Deep Yoga to know and be able to do. The first thing we all readily agreed on was that while each of us has in some way been influenced by the Iyengar approach to alignment and sequencing, we were nevertheless determined to keep our program open to the best ideas of all modern yoga schools. At the same time we wanted to make sure our students understood and respected the long yoga tradition, which includes, though many students are unaware of it, a long-standing association with Buddhism. We concluded that what we all would most want in a training program was a blend of and balance between what traditional yoga calls the ‘pairs-of-opposites.’ So we’ve organized the DY program to be on the one hand highly structured and methodical, on the other hand eclectic and improvisational; on the one hand thoroughly modern in its approach, on the other, resolutely traditional; on the one hand philosophical and speculative, on the other down-to-earth. We feel in this way the student will come out of the program with a working knowledge of the best of both worlds, the structured but also the freewheeling, the old and the new, the theoretical and the practical.

We’ve retained many aspects of the established program because they’ve worked well over the last four years and served our students’ needs. We’ll continue to offer two training tracks running side by side, the Teacher Training (TT) track for aspiring teachers, and the Advanced Studies (AS) track for experienced students whose only goal is to expand their knowledge and practice of yoga. Each of these tracks will in the course of their study fulfill the requirements of the Yoga Alliance for its 200-hour certification. We’ll again spread the program hours out over 10 months, from September 2011 through June 2012, and continue to meet once a week on Thursday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 pm and one Saturday afternoon and evening a month (usually the first Saturday of the month) from 1:30 to 8:00 pm. We think this schedule gives our students sufficient leeway to study intensively and yet at the same time fulfill their day-to-day responsibilities to family, friends and work. We’ll also continue to pair each student with one of our faculty members, who will serve as his/her mentor for the entire program. For more on this see Mentor-Student Sambandha.

One aspect of the DY program that we think sets it a little apart from other 200-hour programs stems from Piedmont Yoga’s dedication to bringing yoga to everyone, regardless of age or physical ability. If you look at our schedule you’ll see we hold classes for a variety of special populations, such as people with physical disabilities, with Parkinson’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis, for kids, teenagers, seniors and more. As a student in the DY program you’ll be able to observe these classes and, with the teacher’s permission, serve as an assistant, learning not only how to work with special populations but how to apply this skill to just about anyone who comes to one of your classes.

The three main changes we made last year have worked so well, we’ll continue them this year: involve the timing of the classes, the content of some of the classes, and the length of the program. Based on the experience we’ve gained from our previous programs, through our extensive program review, and taking into account comments solicited from our DY students, we’ve first streamlined the program’s structure to make it more focused; secondly, made its content more relevant for the modern student, especially that of the Philosophy section; and third, given the teacher trainees a greater opportunity to practice and perfect their craft in a controlled setting.

This means that now Anatomy and Kinesiology with Baxter Bell, MD, will run throughout the first four months of the program, alternating with classes on the Anatomy of Asana. We believe this will help our students get a better grasp on anatomical principles and how they relate to asana and movement, certainly an important aspect of the practice whether you’re a teacher or just a student.

Then in the spring of 2012, once the 20 hours of anatomy are completed, we’ll shift our attention to 30 hours of Yoga Philosophy and History with Richard Rosen and Yoko Yoshikawa. We spent many hours discussing the relevance of traditional yoga philosophy to modern practice, teaching, and living in the world. We finally settled on a two-stage presentation: the first stage will lay the foundation for the study of modern yoga by examining yoga’s traditional roots through the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutra and the later development of Hatha Yoga. Stage 2 will then build on this, looking into the history and philosophy of modern Hatha Yoga, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, and its many offshoots. We hope by this to shine a new light on popular notions of yoga today, and give you a historical context for your own practice and teaching.

Our faculty recognized the need to spend more time guiding TT track students in a class room-like setting, which couldn’t easily be done within the 200-hour framework. So thinking outside the Yoga Alliance mandated box, we added an extra 25 ‘graduate’ hours to give our TT track students the opportunity to practice their teaching skills in a simulated class room setting under the watchful eyes of our faculty. To this end we’ve scheduled once again this year, two 12-hour weekend intensives (to meet on Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and evening, and Sunday afternoon), one in January, at the halfway point of the program, and the other in late May near program’s end.

Finally, in order to give you a chance to meet all the faculty in the first month of the program, and likewise allow each of us to meet with you all, September will be dedicated to asana practice, with a different faculty member leading the class each week and on the first Saturday session.  Then come the first of October, Anatomy sessions will alternate with other topics every other week.

We are excited about the continued evolution and improvement in our program and are looking forward to another great group of new students to join us!