People usually come for yoga teacher training for one of two reasons:
Either they are already yoga practitioners and may not be sure about teaching but they want to learn more about yoga and deepen their own practice or they are people who already know they want to teach yoga and have come to learn the skills and get the experience and certification they need to be able to teach yoga effectively.
At Sunstone Yoga Academy, we offer two different ways of learning to teach yoga. There is the intensive program or the weekend version. Which one people select will depend a lot on what they want to achieve and how much time they have available and what their lifestyles are (jobs, family, etc).
With the intensive version, it goes from Monday to Friday from 6:30 am until almost 8:30 pm and includes 3 practice classes a day in addition to all the other learning that is happening. This can be scary for people who don’t have a set practice yet, but it is ideal for someone who has a regular practice of 4-5 classes per week (we have had people come in with steady practices of fewer classes per week than that, but the challenge can be greater for them). The intensive version results in the 200 hour yoga teacher training certification within 4 weeks, or the 500 hour yoga teacher certification within 8 weeks.
The weekend version is not quite as intense – it’s 8 am until 6 pm Saturday and Sundays with five weekends on, then one weekend off. It includes one practice class per day in addition to all the other learning that is going on. Most of the physical yoga practice is done by students during the week & we focus on the classroom training during the weekend. To get to the 200 hour yoga teacher certification, a student will do two sets of five weekends (with the one weekend break in between). To achieve the 500 hour yoga teacher certification, the student will do an additional two sets of five weekends (again with a one weekend break in the middle).
Before you are accepted into the teacher training program at Sunstone Yoga Academy, we will talk with you about what you want to achieve and what your level of readiness is. The level of readiness is not defined simply by what type of practice you have, but also by how ready you are to embrace the challenge, what type of support systems you have in place, whether you are ready to commit the time necessary, and a variety of other factors. Contact us today to start this process.
When someone comes in to either of our yoga teacher training programs, they just need to come in with an open mind and be ready to learn. It can be hard to grasp the challenges that will come up as the reality of the level of commitment you have made starts to make itself known, but the potential rewards are huge. New students need to be ready to take on a type of pseudo family, particularly if they are coming in to the intensive progam. The yoga teacher training students will be in a confined space with people they didn’t know previously for forty days. It’s a life changing and dominating experience in a supportive and expert environment.
In your yoga teacher training program, you will find people of all ages. We have young people who have just graduated from high school and come before they go to college; we have retired friends who are ready to try something new; we have people who are transitioning in many ways (some difficult like divorce or health problems, some exciting like career changes or life changes). There are definitely people who come for yoga teacher training from all different age groups, social classes and categories of life experience and training. You never know what you’ll get or what the class mix will be like until the yoga teacher training program starts, and it’s fun to watch and experience how the groups start to meld and who resonates and connects with whom, and why they do.