Continuing Education Courses for Yoga Teachers and Yoga Therapists

Three years ago, I went to Boston for a weekend workshop on addressing chronic pain with mindfulness meditation. It was advertised as a Continuing Education Course for yoga teachers, and was taught by a famous neuroscientist. I was very excited because the topic of chronic pain management through mind training interests me greatly. So I spent money on the workshop (it wasn’t cheap), airfare and hotel, hoping to get some useful insights. The weekend was lovely and the information was interesting, but if you ask me about it now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you one single thing that I learned over that weekend. The slides we were promised never materialized, my notes were hectic and a bit random, and none of that information had any applicability in my real client work.

Does any of that sound familiar? As yoga teachers, we constantly strive for new knowledge, sign up for all sorts of Continuing Education Courses, and often those courses don’t add up to much. In my experience, there are some consistent issues with Continuing Education Courses for yoga teachers that I often encounter. These courses can be:

• Too long—most of the time I am not looking for a whole new certification program;
• Too broad—I prefer to zoom in on a specific topic, instead of having a little bit of everything;
• Too foundational—I do not need to build my knowledge from the ground up, I already have a certain foundation that I want to build upon;
• Too theoretical—I want to be able to actually apply the knowledge I gain from the course in my life and my teaching;
• Too unaccountable—I prefer to have some sort of accountability on whether or not I was able to absorb and retain the information that was offered.

I have complained about those shortcomings to my fellow yoga therapists on many occasions, and finally we decided to do something about it! This is how YT SkillUP was born.

YT SkillUP is a new platform that will offer Continuing Education Courses to Yoga Teachers and Yoga Therapists on very specific, relevant topics. I teamed up with two fabulous experienced Yoga Therapists Rachel Lanzerotti (MSW, E-RYT500, IAYT-Certified Yoga Therapist) and Mary Hilliker (E-RYT500, IAYT-Certified Yoga Therapist, Registered Nutritionist). Each one of us brings a unique perspective and decades of specialized yoga teaching experience.

Here is what you can expect from every Continuing Education Course on YT SkillUP:

• Fresh, relevant content that stems from decades of study and decades of practical teaching experience,
• Narrow focus on a specific topic so that you get exactly what you need,
• Easy to follow and navigate prerecorded video format,
• A printed study guide to apply this content in your own life and teaching,
• A final project assignment at the end of the course that gets reviewed and commented on by your teacher.

Our courses build on the foundation of your existing knowledge and aim to expand and deepen that knowledge. They are approved for CECs by Yoga Alliance and IAYT. We will cover a wide range of topics, including information on:

• Working with specific populations and/or conditions (older students, pregnant women, students with back pain, etc.),
• Using different yogic techniques to achieve better outcomes for your students,
• Sorting out business aspects of yoga (how to get more students, how to build referral networks, how to teach Yoga Therapy groups, workshops or retreats, etc.),
• Organizing your private yoga practice (how to keep client records, what to include in intake forms, how to make your website more effective, etc.).

We can’t wait to get started! Check out this short video to get a better idea of how YT SkillUP will work and take a peak at YT SkillUP website to see which courses are currently in the works >