February 21, 2016 - March 5, 2016
Directed by Don Stapleton, Ph. D.
February 21, 2016 - March 5, 2016
Directed by Don Stapleton, Ph. D.
As presented by Don Stapleton in his book, Self Awakening Yoga: The Expansion of Consciousness through the Body’s Own Wisdom, the Self-Awakening Yoga Therapeutics Teacher Training is a 100-Hour immersion that provides yoga teachers and therapists with professional experience, knowledge and therapeutic skills that can support a diverse student base.
Grounded in the latest research in neuroscience and neurobiology, Self Awakening Yoga® explores the self-learning process that arises from focusing mental attention on bodily sensation. Through easy-to-practice actions, practitioners relearn the natural patterns of movement that unfolded throughout each of the developmental cycles, from birth to maturity. These pleasurable movements free us to move the way the body is designed to move, and result in the feeling of being at home within our own bodies.
Through increased attention, we learn how to enter a state of embodied, meditative awareness. By moving slowly, we allow the body to learn through experience and respond to the internal inquiries, “What wants to happen?” “What wants to open?” “What would feel more pleasurable?” The result is that you establish the ability to witness yourself “As Is.”
What will I be learning?
In the process of Self-Awakening Yoga you learn to become your own best teacher. You learn to use your body's signals to devise new and effective ways of entering into movement and postures that may seem difficult or challenging. By slowing down and listening to the messages your body sends through increased sensation and by listening to your body’s wisdom, you will always discover possibilities that you never noticed before. The Self-Awakening methodology is experiential and provides a lifetime of tools for self-awareness and practice.
Course includes daily workshops, demonstrations, small group exercises and practice sessions with partners that delve into the neuromuscular physiology, benefits and contraindications, learning psychology and skills for designing individualized sequences of therapeutic movement that take your students and clients through progressive stages of practice.
Expand your skills as a yoga educator/therapist beyond modifying and adapting yoga asanas
• As an experienced yoga teacher, you may already be skilled in modifying poses and asanas to adapt to the individual needs of students in your classroom. But on a purely physical, therapeutic basis, not all students coming to a yoga class can or should begin with traditional yoga postures—no matter how creative or inventive we become in helping them achieve the results they are expecting.
• Beyond making modifications and adjustments that make it possible to use specific postures for alignment, or specific postures for particular organs or glands, you will learn to tune in to a deeper possibility than using effort and routine adjustments can achieve. Leaning to tune-in to this is the foundation for assisting any student into a yoga journey that will be supportive and fulfilling for a lifetime.
• Take home a wealth of practical tools that will transform the way you and your students/clients practice yoga
As a teacher or therapist, this training will free you from the boundaries of techniques, authorities and experts, and even pre-existing yoga systems. Instead, accessing your inner teacher becomes a source of intuitive guidance that will bring a depth of insight into your individualized offerings with group and one-on-one clients.
Includes a workbook with experience guides and educational methodology for creating your own Self-Awakening Yoga curriculum and professional practice.
Suggested Reading: Self-Awakening Yoga: The Expansion of Consciousness through the Body's Own Wisdom, by Don Stapleton Ph.D., Healing Arts Press, 2004.
Required for 300-Hour Advanced Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Required for comprehensive 500-Hour Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Required for 1000-Hour Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Applies towards Continuing Education Credits for Yoga Alliance CEU
Course Syllabus
• Develop a repertoire of invigorating warm-up movements that:
o Engage the whole body and stimulate vivid sensations that draw mental awareness to the physical feelings arising in the body
o Awaken awareness to muscular-skeletal alignment, relationship to gravity and flow of breath.
o Begin with large physical movements and slowly progress in speed and momentum to activate circulation of blood, lymphatic fluids and increase lung capacity
• Learn conditioning movements for muscle groups and joints that prepare the body for specific yoga asanas:
o Develop concentration by focusing awareness on physical feelings that arise from inside the body through slow, deliberate, repetitive movements that target specific muscle groups
o Develop kinesthetic and proprioceptive awareness
o Movements that bring attention to efficient and inefficient patterns of alignment and facilitate the release of patterns of habitual movement and protection mechanisms. In returning to the original patterns of movement, new choices emerge that offer greater efficiency and restore a better functional relationship to gravity.
o Movements that emphasize positions for opening specific areas of the body effected by specific asanas
o Alternatives that reveal options for fresh, non-habitual, spontaneous movement and that stimulate differentiation of body segments, dendritic growth and neuromuscular intelligence
o Develop the capacity of witness consciousness, the ability to see oneself without judging the habitual physical, mental and emotional patterns that limit potential for continuous, spontaneous growth
o Empower the learner with the confidence to self-diagnose and self-educate
• Movement inquiry sequences that are designed to slow down mental awareness in order to become present to the “felt-sense of time” in which the body lives
o Movements that induce the state of meditative awareness
o When sensations arise and the force of gravity becomes evenly distributed throughout the body, one releases feelings of being burdened, emotionally drained, and out of control. Conscious re-patterning in the way the body responds to gravity dramatically influences overall health and well-being in all dimensions of the self.
o The principles of Self-Awakening Yoga arise from neuro-muscular developmental stages that are encoded in the body's memory from birth. The sequences you experience in this level reveal fundamental insights into developmental patterns and structural alignment. You establish the ability to witness yourself “As Is”
o The self-awakening learning process enhances functional movement and leads to greater flexibility, reduced pain, and greater ease and pleasure of movement
• Movement sequences that encourage the release of control over movement and allow for a transition into Meditation-In-Motion
o Cultivating one's capacity for relaxed awareness allows for a deep release into the natural flexibility, mobility and balance in your body --without producing strain or fatigue. Going slowly enough to allow the body to learn through experience will access the intelligent life force, Prana that is always at work, supporting your discovery of wholeness.
o For authentic healing and balance to arise, Nosara Yoga Therapeutics trains you to attune your mental awareness to the workings of prana in your body and intuitive wisdom arising from within you. Accessing your inner teacher as a source of intuitive guidance frees you from the illusion that "healing" exists outside of you—in techniques, in the authority of an expert or even a pre-existing yoga system.
o By releasing into the intelligence of Prana , your body begins to respond to the inquiries --"What wants to happen?” “ What wants to open?"
o Through entering meditation-in-motion, you access a level of creativity from which you are able to generate a new future that is worth living into
Understand the learning psychology and therapeutic benefits behind “learning how to learn from our own experience”
• Regardless of what motivates an individual to take on a yoga practice, there is an obscure background conversation that there is something is not quite right with my body, and it’s my job to fix or change myself in some way. “Maybe yoga can help me heal my pain or injuries, or can help me improve my physical appearance, or can help me gain greater ease, flexibility, balance, or strength. Or, maybe even yoga can give me peace of mind and open my heart.”
• All of these background conversations are valid entry points into a yoga learning experience, but it is the job of a yoga educator to shift the dynamic learning process from the misperception that it’s my role to fix or change myself through my own physical, mental or emotional effort. In reality, the physical organism lives in a time and reality that is already connected to the wisdom required to bring about positive, therapeutic change. How do we tap into the natural wisdom that is already present, inherent in the intelligence of the organism? How do we partner with the wisdom of the organism to access a wisdom so profound that it already contains the power of the evolutionary process in every cell and fiber of the body itself?
• Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is something wrong here, and it is my job to fix it, Nosara Yoga Therapeutics begins with the search for pleasure in the sensations that arise in natural movement. By discovering easier and more pleasurable ways to move we are already improving the quality of life by establishing a direct influence on or cognitive functions and emotional well-being.
Expand your skills as a yoga educator/therapist beyond modifying and adapting yoga asanas
• As an experienced yoga teacher, you may already be skilled in modifying poses and asanas to adapt to the individual needs of students in your classroom. But on a purely physical, therapeutic basis, not all students coming to a yoga class can or should begin with traditional yoga postures—no matter how creative or inventive we become in helping them achieve the results they are expecting.
• Beyond making modifications and adjustments that make it possible to use specific postures for alignment, or specific postures for particular organs or glands, you will learn to tune in to a deeper possibility than using effort and routine adjustments can achieve. Leaning to tune-in to this is the foundation for assisting any student into a yoga journey that will be supportive and fulfilling for a lifetime.
• Take home a wealth of practical tools that will transform the way you and your students/clients practice yoga
As a teacher or therapist, this training will free you from the boundaries of techniques, authorities and experts, and even pre-existing yoga systems. Instead, accessing your inner teacher becomes a source of intuitive guidance that will bring a depth of insight into your individualized offerings with group and one-on-one clients.
Includes a workbook with experience guides and educational methodology for creating your own Self-Awakening Yoga curriculum and professional practice.
Suggested Reading: Self-Awakening Yoga: The Expansion of Consciousness through the Body's Own Wisdom, by Don Stapleton Ph.D., Healing Arts Press, 2004.
Required for 300-Hour Advanced Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Required for comprehensive 500-Hour Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Required for 1000-Hour Nosara Yoga Teacher Training
Applies towards Continuing Education Credits for Yoga Alliance CEU
Editing to be continued from here downward