Teacher training this weekend was a lot of fun. This was presentation month, so each trainee gave a presentation on the topic of our choice. My topic was “yoga for great sex”, and my presentation went really well – everyone had a good time and a lot of laughs, and I got to share a lot of good information. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting all that info here for you!
Other presentation topics included yoga for natural childbirth, yoga for lower back pain, yoga for athletes, yoga for children, devotional music, yoga for anxiety and depression, yoga for post-traumatic stress disorder, yoga for martial artists, and the chakras. Everyone did a really fantastic job of researching each topic and presenting what they’d learned. Each of us could easily have done a 30- or 60-minute presentation instead of just 15 minutes!
At the end of Saturday’s session, we spent some time going over specific yoga asanas and talking about proper alignment, common problems, and how to help a student with those problems. We did this once before, last spring, and it was just as helpful this weekend as it was back then. I’ve practiced yoga for over eight years but there are still poses I don’t fully understand, and even for the poses I do know well, I don’t necessarily know the problems that a beginning student or student with limited mobility might have. These things are really important to know! Now I feel a lot more comfortable teaching basic poses like wide-legged standing forward fold or head-to-knee pose.
Our homework for this next month is to read the Upanishads and to keep track of any questions we might have as we read. N says that we shouldn’t try to sit down and read a bunch of them; it’ll be more effective to read just one upanishad and then take a break. They’re not thematically linked (well, other than they’re all about experiences of higher consciousness) so we don’t need to read them all at once, and it’s better not to, to give the material more time to sink in. We also have to do two posture write-ups this month, just on any pose we want to learn more about.
Since I probably won’t have a lot of posts to make about the Upanishads until later in the month, this works out well for the blog – I’ll finish up our series on yoga and emotions and also get started on all the fabulous yoga and sex material! I’m so excited to share this with you!
Rox Does Yoga 
I know I don’t comment that often, but really, Rox, this blog is a delight to read. I’m always looking forward to your posts; they’re fun to read and really informative. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us!
Thanks so much, Sophie! 🙂
… yoga for post-traumatic stress disorder…
I’m personally curious, since the reason I started yoga was to manage PTSD, but do you remember anything about this presentation?
That presentation focused specifically on how yoga can help prison inmates. There have been a number of studies on yoga helping PTSD in war veterans but not much has been done on yoga for PTSD in convicts, so that’s where my friend focused her research, since in a prison environment, yoga has to be handled a little differently than in a typical class, and the yoga mindset, meditation, etc will have to have a different focus for someone who is literally imprisoned. It was an interesting presentation! I do remember that she talked a little about PTSD in general: apparently doctors and psychiatrists prescribe a bunch of different things to help those with PTSD, most of which can be found in a regular yoga practice. I get the sense that yoga hasn’t been studied very much as a treatment for PTSD, but it could totally be helpful for someone suffering from PTSD no matter what the environment.