75 HOURS??? Seriously?

I spent all day yesterday trying to figure out what to do about the Shack's teacher training program. Well -- it wasn't ALL day. I spent the hour of General Hospital finishing a scarf and an hour in the evening watching a Wakefield game from April. (I hate knuckleballers -- i fell asleep and missed Dr. Quinn getting kicked off Dancing. I'm out $5. Stupid knuckleballers...). But I digress... my point was that I thought and researched and stressed ALL day and my conclusion is that it can't be done or more precisely is that I cannot, in good conscience, do it. The Yoga Shack Teacher Training Program registered with the Yoga Alliance will end.

The Yoga Alliance is a wonderful idea. The first election of the second Bush created much panic for the alternative health community. No one knew that a war would soon happen and engulf the focus of the government for many years to come. Massage, yoga, herbs, etc, were just starting to grow in popularity and there was a lot of talk about insurance companies potentially covering alternative or preventative medicine. If that were to come to fruition, we all need the government (or insurance companies) would need to regulate these specialties. Not willing to have the government tell them what they could and couldn't do, some teachers grouped together and started the Yoga Alliance. The idea was to set up their own standards, so should the government later decide that needed standards, they would already be in place. The idea was to let yoga teachers decide what qualifications made a good yoga teacher. So they set up a registry of yoga teachers who had a certain amount of experience or training. The idea is not to license or control who teaches and who doesn't but simply to list teachers who met a certain minimum standards.

So it has become the standard. While it is still not necessary to be "registered", it is becoming the norm and some studios won't hire you if you aren't registered. Some of the best and most experienced teachers that I ever worked with aren't registered. It has become almost a necessity of a teacher training program. Graduates want to be able to register with the Yoga Alliance. So I set up my teacher training program to meet the standards and my graduates registered. Sure I had some complaints about the standards. Like they only require 5 hours of practicuum. FIVE hours of teaching DOES NOT MAKE YOU A TEACHER in any way, shape, or form. They require WAY too much Philosophy and Ethics. Seriously, who can teach someone to be ethical. Some of the most unethical people I've met in my life are Registered Yoga Teachers. But I did what I had to and everyone was relatively happy.

But then they changed their standards. They were subtle changes for the most part, but one stood out and has ruined all the fun. They require 100 hours of yoga techniques. That's not surprising, although it sounds like a lot. The catch is that 75 of these hours can longer be from classes that are open to the general public. They have to be from classes that are ONLY OPEN TO TEACHER TRAINEES. Now I require students to get through the entire primary series in Mysore sessions in order to even qualify for teacher training. This is a tremendous number of hours, much of which is one on one. Students have to memorize the order of the postures, the form and alignment, and the breath. And then, according the Yoga Alliance, I'm supposed to spend 75 hours teaching them (and there will only be a couple) what they already know. And the time would mean 36 5-hour sessions. Seriously???

I get why they made the change. I totally get it. Most yoga students are in the back of a room of 100 people and their teacher never gets off their mat. But that's not how it is here. I'm on my hands and knees teaching each person individually. Their one size fits all set of standards just doesn't fit us.

more rant coming soon....