More pictures

Ana, diggin' her poem and her heart-based theme...
Darren, listening and thinking...

Jen

Jen, smiling for the camera

Jeremiah

Kristin and Jesse sharing notes

Pamela, nailing her theme and well, delighting in the knowledge that she hit a home run.

The Goddess Brigitte...

The Kula... Another fun day of teacher training. I think this training would make a better 100-hour training than a 20-hour training. There is so much material to cover and so many different points to clarify and I had such an ambitious agenda in mind. (Surprise, surprise, me having an ambitious agenda!) So we covered about half of what I had planned to cover today but also a ton of stuff I hadn't planned at all so I think it worked out well and the majority of it proved useful.

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This is sequencing within a sequencing within sequencing for me since I had to sequence the content of the weekend and then within that sequence the classes and exercises that illustrate the overall concepts and then address the spur of the moment issues that arise with appropriately sequenced responses and really, it is never dull. (Certainly, moments of glazing over and overload have transpired but I do not think it has been dull for any of us.

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Really, it is such a great group of teachers and students. And just plain awesome people. I was thinking this morning that many of us started the Immerison together last August and now, after 108-hours of Immersion studies and nearly 50-hours of teacher training, a lot of classes and workshops and practices later, we are really bonded. I love that about our method. It creates and at times, demands, that we go deeply into relationships with one another and really commit- not just to a workshop, not just to a yoga method, but to really helping each other learn and grow as people as well as practitioners and teachers. What a miracle and what a blessing it is to have each other. It just blows me away. Truly.

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We spent this morning working on developing heart-based themes from poems. (Read the poem, answer the following questions: 1. What is the message of the poem? 2. How does the message relate to Anusara Yoga philosophy? 3. How does the message relate to the grand purposes of yoga? 4. How does it relate to the class you are going to teach? And there, my friends, is your recipe for making a theme based on a poem or a reading.) It went so well. It was just an awesome feeling for me to watch people really get the simplicity of making themes and to see the lights come on and the confidence that followed the practice teaching that we did with setting the theme. So fun.

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Then we worked on pacing and vocal tone a bit with some partner exercises and then we broke for lunch.

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We spent the afternoon with Concepts for Teaching Beginners. We talked a lot about how one might sequence a Beginning Series and I demonstrated how I would teach the first night of a beginning series by teaching a mock, beginning series class. As we debriefed that class, we got into a discussion of "what to do with this or that" and I did some impromptu teaching examples of how to sequence poses to make them more accessible; how to break poses down and use the actions that come easily in certain poses to teach that same action that comes with more difficulty in a different pose. Like teaching shalabasana to help students learn how to lift their chest in trikonasana and so on.

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Sequencing is awesome and huge because once you open up one aspect of the subject several other avenues of possibility also get opened. Really, 100-hours would not even be long enough. But my main agenda in a weekend like this is not covering every possible way something could be done but to show a few ways that spark people's creativity so that the principles of sequencing then begin to guide us to our own creative expression. (For when we know the principles (Chit) we can express them in creative and delightful ways.(Ananda)

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Really, it is all chit-ananda, baby.