Required for 300-Hour Self-Awakening Yoga Teacher Training
Applies towards Continuing Education Credits for Yoga Alliance CEU

As presented by Brahmanand in his book, Self Awakening Yoga: The Expansion of Consciousness through the Body’s Own Wisdom, the Self-Awakening Therapeutic Essentials 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 Therapeutic Essentials® 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.

The 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.

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.

Suggested Reading: Self-Awakening Yoga: The Expansion of Consciousness through the Body's Own Wisdom, by Don Stapleton Ph.D., Healing Arts Press, 2004.