Hosting your own yoga workshop is the next logical step for any Yoga teacher who develops a greater interest in the intimate details of the practice. After practicing for a while you come to realize that you are particularly good in some areas of Yoga practice. Maybe you make a name for yourself as the best teacher for niyamas and yamas, or maybe your students rave about how good you are at creating creative flows through giving adjustments.
However, while hosting a workshop can be a great way to increase your income, you need to know how to have a successful workshop. The first step to having a great workshop is choosing a few core topics. This guide provides several topic ideas to get you started on executing and planning a yoga workshop.
Teaching Meditation
This type of workshop will teach the basics of how to lead meditation classes so that it can become a joyful and more accessible experience for the students. Taking either a practice, discussion or lecture format, you can cover several meditation techniques such as how best to teach visualization, counting, tantric micro-practice, and the basic breathing techniques that include classical mantra, and heart-centered mantra.
The Business and Profession of Yoga
This could be a very powerful workshop topic that a lot of Yoga teachers will be interested in. Some of the topics to focus on include marketing for yoga teachers, how to handle compensation, how to write your yoga teacher resume, yoga teacher livelihood and lifestyle, and professional ethics. For the most part, this will be geared towards beginner or intermediate yoga teachers and hence could also include how to position oneself as a yoga studio of choice, and the nuts and bolts of how to grow a Yoga Studio business, or even transition into private yoga lessons to earn more money.
Integrating Mind, Body, and Spirit
This workshop topic will teach the participants how to teach arm and hip balances to students with proper compassion, intelligence, patience, and integration. Unlike in your normal studio class, you will go deeper into the basic elements of the asanas and how all these come together to form the fuller asana. Teaching arm and hip balances, the participants will practice how to connect body and mind to develop personal freedom, confidence, and equanimity. It is always better to practice all the Asanas rather than just reading theory and hence this workshop will involve a lot of practical work in groups.
The Science and Art of Sequencing
One of my all-time favorite workshop ideas as it encompasses practically all the poses you could ever think of. How you go about this is to teach the participants about the basics of ordering poses. For many beginner yoga teachers, ordering poses is not quite as intuitive. As such, this lesson teaches why a certain pose comes before another based on subtle energetics, biomechanics, and functional anatomy. Another important part of this lesson is that it will teach your participants how to make their asanas deeply satisfying, accessible and as safe as they can be for their students. The best way to do this is by opening with a lecture on how the different poses follow each other. This will then be followed by small group discussions on the theoretical foundations of kinesiology, biomechanics, and functional anatomy and how these affect the practice of the asanas.
The Relationship between Inversions, Arm Balances and Core Practices
This workshop will provide an in-depth look inversion poses, arm balances, and application of core practices. Going deeper into the subfamilies, we can design a lesson on how to perform standing balances, external rotation, and internal rotation. The most common challenges that students face in the yoga class will be explored with the yoga teachers discussing their experiences in an open session. To make the lesson richer, also include how the teacher can best observe student challenges then using a variety of props modify the lesson to help the student get a lot more from the session.
Creating workshops is another great way to earn revenue and promote yourself as an expert yoga teacher. If you need a little assistance in creating a great workshop, considering getting a copy of No Prep Yoga Plans. It contains some relevant information that can help you plan a meditation workshop, sequencing, or even integrating the mind, body, and spirit. I highly recommend No Prep Yoga Plans which has both a Inspirational and Faith-based version. No Prep Yoga Plans is like the Cliffnotes of Yoga for new yoga teachers. It contains yoga sequences, guided meditations, inspirational openers, and much more. To download a free sample, visit No Prep Yoga Plans.
