How to Choose the Right Yoga Teacher Training in Sydney?
How do you find the Right Yoga Teacher Training in Sydney? The list of questions below will help to pick the right one to benefit you.
What is the reputation of the yoga teacher training institution or from where the certification was obtained?
Is the teacher training qualification recognized by the premier yoga body such as the Yoga Alliance of Australia or Yoga Alliance International?
Does the syllabus and its components include all eight limbs of yoga?
Are the yoga teacher training courses and retreats conducted face to face, online or hybrid?
How many hours of homework and hours of personal study and reflection are required during the yoga teacher training programs?
What are the experience and qualifications of the teachers (their specific yogic practises) conducting the yoga and meditation teacher training program
How positive are the reviews and experiences of past students about the teacher training course or yoga teacher training retreat?
Does the yoga training offer a community environment?
Does the yoga training offer the ability and support for continuous education to the newly minted yoga teachers?
What is the duration of the course? Are teaching hours fully covering the said hours?
Does the teacher training include experiential training such as doing trial yoga classes, monitored, and evaluated by a senior teacher and providing feedback?
Does the training enable the students to experience and feel yoga? This is a key reason many yoga enthusiasts do a yoga teacher training but cannot teach successfully.
How long and successfully has the yoga teacher training institution been in in service?
Yoga teacher training qualifications in the modern era have become a requirement, though it does not mean much. Many unregistered schools and online sites offer yoga teacher training programmes conducted by and itself making it quite easy to gain a qualification such as a 200-hour yoga teacher training qualification very quickly.
It is also noted that even though some of these yoga teacher training and immersion programmes say that it will cover or teach yoga and related subjects such as pranayama and meditation to boot, two hundred hours, or three hundred hours or even five hundred hours most of the courses do not actually have the same number of hours that they advertise. They cover it up by saying things like there are many hours we (students) are expected to devote to private practise or that personal practise is required to make up the required number of hours to get the qualification.
It should be mentioned that in the ancient days and in traditional yoga, the yoga teacher never had a paper qualification. He had gained experience and background knowledge by training under a senior guru or teacher himself (they were exclusively men then) for almost 20 to 25 years before they were allowed to even start teaching a straightforward yoga class. Unfortunately, today in the Instagram, Facebook, and other social media era you would find young people who have just completed a 200-hour yoga training programme in countries like Bali or any tropical country whilst on a short holiday and then looking to teach in many places. Even in countries like Australia the industry is not properly regulated or controlled and hence many people can easily gain the required paper qualifications to teach yoga and meditation.
A simple internet search about yoga classes in Sydney or teacher training in Sydney or best yoga teacher training in Sydney will soon reveal to you the true nature and dire state of the industry and how everyone is trying to make money from yoga. This is not only true of Sydney Yoga Schools but all over Australia and the world at large.
So, what is the right yoga teacher training qualification and what should we be looking for to find it?
The above list is a good start. It lists out the major areas you should be looking for and ticking off to ensure you have a decent chance to teach yoga and meditation after your yoga teacher training course.
As the first requirement it is important to recognize that experienced and even registered yoga teachers are much better than simply being a newly minted yoga teacher with 200 or 300 or even five hundred hours. Training from reputed yoga schools such as Mysuru (Mysore) school for ashtanga yoga, Iyengar yoga for alignment and postural teaching and even hot yoga from the Bikram school which are well accepted and recognised as reputed will have greater value rather than online courses and programmes that you can easily get without much effort. For this you will have to invest time, money, and travel.
Strangely many of the fitness professionals who teach in sports facilities and gymnasiums do a two-day gym yoga programme and then they are considered suitable to teach yoga in those sport facilities and gymnasiums. This should be highly discouraged for it causes a lot of risk and a bad reputation to the complete field of yoga. You do not want to be doing a teacher training or even doing a casual yoga class with them.
So, a proper training yoga teacher training school that includes treatment of ailments, breathwork, meditation and some important aspects such as bandhas, kriyas should all be incorporated in this yoga training and integrated to get a complete practise. If these elements are not included and taught comprehensively followed by private and personal experiential based training, then such qualifications have extraordinarily little value.
Hence when choosing a yoga school for your yoga teacher training, it is important that you look at the primary teachers and the main senior teachers to find out how much their qualification means to your practise. Meaning, did they follow the above list to ensure they got the best yoga teacher training themselves. Then follow suit.
