Yoga Teacher Training

The practice of gratitude has deep roots in yoga, with even the earliest yogic texts—like Patanjali’s  Yoga Sutras , compiled prior to 400 CE—encouraging positive emotion practices as a way to combat a negative state of mind. In Sanskrit, the word for gratefulness is  Kritajna  formed from the root words  krita,  meaning “cultivated or acquired,” and  jna,  referring to “a state of consciousness or awareness.” Modern research continues to emphasize the importance of gratitude, revealing that fostering conscious gratefulness can  boost your immune system, increase your energy and creativity, and create a deeper feeling of connection  with others. Gratitude alone is a simple and easy practice, but I’ve found that when combined with the power of yoga, it is even more powerful. 8 Simple Ways to Practice Yoga for Gratitude 1. Set a gratitude intention The first and best place to begin adding gratitude to your yoga practice is ...

Within yoga’s ability to create total well-being, lies its ability to reduce excess weight through burning calories, boosting metabolism and encouraging a healthy lifestyle. Yoga is not a quick fix, but can be an excellent long-term holistic approach to loosing excess weight – and keeping it off. Not only that, yoga creates many other positive changes: improves self-esteem, increases mental focus, reduces stress, promotes flexibility and increases strength and balance. Metabolism is the chemical processes that create energy in the body that are regulated by the endocrine system, especially the thyroid. Yoga has a powerful stimulating and strengthening effect on the endocrine organs and thus can boost metabolism to burn more calories. The twisting and compressing of the yoga postures massage the internal endocrine organs regulating their function and improving local circulation. But even with yoga’s effect on metabolism, the age-old weight loss formula of reducing calorie intake and...

Eighty percent of Americans develop back pain at some point in their lives due to injury, overuse or disease. Yoga is an excellent therapy for healing sore and injured back muscles, reducing recovery time, preventing re-injury, and reducing the risk of disability from back pain. Yoga helps alleviate lower back pain by strengthening and stretching the muscles of the lower back, reducing inflammation and increasing circulation of blood and prana. Regular yoga practice also improves posture and body mechanics, relieving pain and preventing injury by keeping the spine in proper alignment. In a 1985 survey, 96% of respondents who practiced yoga reported relief from persistent back pain, compared to 23% who were seeing neurosurgeons Many conditions can cause back pain, and most of these can be helped and treated with a conscious and gentle yoga practice. All cases of moderate to severe back pain need to be evaluated by a medical professional for a correct diagnosis and proper treatment p...

Diabetes is a complex condition with a multitude of metabolic imbalances involving the regulation and utilization of insulin and glucose (sugar) in the body. Effecting over 18 million Americans, Diabetes is currently considered an epidemic disease that is largely preventable and treatable through diet, exercise and lifestyle changes. Yoga’s effectiveness at preventing and treating diabetes is due to its emphasis of a healthy diet and lifestyle as well as its ability to balance the endocrine system, massage and tone the abdominal organs, stimulate the nervous and circulatory systems, and reduce stress. Exercise is a highly effective part of diabetes treatment because it increases insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar. Many studies have reported the beneficial effect of the practice of yoga on diabetes, confirming that the practice of postures can stimulate the insulin producing cells in the pancreas. Yoga has also been proven helpful for weight management, blood sugar control, ...