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Modo Yoga teacher training: Why you should do it

I am 65 years old and didn’t start practicing yoga until my early 50s to see if it would help me deal with the stress of a very demanding legal career.

I practiced criminal law as a Crown Attorney in Toronto (Canada) for 25 years. Before becoming a lawyer I got my MSW and practiced social work also in Toronto for five years.

I am now retired and yoga is a very important part of my life. It helps me deal with the different challenges of being retired, like who am I now? Why am I here? What can I still contribute? What is the meaning of my life now? You know all those simple questions that still need to be pondered

About four years after I started practicing, the studio had moved to the Uptown location (Toronto, Can.) and I was loving my practice.

I was working full time then and had to really work hard at fitting it in to my schedule but the 6:30 a.m. classes were my salvation.

I often say introducing yoga into my life saved my life. I had a very stressful, high profile, demanding career and yoga was the only thing that helped me deal with the stress and anxiety.

In the beginning it was all about the poses and using my body and now, many years later, it is all about the emotional and mental discipline and the meditative part of yoga.

I went from dancer’s pose being my favourite to savasana.

About four or five years into my practice, I heard people talking about training to teach Modo Yoga.

Then I heard Ted and Jess were doing a training in India. I decided that I wanted to go.

I did not want to teach, I just wanted to deepen my personal practice and learn more about this yoga I loved.

I wanted to learn and I thought what better place to learn yoga then in India, the motherland of yoga.

I thought this is a chance to do something I love in a place I had always wanted to go with a group of like-minded people.

I didn’t know any students who were going but Ted said I was welcome to join them so I was in.

The month in India doing the training is still one of my favourite travel learning experiences and I have had many.

I like learning and I like traveling so it was an amazing combination. I met people I would have never met otherwise and some of those people are still in my life.

I didn’t go with the intention of teaching, and I never changed that intention. I did what I wanted and that was to deepen my practice.

It was a major turning point in my practice. It changed my appreciation of yoga.

I saw the complexity and the layers which I never would have seen had I just continued practicing.

When I came back from the training, I didn’t do the things required to be a teacher. I was back into my full time job.

The training had served its purpose, which was to take me and my practice to a different level.

I am now retired and people ask me all the time if I am interested in teaching and I always say, “No.”

I had a job and I don’t want my yoga practice to be my job. I love being an ambassador for yoga and I love encouraging people to try yoga, but I don’t want it to be an obligation.

I love my teachers and I really appreciate their diligence and commitment, especially the ones who take their teaching seriously and continue to learn so they can share that with me but I don’t need to be one of them.

I have nothing against yoga retreats in fact I have done a number of them with teachers from my studio, but they have a different focus.

They are not as demanding and challenging. Like anything else you pretty much get what you put in. The personal goals are different. And the people around you have different goals.

In a training setting you are with people who take this seriously. It is like any other professional training.

So, if you want to relax and deepen your practice on your own terms then go to a retreat. If you want to dig deep into yourself and the practice of yoga while being surrounded by supportive, friendly, non- judgmental people, then training is the way to go.

I am so glad I took the training when I did. It really did make me look at things from a totally different perspective. I have returned from retreats and after a month or less the effects have worn off.

Every time I take a yoga class I reignite the things I learned during the training. I listen to the teachers differently.

I listen to my body differently because I learned what was going on in my body. The effects still linger.

I took my training in 2007 and this is now 2015. I was looking for something to help me deal with life and I found it. I practice every day. I read a lot. I want to continue learning about yoga and the philosophy behind it.

I am even thinking of going to Nepal to visit Lumbini, the birth place of Buddha. The learning and the adventure continues.

— namaste, Donna

What is ‘savasana’ and why do we all need it?

Savasana (shah-VAH-sah-nah or shih-VAH-snah) is the final resting pose at the end of almost every yoga practice – including the Modo Yoga series.

Savasana is likely the first Sanskrit word learned by yoga students, and it often quickly becomes their favourite.

It brings with it images of calmness, rest and relaxation, of drifting away, and sometimes even napping, as a well-exercised body and relaxed mind settle into the mat at the end of a practice.

The word itself can be broken down into “asana” (posture) and “sava” (corpse).

Savasana, quite literally, means “Corpse Pose” – which doesn’t exactly bring such peaceful images to mind, does it?

But that’s the point.

Not only is a corpse’s physical body perfectly still; its mind is still, too. Completely still. Not awake and thinking about the just-finished yoga practice or lists of things to do after class, not asleep and dreaming.

Just still.

This complete stillness in mind and body is the goal of savasana, which for most people makes it both the easiest pose physically, and the most challenging pose mentally and/or emotionally.

A lot happens in our bodies during savasana, despite (and because of) our stillness. Savasana offers the body rest after a yoga practice.

It is a time when our musculo-skeletal and nervous systems integrate the practice we just finished; a time when the fight-flight-or-freeze states that typify the majority of our daily lives take a back seat and the rest-and-digest mechanisms in our parasympathetic nervous systems take the driver’s seat; a time when our digestive and immune systems function best; and, a time when our minds become more calm and clear.

But, as is true with all kinds of meditation (and savasana is meant to be a type of mediation practice), it’s almost impossible to not think.

Our brains want to think…it’s what they do!

On the mental level, savasana provides the opportunity to take a break from active thinking and be present in the moment with the sensations of the body: the sweat trickling down our foreheads and ribcages, the rise and fall of our bellies as we breathe, the support of our mats beneath us.

The challenge is to turn off active thinking and simply observe these sensations without letting yourself get caught up in the stories that might accompany them.

For example, the warmth of the room and sweat on your body could easily bring memories of the time you spent on that beach during your vacation last winter, and of how delicious those piña coladas were, and about how you can’t wait for your trip to Cuba next month and…

To be in stillness and silence with ourselves is often a very difficult thing to do, which is one of the reasons why so many of us tend to keep ourselves so busy — to avoid feeling the discomfort that can arise when we are still.

But savasana provides the chance to step back and just notice what we’re thinking and feeling without clinging to those thoughts and feelings.

To observe them without judging them as either good or bad, or pleasant or unpleasant, but instead just letting them be what they are.

The physical and mental benefits of savasana are profound in their own right, but savasana is also a sacred time for some practitioners — a time when they are able to let go of emotions that have been trapped in their bodies, or to feel connected to something larger than themselves.

This is why, as yoga teachers, we invite our students to stay in savasana for as long as they can, and to resist the impulse to jump up and rush out the door two seconds after the teacher says “namaste” so they can dive back into crossing things off their lists of things to do.

It is also why we ask them to leave as quietly as they can when it is time to go, to maintain as quiet a space as possible for as long as possible for those who have chosen to remain present with themselves on their mats in savasana.

The Modo Yoga series is a wonderful sequence of poses designed to stretch and strengthen the entire body, but it is final savasana that many teachers would consider one of the most important poses in the series, as the main purpose of the entire practice is really to prepare the mind and body for the myriad benefits of Savasana.

I hope this post has inspired you to view Savasana from a new perspective and invite you to explore its gifts more deeply as you continue your yoga journey.

— namaste, Andrew

Yoga was the anchor in the storm when Andrew Jobe‘s marriage dissolved, and he now strives to help others through yoga and Reiki in the way that they helped him. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario, Can. with his family, where he runs his own business guiding fellow yogis and yoginis and offering Reiki treatments, writing and editing services, bird surveys, and birdwatching courses.  His favourite asana is Reclining Pigeon.