Te acher zone
With yoga teacher trainings on the rise, Sarah Oakley explores the growing
popularity for online home study courses
A
yoga teacher training is a
journey which can now take
many forms. When it comes
to choosing to advance your
skills, my advice would be
to have a good look around at different
training bodies – and then go with your
gut! One of those options is online yoga
teacher training.
I established my yoga teacher training
business YogaGro in 2012, and now have
over 300 graduates worldwide. However,
YogaGro didn’t start out as online training. I
spent many years training students face-to-
face and I loved it.
However, a year after starting, my
husband’s long-term battle with ME/Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) took a turn for the
worse and he has been housebound and
often bed-bound since. With my new role as
a carer, and with two young children and no
family close by for support, I soon realisedthat organising and running face-to-face
training intensives (with the long days and
presence I would want to give) was no longer
a possibility.
Yet my passion still burned inside. So for
me, it was time to step out of the classic
structures of yoga teacher training and
embrace change.
While many of us would love to pop over
to an ashram or retreat for a month it’s not
always possible to take time out of your
daily routine and to devote yourself to yoga
in this way. My most popular training is
Prenatal, Postnatal and Fertility Yoga and,
indeed, it is mostly mothers who train with
YogaGro. When you become a mum it is easy
to put your hopes and desires on the back-
burner and get lost in all the daily chores.
But I hope to show new mums that you
can be a good mother and follow your
dreams at the same time. You totally can
if you desire! So, with faith that there wereothers out there with a passion to train that
I could serve, and whose needs I could cater
for, I made the decision to make YogaGro
training as flexible and as accessible as
possible by going online.
Five years ago I stood pretty much alone
in that market. However, I now have a whole
new set of online yoga teacher training
buddies to proudly sit alongside who have
also taken the same leap.
One of them is Gayle Berry from Bossom
and Berry Baby Massage and Yoga:
“I decided to offer online courses because
my vision was to share my message of
the importance of nurturing touch, love
and connection for babies and children
across the globe. To be able to provide
training courses in person would have been
expensive and complicated to organise, so
by creating an online hub of my courses
and then sharing them with students across
the world my reach has been far greater.The RISE of the
ONLINE YOGA SCHOOL