OmYogaMagazineFebruary2019

YIN YOGA TEACHER

TRAINING AND CHAKRA

MEDITATION IMMERSION

at Yoga Orchid Yinstitute, the institute

for further Yin Yoga Training - lead by

Regina Kerschbaumer

Are you a qualified Yoga Teacher

(200RYT) who needs new inspiration?

Gain deeper understanding and confidence to

incorporate the increasingly popular meditative

practices of Yin Yoga and Chakra meditation

into your classes.

Yin Yoga, Mindfulness,

Chakra Meditations and

Yoga Nidra

Book now for

Module 1 (50hrs)

21 - 27 April

2019

at the exclusive

Le Pena Tarifa Villa,

Spain

100 hour further RYT for

Qualified Yoga Professionals

1st Module - 50hours:

21 - 27 April 2019

Where: Le Pena, Tarifa, Spain

Only 9 spaces left

• Book Now!

“I am looking

forward to sharing

with you my

in-depth knowledge

and passion for

teaching the uniquely

transformative

practice of

Yin Yoga.”

Places are limited book now at

http://www.yogaorchid.com/advanced-training/

or contact Regina at [email protected]

for more details

Regina has trained under Paul Grilley (the

founder of Yin Yoga) and Sarah Powers for

the past 12 years and has over 30 years of

bodywork experience.

Yoga instructor Rebecca Shepherd, who

originally trained in Bikram, explains

what drew her to the ‘yin crowd’

I

n the summer of 2001, never having set foot in a hot yoga

studio, I packed my bags and headed to Los Angeles to

rendezvous with my Florida-based friend to attend the

Bikram Yoga teacher training. By some miracle I survived the

two classes a day for nine weeks and went straight to work

teaching in London’s only hot yoga studio at that time.

However, I was never really happy teaching 16- and 60-year-olds,

ballerinas and brick layers the same sequence of poses in the same

way and I intuitively taught variations for those who needed them.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1979, a teenager called Paul Grilley

who had an innate interest in yoga walked into a bookshop and

picked up ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda.

Intrigued, he too headed to Los Angeles studying with Bikram

Choudhury whose guru Bhishnu Ghosh was the brother of

Yogananda. He became a Kriya Yoga adept studying at the

headquarters of The Self Realisation Fellowship set up by Yogananda

in the 1920s and practiced ashtanga, hanging out with some of

the prominent teachers of the time who would be flown out to

glamorous locations to teach the likes of Sting and Madonna.

Then, one fateful day, Grilley was watching a public access

channel on TV and saw the bendiest man he’d ever seen practicing

Daoist yoga. This was Monkey Kung Fu master Paulie Zink. Grilley

discovered that he taught his discipline two hours away, so he began

attending these extended sessions in Zink’s garage.

Unlike his fellow students who just wanted to get to the Kung Fu,

Grilley was more interested in the Daoist yoga warm up and, after a

year, amicably parted ways with Zink and introduced the long, deep

stretches into his classes. It was his student Sarah Powers who

suggested naming the style ‘yin yoga’ to differentiate it from the

more active yang aspect of the practice – and so modern yin yoga

was born.

When I was handed Paul Grilley’s DVDs in 2005 it validated my

instinct that people are unique and their yoga practice needs to

reflect that. Following a repetitive injury practicing his ‘drop-backs’

into the wheel pose, Grilley delved deeper into anatomy and has

travelled the world lecturing on skeletal variation and a functional

approach to yoga.

Understandably, he and his wife and teaching partner, Suzee, no

longer travel, and now teach from their base at the beautiful Land

of Medicine Buddha retreat in the redwoods of California. This has

become a second home to me. I now offer ‘Grilley’ style teacher

trainings in Cumbria in order to uphold the ethos of the practice he

painstakingly developed.

By all means teach and practice ‘aesthetic’ yoga; strive to achieve

a specific pose whether to your detriment or not (as Grilley once

strove to achieve his drop backs) — or learn to see beneath the skin

and understand the ‘bare bones of yoga’ so that you practice and

teach in a confident, functional manner to achieve optimum health.

By Rebecca Shepherd of The Yin Crowd (the-yin-crowd.info)

yin yoga