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Planning Workshops, Series, Wellness Circles and Other Events + Free Resources & Free Samples of Workshop Toolkits, Student Handouts, Asana Teaching Guides

Planning Workshops, Series & Other Events

Benefits from Pre-Planning Your Teachings

Planning ahead of time can bring benefits not possible when you’re doing it all “on the fly.” For example:

  1. You have the opportunity to take a higher and more strategic perspective, enabling you to  delve more deeply into topics you love and/or progress through a series of related topics. This gives students who attend regularly the opportunity to focus in on a practice in a deeper or fuller way, likely experiencing greater impact. (But the progression of classes need not require previous attendance unless you specifically wish to offer such a series.)
  2. Planning ahead of time means you have the opportunity to be responsive to the season, holidays and other considerations. For example, you can be prepared to hold a workshop on Goddess mythology around the time of Navratri, or to hold a series on Restorative Yoga to cool and balance students during the heat of summer.
  3. With advance planning, you can immerse yourself in the teaching ahead of time if you wish.
  4. With a predetermined focus, classes are less likely to feel stale, disjointed or too busy.
  5. You can condense your planning time into a few specific, focused times. If you rarely plan, your focus will pay dividends. And if you’re often trying to fit in mini-planning times, your advance planning of multiple classes means you can avoid the stress of feeling anxious about planning prior to every class.

Additional Benefits for Planning Beyond Single Classes

When your plans are for more than an individual class, you get additional benefits. When you’re planning a workshop, a series of classes, a Wellness Circle (info below), or other event, you’ll have these opportunities:

  1. The ability to promote the upcoming focus, thereby encouraging preregistration.
  2. A way to inspire students to attend regularly to experience the promised path of study.
  3. Series and workshops usually earn more per student and/or encourage more regular attendance, thereby generating additional revenue.

We offer support for creating a plan to progressively cover a topic through a series of classes or workshops. The classes can be tied together based on a philosophy or anatomy topic, an asana category, yoga tool such as pranayama, or many other themes.

Teach What You Have Experience With

Any topic you choose should, of course, be one that you have experience with.

Consider Partnering

Need a bit more confidence or support? Partner with someone who has complementary skills. By coming at the subject from different angles, and with different approaches and styles, you can feel more comfortable and you’re also more able to appeal to a wider range of students.

How to Flexibly Use Our Outlines

We have broken down each topic into a relatively large number of sub-topics so that you can easily choose to cover each individually or to combine them. For instance, you can focus the first class of a series on an Introduction or Overview or you can combine the Introduction with the next sub-topic for your first class. For example, you can cover the Yamas and Niyamas in 10 or fewer classes, or you can feature them in 12 or more classes by including an introduction to the Sutras or Eight Limbs, or by creating a class not only for each of the last three Niyamas but also one on Kriya Yoga, for instance.

Introducing Wellness Circles

As an adjunct or alternative to workshops, consider leading Wellness Circles.

You are welcome to call such gatherings any name that resonates for you; we offer the name, Wellness Circle, to invite a holistic, open approach to health and wellness, and to encourage a sense of equality and mutual support among participants.

You might find that such an approach lessens any pressure you may feel to be an all-knowing “expert” in order to lead groups. You can feel more free to be a guide and mentor as you feel called, while also encouraging active engagement in a mutual endeavor.

In this approach, you set a tone that invites participation via a structured process. Participants come to experience that community members sharing with each other can be extremely helpful. If you’ve ever taught or attended a prenatal yoga class, for example, you may have encountered such an approach. You might consider:

  1. Setting up mats in a circle.
  2. Having a brief opening that brings people into a sense of cohesion.
  3. Set a focus, and/or ask a question to be answered during sharing. Be clear that participants may pass if they don’t want to share. Explain, also, that while this brief time may not be enough to share everything that is relevant, it can alert participants to people they wish to connect with afterward.
  4. Ensure each person has “the floor” to speak uninterrupted by passing around a talking stick. Make it clear that only the person holding the talking stick is invited to speak during the sharing circle.
  5. If necessary to stay within time limits and avoid excessive time use by one person, you can use a visual timer such as an hourglass-shaped sand timer, for example.

Workshop Toolkits

What Teachers Are Saying

Teachers who reviewed the Anxiety & Yoga presentation (receiving no compensation of any sort) had these reactions:

Teacher #1

As a Psychologist and Yoga Teacher, I love your presentation! It feels like it’s not too basic but not too complicated either.

Teacher #2

Simply reading through it brought up a desire to theme a class with bits of this information or host a workshop to share all of it. The visuals are really beautiful, too. Very nice.

The Intention for Workshop Toolkits

As a yoga teacher, you know that when people are practicing the right style of yoga for them, that the experience they have will be more valuable than any information could ever be. And yet, research and contextual information can lead to a critical, defining moment when a person takes an action that begins a series of events. Specifically, inspiring information can help them to:

  • Overcome the power of inertia.
  • Counter unhelpful and inaccurate belief systems.
  • Be inspired to surmount hurdles in their life such as a chaotic or overwhelming life circumstance, heavy responsibilities, or busy schedule that have been prohibiting them from making forward progress.

Such information can prompt a person to give yoga (and other tools) a chance, to reach out and sign up for a workshop, to open up to others and seek more support, and to finally feel they’re receiving the support they need to make lifestyle changes.

The workshop toolkits give you the support and confidence to offer workshops, Wellness Circles or other events. In a nutshell, the toolkits give you:

  1. Specific data at your fingertips. Check!
  2. Ways to transmit the knowledge so that it’s effectively received by those who could benefit. Check!

We’ve invested the time, skill and care to create the toolkits so that you can just show up and be present*, knowing you have the support and confidence to offer workshops or other events that will help attendees experience success and tap into their precious wholeness.

*The phrase “just show up” is not to suggest the toolkit replaces the proficiency and capability that comes from years of practicing and teaching yoga. We’re saying that many teachers have the experience and knowledge to help more people, but need more accessible teaching support to feel ready to specifically invite those experiencing such conditions as anxiety, chronic pain, arthritis and so on.

See free samples of slides and presenter notes here.

Try it Out for 50% Off

We want you to see for yourself that you have what you need to take the next step in supporting others in your community.

We’re offering a big discount on the Anxiety toolkit so as to, hopefully, inspire you to take the next step in planning your event. We believe the world needs you and the yoga tools you are prepared to share.

Use the following code for 50% off the Anxiety and Yoga toolkit in the store.

TOOLKIT50off

Make it Happen

Considering Partnering

The world needs you to be sharing the inspirational teachings that you love to share! And by doing this through workshops, you can secure student pre-registration and more revenue.

We strive to save your planning time so that you can go deeper into the areas where you add the most value.

Need a bit more confidence or support? Partner with someone who has complementary skills. By coming at the subject from different angles, and with different approaches and styles, you can feel more comfortable and you’re also more able to appeal to a wider range of students.

Getting Started

  1. Decide on series title and focus.
  2. Even if you don’t plan specific workshops, you may wish to promote the benefits of your upcoming classes to encourage student commitment and attendance.
  3. Plan location and dates.
  4. Determine your reservation and payment system.
  5. Promote the offerings via your personal channels and co-promote with a studio, co-presenter or other partners.

Workshop Topics

See our member lesson for structured outlines for more than 20 different workshop themes.

Each series can last anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks, and we include quick links to teaching content. Examples include Yamas & Niyamas, Seasonal Yoga, Energy & Subtle Body Anatomy, Kleshas, Asana Categories, Strengthening, and many more.

We also offer affordable student handouts to support your workshops. (No membership needed.) Information below.

Free Samples – Student Handouts

We offer professionally-designed student handouts for various series topics. The content is top-notch and will add value to your offering. You can use the strategic flow of the handouts to guide your workshop structure, or simply offer them as background to support in-class practice. Prices as low as $12 each, including rights to copy and distribute to your students.

See excerpts and a sample below, and find them all in the Store.

To see a complete Student Handout, click here:

Workshop Handout – Forward Bending

We think you’ll agree that it is:

  • Beautifully designed
  • Clearly presented with excellent content
  • Brief enough to be inviting; deep enough to add real value
  • Strategic and organized; can guide your own class planning, or can simply serve as value-added support for students

Please let us know what you think and if there’s anything else you need.

Choose from the following series topics. Each bulleted item is a separate Student Handout. To see the content covered in each handout, go to the Store.

Asana Categories
  • Forward Bending
  • Backbending
  • Twisting
  • Core Strengthening
  • Balancing
  • Inversions
Ayurveda & Yoga
  • Introduction
  • Doshas
  • Dosha-Balancing Asana
  • Diet & Lifestyle
Eight Limbs
  • Eight Limbs Introduction
  • Yamas
  • Niyamas
Stress & Yoga
  • Nervous System
  • Yoga for Stress Reduction
  • Breathing Practices
  • Yoga Nidra
Surya Namaskar
  • Overview
  • Asana & Sequences
  • Alignment & Devotional Practices
  • Variations

Free Samples – Asana Teaching Guides

With this 3-minute slide show, we hope you’ll get a sense for how uniquely powerful the Asana Teaching Guides are in offering truly valuable support in your lifelong quest to optimize teachings for all students.

Asana Teaching Guides (available in the Store) can serve as a life-long teaching resource. The guides are precisely organized PDFs that give you quick and comprehensive reference for teaching, cueing, sequencing and adapting poses. They include pictures of dozens of variations with instructions.

The following samples are excerpted from MULTIPLE, DIFFERENT guides in order to give you a sense for the scope, structure, precision and quality of the materials.

 

 

 

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