CURIOSITY TO CALLING

A Semi-private Training Course For New and Recovering Yoga Teachers

I know. I don’t quite believe everything they told us either. Seems a little oversimplified. And it is. Enough with the spiritual bypass and the cultural appropriation. We can do this respectfully, and with clarity. This is a Yoga Teacher Training. And also not.

Let’s be honest

A NOTE FROM VALERIE

You can’t learn to teach yoga in 200 hours. Or even 500 hours. You learn to teach through experience, grit, courage, humility, observation, and rigorous ongoing study. Curiosity to Calling is the latter —rigorous ongoing study with an eye towards teaching, and teaching well.

This ‘continuing education’ course is designed for yoga teachers who are ready to step back into the labyrinth for another deep dive. But also established practitioners who are ready to begin their journey towards becoming teachers.

Because what we CAN do if we want to teach is immerse ourselves in the material we will be teaching, surrounded by others who are also on that path, and provide ourselves an opportunity to bolster that courage and tap into that grit.

This training opportunity is different from my others. We are building it from the ground up to meet the needs of a small group of students who want to take a deep dive.

Practice is a process of inquiry. Our guides can offer suggestions, options and perspectives. It’s up to us to try them on, roll around in them, keep the ones that are relevant to us and shelve the rest… sometimes temporarily, and sometimes forever. What we don’t often get though is the opportunity to dig deep into the ‘why’ behind the scenes.

Curiosity to Calling is an invitation to explore the whys and hows of embodied somatic practice through the movement vocabulary of postural yoga with an eye towards sharing this knowledge and experience with others.

Yes, we will talk about (and practice) meditation, philosophy, and breathing. But Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) —as our strange collection of movements, transitions and postural experiments has come to be known— invites us to explore consciousness through the gateway of our flesh, blood, muscles and bones. How does this happen?

Our yoga is a mash-up. It references the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita (c.300 BCE), hails to what appears to be a western-derived preoccupation with Patanjali’s yoga (c.400 CE), and is preoccupied with the physical alchemy explored during the vast and varied cultural phenomenon known as Tantra (c. 500 CE - 1700 CE). This is a ridiculously long period of time from which to trace a direct affiliation, let alone from which to derive a defined practice curriculum.

The word ‘yoga’ promises more than a way to improve physical strength and flexibility, heal injuries, or mitigate stress. If we carry that hope for more into our practice, let us intelligently investigate precisely how the somatic awareness we build there helps us explore the nature of consciousness?

If you decide to join us, we will travel a road into the unknown, asking ‘why’ all along the way. My hope is you will feel comfortable enough in our group to take risks. My wish is for us to laugh a lot together along the way. During our time I will do my best to encourage us to remain mindful of our shared and individual cultural context(s) and privilege(s), and to strive to support us in developing sensitivity to the emerging call for social justice in our field.

Further, we will practice neither avoiding or being swallowed by our personal, collective, or cultural traumas stories. We will strive to exercise curiosity and honesty at every turn, all the while continuing to nurture our love of our practice along the way.

2022-2023 community forming. Are you feeling called?

Valerie Moselle, ERYT-500, RPYT, YACEP

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