Welcome to Freedom Yoga

Here we are for the the Freedom Yoga Teacher Training and Immersion. This is a five-day course that I taught. I've been teaching yoga now for more than 40 years. I don't know how many of these teacher trainings I've actually taught. Usually they're a 10-day event. I enjoy them. Basically what I'm trying to do during a teacher training or what I find myself going through is basically trying to say everything I know in a relatively short amount of time. This is a five-day teacher training. It's hard to say everything you know in five days, in five short sessions, but it's an interesting exercise and it's again what I like about it is it forces me to be succinct. It forces me to get as clear as I can be in order to just succinctly deliver what I'm learning about. Partly what I'm interested in in a teacher training is to convey the fact that it's about learning. It's about being in learning mode. It's about continuously being in learning mode. I started yoga when I was 14. I've been doing yoga for 47 years now and I feel like I'm a better learner than ever and I'm so happy to be in a mind state where what's happening is learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, and just sharing basically the latest update on what I'm learning about so it's like it's fun for me. Most of the people that come to the course, you know, I know some of them, most of them I don't know. They've heard about me for various reasons. Some of them haven't heard about me and they just want to do a teacher training and so especially on the first session, sort of what's entailed for me is I've got to present things sequentially so that things make sense to someone who is hearing the message for the first time and yet somehow do the big brushstroke so that it's clear about what the simple clear message is and why somebody might want to spend that much time together diving into this. So what I've got to do is I gain everyone's trust and make it seem interesting enough so that people open themselves to what's about to happen. My main learning in all of this is that it is lifestyle. Lifestyle is the way you live your life, the way you do your thing. You know it's not just an exercise, it's not just a therapeutic exercise, it's always been about the mindset, the lifestyle, the spiritual understanding that you come to and yet people come to the sessions for their own reasons and so I've sort of got to be able to like come at the topic from a lot of different angles. The way the sessions have, the way the sessions play out basically is they end up being in five chapters. Chapter one is mindset, yoga philosophy, yoga philosophy made simple, yoga philosophy as far as I understand it and trying to make it relevant so that it does apply to life. Chapter one is talking and I feel free to like just talk and talk and talk about whatever I want to talk about in order to get the point across and that this first chapter is a really good time for people to have questions and answers and be able to dialogue about this stuff. It's fun to be able to ping-pong and dialogue and so each session that we'll do together will be a lot of theoretical, metaphysical discussion as well as theoretical, practical how to do yoga asana discussion, how to teach, how to practice. This is billed as a teacher training and immersion but in my mind it's more than a teacher training, it's about immersion. If you're not immersed you're not going to be able to, you won't have a clue about how to teach but if you're able to immerse yourself and get into the experience then you'll find that all you've got to start to do in order to become a teacher is be able to just report the news about the experience you're having and you'll be able to communicate authentically. So in my mind as I go into the teacher trainings it's mostly an immersion, trying to immerse everyone into the experience that we're having together. And so chapter ones we'll be talking. Chapter two will be discussion and practice with meditation. Meditation is actually the main practice that I'm promoting the most because it's the main thing that will promote or facilitate the realization of what yoga is about. Yoga is an interesting word, it actually means yoke, it means union and when you meditate you do start to get the sense of yoking with the infinite and we'll be talking about this a lot. Yoking with the infinite I talk about is getting online because that's such a perfect analogy for the times. So using your mind to wirelessly get online it'll feel like you're joining it'll feel like you're yoking but the more you yoke and the more you join and the more you wirelessly get online after a certain point you realize oh come on I don't have to get online I'm online and then you begin to like have a real sense of the union meaning of what yoga is. Your mind is connected to the internet of infinite mind and sort of the trick to a lifestyle, yogic lifestyle, is about wirelessly walking around being connected instead of thinking quite so much you learn to listen. So listening actually becomes the main the main practice. You learn to listen by sitting quietly. You learn to listen in the yoga poses. As you learn to listen in the yoga poses it'll start feeling like you're channeling your practice. Channeling your practice is not difficult but it's sort of advanced. If I were to say to a beginner and I get into triangle pose and channel it they wouldn't have a clue about what to do and so it's a matter of like teaching people specific movements specific guidelines about how to do the movements like teaching people how to play a note the notes on a musical instrument. You teach them all this stuff with the knowingness that if they get into it and they get good at the discipline they get good at the structured practice that if they get into it it'll start feeling they'll get in touch with the music that they're playing. They'll get in touch with the meaning of the movement. The movement will then feel inspired and channeled.

Now if you get the hang of how to channel your yoga practice next thing you know you find yourself walking out the door walking down the sidewalk getting into your car channeling your way home and then you begin to get it oh yeah that's what lifestyle means. It's like being wirelessly online all the time as you live your life and so sitting quietly meditating is the first place to get the hang of that. Asana practice is the second place to get the hang of that and then there'll be homeworks in order to help you help remind you to stay online all the time. So chapter one in here will be talking. Chapter two will then be practicing the seated meditations. Chapter three in here will then be guided asana and a guided asana chapter where me the human teacher is telling people telling you exactly how to do the precise movements. It's helpful to have guidance about how to do the movements. You train people in alignment specific sequencing patterns but you train them in specific alignments and specific sequencing patterns knowing that if they get into it the energy will start to take over at a certain point and this is what I didn't know initially. I was just doing like structured practices and loving it loving that loving it doing exactly everything I'd been told but years into it it's like the the joy just started going out of it doing everything right but the joy started going out and at a certain point I had to ditch everything I'd been taught because everything I had been taught had built the sensitivity to the feeling of the energy and the energy was beginning to gush through and wanting to move in different ways than I'd been taught and so there's a certain bravery that's required at a certain point where wow you've got a dare to do is your energy is being as is guiding you to do it finally makes sense to do that and this is what I'm calling like the like certainly the main lesson like the in the practice is like learning to trust yourself it makes sense to trust yourself once you have insight into the fact that you had nothing to do with the fact that you exist you didn't make you I didn't make me the all is being all as you as I trust into my deepest feelings about how to do and be you're not just trusting into your conditioning you're not just trusting into your habits the fear is that if you dare to do as your deepest feelings guide you to do it'll just be more habit more habitual more conditioning but actually once you have insight that you only exist because the all is being itself as you then you realize wow you trusting into you is not just you trusting into stupid little you you trusting into you is how you tap into the infinity of things it makes sense to do as your deepest feelings guide you to do once you start having insight into that again that's what's meant by yoga union unity and beginning to like understand that viscerally beginning to live it and having more fun and so talking helps facilitate all of that chapter 2 and here will be the meditations chapter 3 will be the guided Austin chapter to learn specific techniques that used to be the bulk of all my classes chapter 4 then will then be a free-form chapter in here and the free-form chapter is sort of similar to this guided Austin chapter except instead of listening to the human teacher about what to do you're learning to listen to divine guidance about what to do you trust into your deepest feelings about how to move how to rest how to do exactly what you feel like doing and it starts feeling like you're doing your yoga for years and years I was doing practices I was doing different styles loved it but it always felt like I was doing somebody else's yoga and when this started to kick in suddenly was like oh wow yeah I'm doing my yoga finally you can still learn from others you should learn from others you'll become a better learner from others but really what you should be learning is how to wirelessly let the infinity of mind guide you about how to do and be so that's the main themes that we'll be working with we'll do the free-form chapter and then a concluding meditation at the end I'm trying to get shavasanas in in each of these classes but we're always running out of time so we don't actually do it so welcome I'm glad you're here freedom yoga teacher training and immersion