Participants learn about yoga and how it can be used, be it for self-practice or teaching. They learn how to guide meditations and breath work, while engaging in self-care workshops to promote health, resources, and community.
All participants learn how the shapes and sequences of yoga create the foundation for self-designed classes. Each participant will be encouraged to explore movement as a path for holistic empowerment.
When yoga fits the person as opposed to the person fitting to yoga.
Empowering communities
through teacher training in Africa.
Our aim is to make yoga accessible to everyone and anyone so that it can be culturally adapted to serve different communities. We believe anyone can teach yoga, if they are given the tools and time to collaboratively explore the practice.
We envision the positive effect yoga can have on the well-being of these communities, especially through women, because it merges leadership values, peace building and self-compassion.
Current Teacher Training Programs
RWANDA + KOMERA
In June 2019 we launched our first “On the Ground” Yoga Teacher Training Program in Rwanda with our partner organization, Komera.
In training 9 members of staff in Komera, these teachers were then able to expand and facilitate yoga classes for their own female residents. During the teacher training immersion participants learnt about the physical yoga practices, whereby shapes and sequences were self-designed to encourage holistic empowerment and to cement our message that yoga is for every type of body and every type of person. We returned in February 2020 for a three day long workshop with local seven local primary school teachers who who learned how to weave in yoga and meditation practices into their classrooms. In addition, we led a two day workshop with 30 post-secondary school students (women between the ages of 18-20) who each learned to teach a 30 minute yoga practice and designed their own meditations. We look forward to returning to Rwanda to continue our collaboration.
Morocco + EFA
The project will explore how learning yoga and other holistic practices, including elements of self-care, such as meditation and creative expression through movement, can positively impact female, adolescent students in the High Atlas Mountains of rural Morocco. We will be leading yoga classes virtually through Zoom, so that the students become familiar with the yoga practice before an intensive training session that will be taught in person in Morocco in summer 2022. Through a qualitative study that is attentive to their responses – articulated both linguistically and through embodied responses the project will explore what it means to think with and through the body as the vehicle for all other forms of empowerment (i.e., economic, political, social action etc). How to understand the term ‘empowerment’ will be central and the students in the program will guide the research here.
Our aim over a two-year period of working with 9 of Education For All’s baccalaureate students, aged 15-16, on yoga techniques will be to encourage a space for freedom of expression and even to grant the students the opportunity to teach yoga as a means of livelihood.
It will be essential to consider how the adoption of yoga teaching and philosophy will be culturally adapted to the Amazigh community by acknowledging the Islamic faith and culture in which the project will take place. This is vital in executing the project in a safe and inclusive manner, respectful of the co-collaboration between EFA and Souljourn Yoga.