Empowering communities WORLDWIDE through teacher training.
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.
Past Teacher Training Programs
In June 2019 we launched our first “On the Ground” Yoga Teacher Training Program in Rwanda with our partner organization, Komera.
During training, 9 members of staff in Komera were 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 seven local primary school teachers 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 to 20) who each learned to teach a 30-minute yoga practice and designed their own meditations.
RWANDA + KOMERA
From 2022 to 2024, this project explored how yoga and holistic self-care practices such as meditation and creative movement could support the well-being and sense of agency of adolescent girls in the High Atlas Mountains of rural Morocco. Working with nine baccalaureate students aged 15 to 16 from the NGO Education For All Morocco, the project combined virtual yoga classes through our On the Ground Yoga yoga teacher training in the summer of 2022.
The program created a space for reflection, self-expression, and embodied learning while exploring how practices such as yoga could contribute to broader forms of empowerment, including social, economic, and personal agency. Particular attention was given to how yoga philosophy and teaching could be thoughtfully adapted within the Amazigh community, respecting the Islamic faith and cultural context in which the project took place.
Through the lens of yoga training, the project explored themes of identity, belonging, and resilience as the girls navigated the expectations of education, family, and community life while living and studying in the town of Asni. The research highlighted how the participants actively shaped their own sense of agency and future possibilities through practices of self-inquiry, collective care, and embodied reflection.
In September 2023, the High Atlas region was struck by a devastating earthquake, with the students living at the epicenter. In the aftermath, the girls drew on the practices and sense of community cultivated through the project to support one another during a period of profound uncertainty, demonstrating the role that embodied practices and collective resilience can play in moments of crisis.
