Yoga Soup is honored to host a special 300 hour teacher training with lead teachers Cynthia Abulafia, Dora Chan, and Jazmin Ment. This in-depth training is open to anyone who has completed or is currently working toward completion of a 200 hour teacher training and would like to go deeper into the understanding of Yoga, Nondual Tantra, Self-Care tools, embodied movement, and the heart of the practice.
From September of 2023 to May of 2024 we will build upon our understanding of the heart of practice: how we ourselves internalize and experience this practice that we call yoga and how we offer it to others.
This 300 hour training will explore the teachings that show the depth of self-inquiry, self-acknowledgement, and self-agency. With Cynthia, we will look carefully at the texts and teachings of Tantra, or Nondual Kashmiri Shaivism. From this system, we will look at what’s beautifully named The Recognition School. We will explore the practices, the breath, the lessons from the teachings of the heart path. This is the path of self-reflection. Throughout the training we will investigate and build our understanding of the heart’s mirror. Cynthia has been teaching yoga for almost 20 years. She has studied extensively many different systems of classical and postural yoga such as Ashtanga and Iyengar, nondual teachings from the East and West, Tantra, human anatomy, Yoga Therapy, and the energetic or subtle body, with particular emphasis on Kundalini experiences and awakenings. She teaches the feminine path of awakening, highlighting our curiosity and our amazing ability to notice what we notice.
This training will also include a deeper immersion into yoga as a form of self-care and integrative trauma resourcing. From Yoga Nidra we will investigate practice, self-care, the nervous system, and informed trauma work. With Dora we will learn to listen closer to the body and mind, and the dance between the two. We will also look at Yin Yoga and how fascia, the nervous system, and movement can come together for deep inner healing and self-care. Dora understands how to address stress, internal rhythm, and self-inquiry. She holds a phD in Immunology, is a certified iRest yoga teacher, a holistic nutritionist, a Reiki master, a certified Yin Yoga teacher, and a certified Chair Yoga teacher. All of these modalities come together under the passion of grounding, investigating, and taking care of the whole being: body, heart, mind, and internal systems.
Jazmin has been practicing and studying yoga since she was a young child, and has done extensive training in yoga most of her life, particularly with her mentors Colleen Saidman Yee and Rodney Yee. Jazmin’s classes inspire strength, flexibility, inquiry, laughter, and ease. Balanced between alignment and flow, insight and curiosity, Jazmin’s thoughtfully sequenced classes are a vessel to explore inner peace, deep listening, compassion, and ultimately, love.
It is understood in yoga that any solid practice of self-investigation, whether personal and fluid or set in ideology and tradition, must rest on three legs. These three legs are: the teacher, the teaching, and our own intuition. A stool with only one or two legs will fall over– one with three legs will hold firm. When we follow a single teacher or a teaching– a single idea, book or sequence– this single practice can easily lead to tyranny. When we have inspiration from all three streams; from our teachers and the texts we love, and from our own intuitive knowledge, we learn how to dance and to trust ourselves, life, and the changes that inevitably happen.
In this training we will also dive deeply into sacred texts, some of which are commonly explored in yoga but most of which will likely be new and wildly curious to many students. We will offer tools to help hone and cultivate your intuition, to support a deep and dynamic relationship to your path, your practice, and your love of teachers and texts.
Each of the skillful teachers we are including in this course have decades of practice in their field: David Hurwith expresses joy, curiosity, and passion for embodied anatomy that has threaded through his life as a Broadway dancer, a teacher, and a mover; Luca Cupery has a gift of holding multiple turning containers with so much grace that her many hands appear perfectly balanced and still. She explores self-care, communication skills, and the brilliance of fascia; our other auxiliary teachers will explore sound experiences, Bhakti yoga, Yoga for racial justice and social equity, and other important topics that will be offered to students and woven into this journey that we are excited to embark on together. It truly is a journey to the heart.
We hope you will join us for this transformational experience in 2023.