By Kimaya Singh
As a certified yoga instructor, when to offer different yoga classes depends on whether you are teaching yoga to individuals or groups as an employee or whether you are a business owner with your own yoga studio.
Offering Different Yoga Classes as an Employee
As an employee for yoga studios or gyms, you may have to work within restricted limits or you may be given full latitude to create any type of courses that you like.
Assuming that you have the freedom to choose your own curriculum, then one way to offer different classes is to simply divide your particular style of yoga into different skill levels. So, you could have beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes.
Offering Different Yoga Classes as a Business Owner
If you own your own yoga studio, or have a teaching business, then your range of possibilities could increase quite a bit simply because you don’t have to do all the teaching yourself. You can hire other people to teach classes for you. With this level of latitude on how to teach classes, you are faced with two choices: you could teach yoga in a singular way or in a pluralistic way.
A Singular Approach
As a small business owner with your own yoga studio, you may choose to offer only one school of yoga. Suppose, for example, that your own training consisted of studying Anusara yoga, which works on developing alignment to release suppressed emotions. Thus, your approach will be to create heart-centered awareness through yoga.
Given that this is your specialty, you could use the gradient approach—beginner, medium, and advanced classes. You could also offer sub-levels in each one. The goal for your students is to climb the ranks, as it were, going from one level to a slightly higher level over time.
Additionally, you could introduce non-yoga classes related to heart-awareness. For instance, you could invite authors to discuss their books on heart expansion and raising consciousness.
The Pluralistic Approach
Another way of running your business is to develop it horizontally, rather than vertically. In other words, instead of creating a school where people can gradually improve their skill levels in one particular school of yoga, you can hire instructors from diverse schools to give your students a variety of classes.
This school, for instance, you could hire yoga instructors who had specialized in the following types of yoga:
1. Restorative Yoga.
2. Power Yoga.
3. Hot Yoga.
4. Hatha Yoga.
5. Chair Yoga.
6. Yoga Therapy.
7. Kids Yoga.
8. Kundalini Yoga.
9. Prenatal / Postnatal Yoga.
10. Viniyoga Yoga.
11. Vinyasa Yoga.
12. Yin Yoga.
For this approach, you would need brochures to describe each type of yoga. Students could then decide to sample several forms or to focus on just one form that they liked.
Conclusion
When it comes to offering different yoga classes, it really depends on a wide-range of factors. One factor, of course, is how much flexibility and resources you have available. Another factor is your own particular interests. For some teachers, the real goal of yoga is to help guide the student toward mastery. For other teachers, yoga is a means to introduce people to a wider range of possibilities for self-culture.
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