Yoga Teacher Training Forum

I took the 250h Vinyasa Flow teacher training course with Aura Wellness Center from May - November 2013. First, the website setting out details of the various courses was extremely easy to navigate and explained fully the benefits and requirements of the different courses. Secondly, sign up is extremely easy - you pay the relevant amount and all of the required texts are sent to you quickly, along with the various guidelines and exam papers. When I first received the texts the amount of reading looked imposing, but the guidelines helpefully pointed out that if I read a certain number of pages per day I would be able to complete the course in a few months. I chose to combine my weekly reading with taking two 10 day breaks from my job to do the majority of the studying. If my job was a little less demanding, I could easily have fitted it into the evenings and weekends.

In terms of the materials the recommended texts for the Written Exam are fascinating and authoritative. Reading them alongside the questions really helped me get the best out of the materials, answering the questions in depth as I went along. That also helped me to retain much more information than had I been at a face to face training simply taking notes.

The Anatomy Exam was based on Paul Grilley's amazing and insightful DVD and the standard Kaminoff anatomy book. Again both are top quality texts.

The opportunity to write a dissertation on a subject of my choice related to yoga was great; I enjoyed researching it and was passionate about my subject matter as I had the freedom to choose.

In terms of support Paul Jerard was fantastic. He was on hand by phone or email to answer any questions I had, some of which were lengthy.

For the Teaching Exam, the video recording of the lesson was fairly simple and Paul was very understanding about the parts where the camera cut out and the erratic cut and paste!

My feedback on all my exams was incredibly useful and I have already put it into practice in my teaching.

Overall I would rate the course extremely highly for anyone who is looking to deepen their practice and/or start on their path to teacher training. I have already started to grow a small studio, with a very experienced business partner yogini, and which is already operating at a profit a mere 4 months after my qualification.

Finally, if you think yoga treaching might be for you but are unsure, this is a much lower cost way to find out whether it is something you would enjoy, without spending thousands of dollars on a 200h qualification at a studio or a retreat.

Overall I thought the programme was excellent: the questions were intelligent, challenging and made me really understand the values and core principles of yoga in considerable depth. On the academic side I consider that I learnt far more this way than if I had done a traditional 200h residential course, most of which do not have exams anything like as rigorous or as detailed as the Aura exams.

Namaste