Teaching Inclusive Yoga
ONLINE COURSE
12 hours | Lifetime access | £297 or £29.70 over 10 months
Teaching Inclusive Yoga
Fill the gaps between your training and the real students who most need yoga. These empowering practices will fill you and your students with confidence.
- Offer a practice that can be both challenging and easeful for everyone
- Get strategies to support students with anxiety, stress or trauma-related issues
- Know how to use asana, sequencing and props to support those in larger, less flexible or hypermobile bodies
- Deepen your teaching to learn the practical skills to make everyone feel safe
This online course covers the content through a mix of talks, workshops, classes and course notes with practical advice and strategies, to study in your own time.
If you have any questions about our online courses or how they work, please check out our FAQ page.
How can we serve those who need yoga most?
Many teacher training courses do not cover how to teach those who need more support in poses, or those who live in larger bodies. We are often ill-equipped to deal with those who are seriously stressed, anxious or have experienced trauma.
But these conditions describe many adults in the Global North and especially those who are drawn to yoga practice.
This course will give you full confidence to support "real students" in "real bodies" by covering how to teach those who need more support. Let's match the teaching of yoga to the philosophy and offer an inclusive, empowering practice!
What the course covers:
How to offer the full experience of yoga
We cover the broad picture - how can we think about and express yoga so that “getting the pose right” is less important than an expansive experience of yoga. We offer radical teachings on the nature of freedom, that we are all already home, loved, loveable. We teach you how to offer practice where the underlying philosophy of yoga sustains the whole class.
How to teach inclusive asana
We show you ways to teach a range of asana for different bodies and situations, with videos showing adjustments you can make, ways to adapt poses using props and creating sequences that empower everyone with options. We show you how to offer inclusive asana for those in larger bodies, those who may need chair or wall support and for hypermobile students.
How to help manage pain
We talk about proprioception and pain, including how to understand the science of pain and reduce fear in your students, as well as practices and classes to help manage and reduce pain in different areas of the body.
How to help manage anxiety
We explore the nervous system and how yoga works to improve our mental health and adaptability. We give you ways to structure classes for those who feel anxious and those who need more simple movement patterns.
How to support good mental health
We cover breathwork and mindfulness so you can support people who may find it more difficult to find stillness and offer relief for those suffering from anxiety or trauma. We also explain the theory of trauma and how yoga can be used to support good mental health.
How to talk about race and gender
We discuss considerations around race and gender including how to create a safe space for those affected by racism and for LGBTQA+ students so you can make every student feel welcome and offer an inclusive practice for everyone.
Look inside the course
Take a look at short samples from the training materials
Complete course syllabus:
Module 1 - Introduction, Philosophy and Teaching Skills
Module 2 - Inclusive Asana
Module 3 - Proprioception and pain
Module 4 - Breath and mindfulness
Module 5 - Yoga for mental health
Module 6 - Considerations: race, gender and beyond
Why take this course:
- Your class numbers will swell as you are able to meet the needs of real people with everyday issues from both body & mind
- Get strategies to support students with anxiety, stress, trauma-related issues & neurodiverse brains (ADHD, ASD etc.)
- Understanding the nervous system and to help improve mental health
- Know how to sequence, use props & include those in larger bodies, less flexible bodies or hyper mobile bodies
- Know how to incorporate ideas from yoga philosophy to make everyone feel comfortable and at home
- Offer a practise that is both easeful and challenging for everyone in the room by running multi-level classes
- Be able to make rest more accessible to all and offer it for people who find it difficult to settle
- Consider implications of yoga teaching around racism and cultural appropriation
- Consider language, teaching & advocacy for LGBTQIA+ students
About your teacher
I'm Laura
My work & personal life have centred around those with “disabilities”, mental health issues or those who have a felt sense of being “different”. Whilst I do not (yet) have a formal diagnosis, to those who know me well it is evident I have my own neuro-divergent ways. My family is all on the neuro-interesting side of things & I have spent the last 16 years advocating for my autistic - ADHD son. The difficulties with “disability” are often more from the environment- the education system or work place, the transport system etc. rather than necessarily from the person themselves.
My work prior to yoga was running a market garden in a Camphill community, and being an advocate there for those we work alongside- including folks with different abilities. Such as Downs Syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, deafness etc. I had the blessed experience of working with men and women who enlightened me, as to the power of love and everything we have in common beyond appearances. They were beautiful times I am so happy to have had. Isobel, a woman with Downs Syndrome in her 40s and 50s when I was there, was the heart of the community, and someone who changed everyone she met with her love.
From here I took an MA in sustainable environmental management and I studied access to food, which made it so clear to me that poverty and weight gain so often go together, because of the lack of political will to ensure equitable access to healthy food or nutrition education. Sugars & carbs are cheap; proteins & vegetables are comparatively expensive. Health suffers as a direct consequence of the way business and politics are organised.
Living in London, I then worked with an organisation who support those who fled from wards & have been tortured. My work again was in the community garden in group psychotherapy and horticultural therapy projects.
I left this workplace to follow my love of yoga and had the privilege to travel in India and study intensively. I had started yoga some 10 years earlier while at uni. On my return to the UK I started teaching yoga, & continued to study. I offered yoga to those with different needs through day centres and loved the chance to share the yoga in this way.
Over time my own teaching practice evolved to be more trauma sensitive. I taught in Holloway women’s prison in London and saw how the effects of trauma had shaped the lives of women.
My awareness of anxiety grew through study and personal experience through lockdown & into my peri menopause.
I feel it now time to put together this lifetime of research, practice and knowledge- learning from when things went wrong as well as right!
The main thing that I see is that its so often we judge people from our differences rather than all we have in common. When we lean into yoga philosophy and add the fact as are all fundamentally the same, we can offer a genuinely compassionate and really joyful yoga. I am so happy to share this with you.
What our students say:
"As I was fully expecting, it was chocca full of very high quality, evidence-based content. It's a difficult balance between explaining in western neuroscientific, psychological and movement science terms whilst also honouring the yoga tradition, explaining traditional background and context and leaving space for spirituality and I think you manage this extremely well.
I found the teachings on proprioception and hypermobility immensely useful and exciting. I also really liked the way that you bring in awareness of the nervous system throughout, including window of tolerance and encouraging awareness of when teachers bring students in and out of sympathetic and parasympathetic response."
Jenny
"[I will bring into my teaching] everything I learned in terms of making poses more inclusive and being more aware and understanding how mental health and trauma affects us. I absolutely loved this course, thank you"
Immie
Over 30 years
of teaching transformative yoga and yoga teacher training courses
Over 15 years
of training teachers at the longest running yoga studio in Bristol
Over 1000 teachers trained
through my 200 hour and 300 hour advanced teacher training courses and intensives
14-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE
If you aren’t completely satisfied with the course, let us know within the first 14-days for a full refund. No questions asked.