Mindfulness for Yoga Teachers: An Immersion 
With Mimi Kuo-Deemer
Triyoga, Camden
 
January 25 -26, and Feb 1 -2, 2020

Open to teachers and teachers in training, or those with three years of consistent yoga practice.
 
This four-day immersion is aimed at enabling yoga teachers and teachers in training to deepen, broaden and enrich their understanding of mindfulness. It is equally aimed at providing practical tools from the mindfulness tradition that can be shared in classes with students, enabling them to engage with their yoga practice in skilful, kind and insightful ways.
 
While mindfulness has become a catch-word in today’s culture, the roots of mindfulness stem from ancient and powerful ideas originally set forth by the Buddha. This immersion will explore the modern-day value of the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness, and how they may support practice within the contemporary yoga world.  Drawing on the Satipatthana Suttas, or Foundations of Mindfulness, each day of the immersion will explore one of the four foundations as it relates to āsana practice and teaching: Mindfulness of Body, Mindfulness of Vedana (sensations or feeling tones that are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral), Mindfulness of Thoughts and Mindfulness of Dhamma (the path, truth, and all phenomena).  
 
Through a highly experiential approach, we will consider the ways our role as yoga teachers can be supported and guided by the benefits of mindfulness as an embodied practice. We will also develop skills to authentically weave in themes from mindfulness such as compassion, generosity, kindness, and inquiry into āsana classes, and cultivate techniques such as letting go of reactivity, clinging and judgement that can be learned and passed on to others. Underlying all the practices will be an understanding that mindfulness is guided by metta (lovingkindness) and leads to compassion, insight and greater wisdom.
 
In addition to meditation practice, each day will include active practice of yoga āsana and some qigong (a Chinese energy art form).  Emphasis will be placed on understanding how to approach and teach movement-based practices within a mindfulness framework.  Structural and practical methodologies such as using language, introducing and developing themes and weaving narratives into class will be covered. Participants will be given techniques for presenting and sharing mindfulness in accessible, informative and enlivening ways.
 
Topics will include:
  • Embodying practices of mindfulness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and dhamma.
  • Cultivating the art of bringing mindfulness and the gifts of embodied presence, compassion and insight to the yoga classroom.
  • Exploring how triggers within our experience of doing yoga can precipitate our habitual and reactive patterns, and understanding ways to become free from these tendencies.
  • Learning to perceive and work with both our and our students’ tendencies toward skillful and unskillful thoughts and judgements.
  • Fostering valuable resources and skills from within mindfulness to help meet some of the difficulties of being in the role of the teacher such as selfing (inflationary and deflationary tendencies) and working with the voice of the inner critic (comparison, judgement, and the imposter syndrome).
  • Considering the obstacles (hindrances) as well as the freedom that arise from steady mindfulness practice.
  • Bringing metta (care, lovingkindness) into our everyday lives.
 
 
Course structure and times:
Day one – February 23 from  9.45-12.30 + 1400-18.00
Mindfulness of Body: Awakening the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Body

Day two – February 24 from  9.45-12.30 + 1400-18.00
Mindfulness of Vedana (feeling tone): The Gap Between Stimulus and Response 

Day three – March 2 from  9.45-12.30 + 1400-18.00
Mindfulness of Thoughts:  The Inclinations of Mind and Our Emotional Signatures

Day four –  March 3 from  9.45-12.30 + 1400-18.00
Mindfulness of Dhamma: Living in the Light of Our Own Understanding
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What past participants have kindly shared about the last Mindfulness for Yoga Teachers immersion:

‘Mimi‘s immersion was a deeply grounding and nurturing experience for the soul. Mentally I feel lighter, with space to grow and create. Mimi’s use of language and her ability to integrate and impart the teachings of the Buddha was inspiring. This workshop left me full of enquiry and eagerness to learn more. It reignited my love for studying and I am already integrating it into my teaching and my everyday life’. – Serena Davis
 
‘The balance of the course between learning, mediation, yoga practice and group work was excellent. Mimi is hugely inspiring in such a calm and understated way! The course has had an immediate impact on my life –  bringing me back to my practice and giving me tools to help deal with what life throws up. It's also given me new confidence in passing it on to the classes I teach, and helped slowed me down which is no mean feat! Her passion for mindfulness and passing it on is truly inspiring, and I thank her for a heartfelt course’.  – Rachel Palin
 
‘Mimi's course was immersed in thought-provoking materials.  It is not often you see a course from the heart and this was it.  I think most of us came back with a new inner being, fresh with compassion for ourselves and towards others. I had one person come to me and express their changed view of me, which was kinder and softer.  It is wonderful how a short course can change the inner dialogue to kinder and softer sou'. – Nahid Nolan