Avalon Art & Yoga Center -Palo Alto-

Avalon's New Yoga Teachers Training Program Starts Next Month!

Registration is Now Underway

Avalon's Spring - Summer 2012 Teachers Training Program

Classes from 31 March - 26 Aug. 2012 Worker-Friendly Weekend-Only Schedule

One of the only University-Level Yoga
Teacher Training Programs in the world.

Click here or on the image below for a larger poster

Interested in talking about the Program? Call Avalon's Director on his cell phone at 650-465-9711 or email him here.

Avalon's current Teaching Training term ends February 26th. After a short break for Workshops, our new Program starts on Saturday, March 31. Orientation ("Opening Circle") will be held the night before - the only non-weekend class we've scheduled all term.

This next term adds to our distinguished Faculty of over 18 teachers still more internationally famous instructors, including for the first time Max Strom, whose workshops in Europe, Japan, and the United States are consistently jam-packed with students.

Avalon's Teacher Training Program is one of the few Programs in the world that aims to provide University-level instruction. Our Faculty this term includes two M.D.s, seven Ph.D.s, and instructors with other advanced degrees from prestigious schools including Stanford University and the University of Cambridge in Great Britain.

For a quick look at our Faculty, go here. Many of our teachers are cutting-edge researchers with decades of international lecturing experience and a long list of scholarly and popular writings that have deeply influenced our understanding of yoga.

Some of the 20+ major books published by our Faculty are on display in the front window of Avalon.

A Few Unique Features of the Program

Unlike most Yoga Teachers Training Programs, Avalon's curriculum is not tied to a single yoga tradition, but aims to provide training in a wide range of international styles.

One of many unique features of the Program is that our students are given the chance to teach in the many free classes that we offer the community each month. So far as we know, ours is the only Teacher Training Program in the United States that gives students-in-training extensive hands-on teaching experience like this.

We are also the only Program that we know of anywhere that lets students throughout their 5+ months of training take all of the roughly 50 classes we teach each week free of charge. We introduced this innovative feature last year to help ensure that our students have the chance to experience as diverse a range of teaching styles as possible.

Some of our top students in fact take hundreds of classes each term without extra charge! (Please not that we do compensate our teachers fully for these classes: our primary object is not to make money from our Teacher Training Progrm, but to offer the best instruction available anywhere in the world.)

The same end is attained by the size, quality, and diversity of our Faculty. Most teacher training programs today are money-making machines - those in gyms are increasingly run by large multinational corporations - that use a handful of teachers and a generic textbook-driven curriculum. Our Program brings in top regional and global specialists, including academic researchers, from a broad spectrum of traditions and disciplines, aiming to capture as many of all the nuances of traditional and modern "transnational" yoga as it continues to evolve.

One of the results is that Avalon students are far better prepared than graduates from other programs to teach live classes on graduation. It is no accident that Avalon graduates are in high employment demand throughout northern California, and you can find Avalon-trained teachers in top studios throughout the Bay Area.

It is important to note that Avalon takes a purely scientific and not religious approach to yoga. Our Training Program takes into account revolutionary changes in our understanding of yoga history that have emerged in the last few years - in part through the research of key members of our Faculty (see the bios below) - and are especially strong in the growing fields of therapeutic yoga and studies of yoga and the brain. The number of hours we devote to technical topics including in yoga Anatomy and Physiology far exceed those required for Yoga Alliance certification.

For more information on our Program, call Avalon's Director, Steve Farmer, Ph.D., at 650-465-9711, or email him at steve@avalonyoga.com. We are intent on continuing to build the strongest Teachers Training Programs in the world, and we we're happy to talk about it anytime.

Detailed Program information is found below. Click on the links on particular topics:

Introduction
Core Faculty (late March - late August 2012)
Prerequisites
Program Curriculum
Class Schedule/Syllabus/Readings
Evaluation/Teaching Certification
Tuition and Payment
Registration and Further Questions