Giving Voice to Yoga

This is a day-long workshop Bhavani has offered as part of various yoga teacher trainings throughout the Northeast.

It begins with freeing the voice with playful exercises that open the body for sounding and enable one’s authentic sound to emerge. When your voice is free, you are empowered to express your creativity more fully in every area of your life.  We then explore sounding as relationship, as a way to create community, experiencing oneself as a being “of sound mind and body,” in harmony with all of life.

Next we take a look at the verbal process of teaching yoga. In Bhavani’s unique Butterfly Boot Camp you learn to use your voice safely in your teaching, so that you can project to the back of a large room without strain. You’ll also get presentation tips that can transform your leading of postures. And you’ll have an opportunity to put it all together as you present an affirmation to the group.

In the afternoon we have a kirtan, where we immerse ourselves in the bhakti (devotional) practice of Sanskrit chanting  Bhavani also shares ways of contexting the practice of chanting, with background and benefits, so that you can make it more accessible to your students.

It’s a fun and enriching day, filled with much to take away to bless your teaching and your life.

 

Bringing Chanting to Your Yoga Teaching

This is a training program that has been offered at Kripalu as part of the 500-hour Professional Level Yoga Teacher Training. In the porgram you’ll learn ways of sharing with your yoga students the bhakti practice of chanting that affects you so deeply. First immerse yourself in the practice of Sanskrit chanting, then learn how to share the practice at different levels—from developing a playlist of recorded chants to use in class to actually taking up the instruments and providing live kirtan.

You’ll learn

---How to context chanting to make it accessible to your students
---How to choose recorded chants to enhance energy and the feeling of devotion and to create different moods in different sections of the class
---A selection of chants to use live to invoke various divine energies
---How to play the basic chanting beat on the mridungum or other drum
---If you wish, in an optional session, how to play simple chants on a harmonium or other keyboard instrument and how to build the energy of the chant

Each person has the opportunity to practice presenting a chanting experience at the level that works for them. We’ll also address voice projection and the safe use of the voice, whether speaking or singing. You’ll go home refreshed and filled with spirit, as well as ready to sound forth with your students.

A text that is helpful for the program is Kripalu’s chanting book, Sounds of the Sacred, which is available through Bhavani. Feel free to bring a harmonium, small keyboard, and/or any style drum.

 

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Quote of the Week

 

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

 
—Rumi