10 HOUR INTENSIVE - PRACTICE, PRAXIS AND TEACHING
with Alex Sharry
Saturday & Sunday, May 22nd-23rd & May 29th-30th (12-2:30pm EST)
Price: $150
10 Hours bankable toward your Katonah Yoga® Certification.
Many of us understand our yoga practice through practicing. We attend classes to get taught, corrected, praised, and adjusted, we attend workshops to cultivate more knowledge on a specific topic, we commit to home practices that become part of our personal ritual and routine, we practice poses to become more advanced and adjustments to become more adept. Practice is a repetitive process that improves skill. Practice is progressive.
Praxis is the practical application of any branch of learning, it’s an idea translated into action, it’s the synthesis of theory and practice. Learning to teach Katonah Yoga can feel intimidating because the heart of the material can’t be located on a map, it sits invisible at the intersection of our life and our practice. You don’t have to be an esoteric scholar or severe intellect to understand, embody, and articulate the theory of this practice. The task is that you live what you teach, proof it against your own humanity, and articulate it through your experiences. This is how we exercise praxis and why theory is malleable, expansive, ever-changing, and ever-growing.
“Practice teaching” Katonah Yoga is hard because taste is subjective and what works for you in a class doesn’t work for someone else, and someone else, and someone else. Practice teaching feels impossible to “do right;” Listeners and facilitators face the daunting challenge of giving feedback to their peers, and oftentimes the feedback assignment has no framework. Teachers face the unnatural and awkward environment of being watched for critique rather than being present to their room and teaching students.
In this training we will practice teach, but in order to do so effectively we will explore and understand ourselves as teachers first and becoming Katonah teachers second. On top of the practical and utilitarian elements of this training (sequencing, dissecting “the theory,” establishing what makes helpful feedback), we’ll go on a journey that will level the room making it so that no one individual is being asked to go anywhere that we all aren’t going ourselves. As bell hooks says — Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.
In this training we will:
Ransack through our early memories of being students to better understand enforced habits of learning that inform the way we teach
Engage with one another through interactive listening exercises
Put vocabulary to our own vulnerabilities - “I have nothing good to say,” “Katonah Yoga imposter syndrome”
Vocalize theoretical concepts - “what does potential and memory have to do with yoga?”
Merge theory and practice = PRAXIS
Establish a common understanding of giving & receiving feedback
Teach each other and provide feedback
Practice with each other and receive feedback
Join Alex Sharry LIVE on zoom for 10 Hours (over 4 sessions) of theory and practice. You will receive a zoom link via email one hour before the start of each session. Recordings available upon request. Email info@thestudio.yoga after the session to request.