Svastha Yoga Therapy Training

Duration – 10 hours

April 22-23rd 2023 £200

This course lays the foundation for understanding the traditional approach of yoga and ayurveda toward wellbeing. Building on that, we then explore the practical ways to create sustainable positive transformation. The contents of this course are at the heart of all work as a yoga student, yoga facilitator and teacher of wellbeing, and as a yoga therapist.
In this course, you will:
1. Appreciate the holistic view of yoga and ayurveda.
2. Explore wellbeing as the balance of functions in all levels of yourself.
3. Use the full-spectrum Svastha map of wellbeing to look at the skills of wellbeing.
4. Receive an introduction to assessing imbalance.
5. Work with the ways to create, support, and sustain positive change.
6. Understand conscious vs. unconscious in the yoga view: patterns and shifts.
7. Appreciate the importance of the principle of adaptation—use it or lose it.
8. Explore willpower, energy, resistance, effort as parameters that influence change.
9. Differentiate stress vs. challenge. Cultivate safety, resilience. Understand coping and allostasis.
10. Use curiosity, exploration, play, and the new vs familiar.
11. Cognize the role of environment in change: supports for new patterns, triggers for old patterns.
12. Choose steps in the journey of change: small steps and large steps.
13. Adjust degree of challenge: less vs more in time and complexity.
14. Manage lapses, trying again vs trying differently.
15. Work with motivation: values, conviction, insight, changing vs. growing.
16. Explore the personal meaning of change, value system, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, changing vs. growing.
17. Cultivating acceptance, balancing engagement and letting go.
Traditional frameworks:
1. vṛtti-samskāra cycle.
2. hetu, phala, āśraya, ālambana.
3. śraddhā, vīrya, prajñā.
4. tapas, svādhyāya, īśvara-praṇidhāna.
5. vrata/vow/commitment.

Duration: 40 Hours 

20- 21 May, 17 -18 June, 15- 16 July 2023

£600

This master course covers the keys of breathing well: skills, practices, wisdom, insights, and science.

In summary, in this course, you will:

• Learn the skills needed to breathe well, lifelong.
• Receive guided exercises, observation and assessment, and teaching practice for those skills.
• Understand the necessary functional anatomy of breathing techniques.
• Learn decision pathways to work with imbalances of the breath.
• Understand safety and contraindications of different breathing skills.

Topics include:

• Charting the parameters of breathing.
  Observing the breath as it is.
• Finding comfort with the natural breath and understanding its uses.
• Regulating the cycle of breathing skillfully.
• Managing the effort of breathing: decreasing the effort of breathing with ease, increasing the effort with arousal.
• Working with deep breathing and shallow breathing.
• Understanding the anatomy, principles, and practice of physical patterns of breathing and their uses, including abdominal breathing, lower rib breathing, upper chest breathing, and breathing into the back.
• Appreciating the connection between breath and body movement and its practical uses.
• Lengthening the breath with care and comfort.
• Safely using fast breathing.
• Cultivating the inhalation: including using movement, position, touch, visualization, sound, and sequencing.
• Cultivating the exhalation: including using movement, position, touch, visualization, sound, and sequencing.
• Developing breath suspension, safety, contraindications, benefits, sequencing and more.
• Using breathing ratios and stepped breathing in asana and pranayama.
• Using ujjāyī breathing in asana.
• Working with sound to enhance breathing.

Traditional Frameworks

• prāṇa, deśa, kāla, saṁkhyā, dīrgha, sūkṣma
• sama-vṛtti, viṣama-vṛtti, vairambha

Modern Science

• Functional anatomy of the respiratory system.
• Functional anatomy of breathing cycle.
• Physiology of respiration, including:control of breathing
  • gas exchange and transport
  • energy generation
  • metabolic impact, acid-base balance
  • hyperventilation and hypoventilation
• Introduction to visceral regulation and breathing:
  • interoception, homeostasis
  • vagal tone, heart rate variability, regulation through breath
  • connections based on polyvagal theory

15 hours

9 and 10 September 2023

£200

This master course covers the yoga therapy approach to assessment, protocol development, and teaching guidelines for disordered breathing and cardiovascular conditions.
Learn to use yoga therapy to help people with asthma, allergies, sinusitis, COPD, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmias, deep vein thrombosis and more.

Understand common imbalances of breathing patterns and how to use yoga methods to work with them.

Learn the medical science relevant to yoga therapy: anatomy, physiology, pathology, symptoms and signs, and course of the disease.

Use the Svastha map of 10 domains and skills to translate the medical diagnosis into self-care and yoga therapy parameters that you can work with.

Go over common presentations of these conditions with template case studies.

Receive practical guidelines to work safely and effectively with clients with these conditions.

60 hours:,14-15 October, 18-19 November, 16-17 December 2023, 20-21 Jan 2024

£800

Move well: Master Course on Yoga Therapy for Locomotor Issues – 60 hours

This course will take you through all the important skills of movement for each region of the body, the major disorders that arise in those regions, and the yoga therapy approach to managing them. These same skills are also what keep your locomotor system healthy and help you move well, through all phases of life.

In summary, in this course, you will:

• Learn the locomotor skills needed to move well.
• Receive guided exercises, observation and assessment, and teaching practice for those skills.
• Understand the necessary functional anatomy of key body regions.
• Learn decision pathways to work with imbalances of these body regions.
• Appreciate the implication of major locomotor system disorders and diagnoses and learn how to approach them.
• Understand safety and contraindications along with each skill and disorder-based management.

Topics include:

• Understanding, practicing, and teaching the skills of moving well:pain-management as needed
  • awareness & exploration
  • relaxation, release
  • mobilization, easing movement
  • stability, control
  • strength, endurance
  • range of movement, stretching
  • alignment for safe and effective force transmission and loading
  • balance, gait
  • agility, speed and responsiveness
  • coordination, increasing complexity
  • positive emotion and supportive dialogue toward the body
  • breathing to support moving well
  • play, exploration, intrinsic reward
• Learning and teaching guided exercises for each of these regions to develop important movement skills, with a holistic focus:
  • low back
  • mid & upper back
  • neck
  • shoulder
  • elbow, wrist & hand
  • sacrum
  • hip
  • knee
  • ankle & foot
• Learning and teaching guided practices combining multiple movement skills for a region and across regions.
• Appreciating safety and contraindications in teaching and practice.
• Observing a student, assessing locomotor imbalances, and working with decision pathways or protocols for managing those imbalances.
  • Working with major locomotor disorders such as:lumbar spine (chronic low back pain, disc herniation, sciatica, facet joint dysfunction, hyperlordosis, spondylolisthesis)
  • thoracic spine (hyperkyphosis, stiffness, facet joint dysfunction)
  • cervical spine (head forward alignment, disc herniation, nerve compression)
  • scoliosis
  • shoulder (impingement, rotator cuff tears, instability)
  • elbow, hand (epicondylitis, carpal tunnel syndrome)
  • sacroiliac pain and dysfunction
  • hip (fracture, alignment, soft tissue imbalances)
  • knee (IT band, meniscal tears, ligament strains)
  • dropped arches, hallux valgus
• Understanding the tissues of the locomotor system: fascia, cartilage, bones, muscles, ligaments, joints, nerves.
• Appreciating the global organization of movement: tension, compression, tensegrity and integration; prediction, feedback, neural control; development of movement.

Understanding the science of key locomotor skills

30 hours
17-18 Feb, 16-17 March 2024
£400

Course Content:

During this course, participants will:

• Learn to balance your energy levels from being low or high to a neutral and functional state.
• Understand and practice rest, deep rest, and restoration.
• Cultivate positive emotions and sensations in mind and body including compassion, love, joy, and gratitude.
• Develop teaching skills for all the above.

Topics include:

Balancing energy:

• Understanding emotion, valence, energy, and the connection to the yogic frameworks of guna-s and klesa-s.
• Winding down from high energy: using your body, breath, senses to recover balance. How to meet high energy level where it is and chart multimodal stepdown.
• Activating from low energy: using your body, breath, senses to recover. How to meet low energy level where it is and chart multimodal step up.

Cultivating deep rest and recovery:

Working with:

• safety and letting go.
• support and release.
• mobilization and ease.
• visualization for relaxation.
• surrendering effort
• and more techniques of deep rest.

Cultivating positive emotions

• Exploring the role and importance of positive emotions in wellbeing.
• Understanding the traditional presentation of positive emotions in yoga.
• Growing compassion, joy, love, gratitude and more.
• Understanding the challenges in cultivating positive emotions.
• Working with therapeutic applications of positive emotion practices.

Traditional Frameworks

• 3 guṇa-s, bhāva, maitrī, karuṇā, mudita, upekṣā, santoṣa.

Modern Science

• Understanding the stress response and its role in activation, regulation, and shut down:
  • sympathetic nervous system, activation, mobilization responses.
  • parasympathetic nervous system, relaxation, immobilization responses
  • polyvagal theory, heart rate variability
  • window of tolerance, resilience

30 hours
20-21 April, 1-2 June 2024
£400

Course Content:

During this course, participants will:

• Understand the key types of awareness practices.
• Examine the ancient yoga frameworks that structure and explain awareness practices.
• Explore how we can use different types of awareness practices optimally on our journey of wellbeing.
• Classify objects of awareness, what we can practice mindfulness or meditation on, based on practical samkhya and yoga frameworks.
• Practice yogic mindfulness extensively and in-depth.
• Experience absorption practices in sight, mantra, breath and body, positive emotions and more.
• Practice composite visualizations of sensations, images, and more.
• Explore the neuroscience of consciousness and attention.
• Understand the connections between yoga and modern positive psychology and neurobiology on the topic of meditation and mindfulness.

Topics covered include:

What and why of awareness practices

•  The categories of directed attention: mindfulness, absorption, contemplation. What are their key features and the differences between them?
• The stages of progressive absorption in meditation practices.
• Dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi, samyama in traditional yoga.
• Ways that awareness practices play an important role in supporting holistic wellbeing and self-transformation: monitoring, focus, insight, goal-setting.
• Experiencing holistic states of change (bhāva).
• Recalling one’s attention (smṛti-sādhana).
• The arising and role of insight (prajñā) in transformation.
• What to meditate on? Objects or experiences of focus: body, breath, senses, emotions, abstractions, I-sense (grahītā, grahaṇā, grāhya).
• Contemplation and abstractions in meditation pathways: vikalpa, vitarka, vicāra.
• Awareness and the three guṇas of yoga as an underlying framework.

How of awareness practices

• Balancing effort and relaxation in attention practices, walking the line between energy and dullness.
• Growing the qualities of steadiness and entrainment.
• Understanding and practicing focused vs. expansive awareness states.
• Managing the emotional background of mindfulness and absorptive states.
• Cultivating a stable meditation pathway over time.
• Finding salience or importance in objects of absorption.

Yogic mindfulness: cultivating sattvic presence

• Understanding the cautions, challenges, recommendations in mindfulness practices.
• Developing and deepening sattvic mindfulness of breath, body, senses, thoughts and emotions.

Yogic absorption: foundations of mantra, imagery and more:
Understand the principles of, and practice absorption in:

• sound, mantra, speech.
• light, images.
• breath and body sensation.
• positive emotions.
• peace, stillness.

Science of consciousness and attention
Understand the neuroscience of the self, including:

• emergence and purpose of self-construct.
• nerve signaling, neural circuits.
• theories of consciousness.
• top-down monitoring and feedback systems.

Explore the neurobiology of:

• mindfulness, absorption.
• flow states, default mode network.
• mystic and alternative consciousness states.

Traditional yoga frameworks

• bhāva
• dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi, smṛti-sādhana
• prajñā
• vikalpa, vitarka, vicāra
• grahītā, grahaṇā, grāhya

15 hours 

6-7 July 2024

£200

Relationship and connection

We depend on relationships from birth until our passing to provide us with support, connection, stability, positive emotions, meaning, and much more. In this course, we will explore the traditional and yogic frameworks, reflections, and practices that can help us understand and manage our connections and relationships.

30 hours

10-11 August, 7-8 September 2024
£400

Course Content:

During this course, participants will:

• Understand the modern psychology diagnostic view of anxiety, depression, trauma, and addictions.
• Explore the stress response in detail from neurobiology, including polyvagal theory, to behaviour.
• Examine the current science behind depression, addictions, trauma, and anxiety.
• Understand the scientific rationale for a holistic, yoga-based approach.
• Map these disorders to imbalances of skills and functions using the holistic Svastha yoga map.
• Use a comprehensive Svastha yoga approach to create short-term strategies and long-term plans to help people with anxiety, trauma, depression, and addictions.
• Learn teaching skills for working with mental health, including trauma-sensitive language, safety guidelines, cueing and presentation, small group management, referral and support and more.
• Understand the traditional yoga and ayurveda approach to these imbalances.

One to one mentoring with Jane Craggs and Svastha UK Faculty completes the UK portion of the training.. There will be 10 hours of face to face mentoring sessions which can be taken in 1 or 2 hour sessions over the 18 months.

30 hours (live online)

This course gives you a solid foundation in the traditional approach of ayurveda, as relevant to wellbeing maintenance, nutrition, and yoga therapy. We will explore the skills of healthful eating and developing a nourishing relationship to food. We will also go into the topics of lifestyle management, sleep management, and taking care of the senses. Further, we also cover digestive disorders and the yoga and ayurveda approach to managing them.

• In summary, in this course, you will:
• Learn the foundations of ayurveda for health maintenance and wellbeing direct from the ancient traditional sources, and made accessible and clear.
• Understand the importance of nutrition and be guided in developing strategies for optimizing relationship to food and diet.
• Examine and implement lifestyle management of sleep, energy, daily activity, fasting, exercise, and sensory management for greater wellbeing from a traditional and modern scientific perspective.
  Topics include:
• Exploring the roots and key frameworks of ayurveda from the traditional sources, clearly and effectively, including:
  • guṇa and kriya: qualities and functions of body and mind.
  • three doṣa-s (vāta pitta kapha) and their divisions.
  • seven dhātu-s.
  • agni and āma.
• Understanding and assessing ayurvedic constitution (prakṛti) and observing individual balance and imbalance (vikṛti).
• Learning common patterns of imbalance of the functions of the doṣa-s and measures to balance them.
• Exploring the impact of daily life routine (dinacarya) and adaption to the seasons or environment (ṛtucarya) from the traditional ayurvedic perspective.
• Following the models of kāla, artha, karma, hīna-, ati-, and mithyā-yoga, and prajñāparādha, to analyze imbalances of senses and actions and bring them back to wellbeing.
• Developing daily routine and rituals and personalizing lifestyle. Balancing work, play, rest.
• Reflecting on and developing pathways for adapting to stages of life.
• Taking care of the eyes and ears and managing what we see and hear.
• Appreciating the importance of sleep, the science behind it, and developing better quality and duration of sleep holistically.
• Examining the physiology of the digestive system as relevant to holistic wellbeing and yoga therapy.
• Exploring the complexity of the science of nutrition, the microbiome, and common approaches to diets in the modern era.
• Charting diet and eating patterns.
• Understanding relationship to food and hunger (nourishment, sensation, craving, coping).
• Cultivating beneficial relationships to food, before, during, and after eating.
• Investigating the importance of fasting, its relevance, safety, and strategies to practice it effectively.
• Understanding major digestive disorders from a modern medical perspective, as well as taking an ayurvedic and yogic approach to managing them.

6 hours (live online)

Diabetes is one the most prevalent major diseases in the world now. It has been on the rise for years and the burden of its complications is unfortunate and traumatic.
Diabetes is not merely a disease of insulin and glucose—that is only part of a more complex metabolic dysfunction. Yoga and ayurveda, through a holistic approach to nutrition, movement, lifestyle change, and stress management, can have a substantial impact on managing diabetes.
This course will explain the yoga therapy approach to helping those with diabetes.

40 hours (mimimum; additional hours are optional).
Dates are announced monthly on sign up
The Mohan family present 3 x 2-hour sessions per month to assist students in deepening and integrating skills, theory, and application of the holistic yoga approach.
These are generally held on the last weekend of every month, with two of the three sessions able to be attended in the UK time zone.
For the 300-hour program, there is a minimum attendance of 40 hours however, students are welcome to continue with their monthly subscription if desired.
Fees:
US$20.00 per month payable directly to Svastha Yoga & Ayurveda

• Weekend Intensives
  16x 2-day intensives Saturday and Sunday 9am-5.30pm
• 22nd and 23rd April 2023
• 20th and  21st May 2023 
• 17th and 18th June 2023
•  15th and 16th July 2023
• 9th and 10th Sept 2023
• 14th and 15th Oct 2023
• 18th and 19th Nov 2023
•  16th and 17th Dec 2023
• 20 and 21st Jan 2024
• 17th and 18th Feb 2024
• 16th and 17th March 2024
• 20th and 21st April 2024 
• 1st and 2nd June 2024
• 6th and 7th July 2024
• 10th and 11th August 2024
• 7th and 8th September 2024