Intro

Programs

Your wild soul designed this life for you before you were born, and your deepest wounds and darkest shadows are as essential to your nature as your perfect passions and sacred gifts. The Living Mandala Yoga teacher training programs are called “soul-based” in order to distinguish them from more “spirit” driven programs which focus on ego-transcendence, the “light-worker” mentality, and “higher consciousness.” Our programs are grounded in descending the ego as much as ascending the ego; we believe emotions are holy gateways to self-transformation, enjoyment in life (bhukti) is just as essential as spiritual liberation (mukti), and that every yoga teacher must uniquely craft her philosophy based on the components of their life’s purpose (The LIGHT: Passions, Gifts, Spiritual Beliefs AND the DARK: Wounds, Regrets, and all that softens your Ego and shifts your Identity). The practical components of our program are based on the student as a whole being, body, mind, and spirit, and we integrate movement alchemy, magick, body-prayer, energy-work, spell-craft, deep creative dives, circle-craft, and ritual into learning. More specifically, the teaching methods applied include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Council and Circles: Counseling each other is a key part of Vidya (clear-seeing) and enhances feminine communication skills. The future is circular, and time is a spiral.
• Altar-Building: We are constantly building and co-creating altars as symbolic action and to honor ancestors, elements, and, less often, Goddess archetypes.
• Spell-Craft and Ritual: We frame spell-work as the conversation you are having with the world about the kind of future you want for the world’s children, and we frame yoga as a moving ritual.
• Communal Creative Work: We frequently paint/collage together to channel the prana-shakti energy, bolster third-eye balance, and generally take us out of our left-brain/logical thinking.
• Divination: Every day, we have a morning and evening oracle; this is a check-in circle of sorts, during which we draw cards, work with pendulums, or other “wilder” forms of divination in order to gain clarity on the present moment, on the work we have done, and on whatever cosmic guidance we are receiving.
• Pathworking: We do quite a bit of guided meditation in order to work with ancestral, animal, and spirit guides.
• Personal Mythwork: This is a method of sense-making and story-telling. We use personal mythwork quite a lot during our movement practices in order to gain clarity on where we have been and where we are.
• Psychodrama: We frame yoga broadly as “seeking out obstacles to freedom and removing them,” and we engage in several group practices for removing these “obstacles” within our psyche in order to manifest our sacred work.