Street Yoga Teacher Training
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To apply for a Street Yoga training, there are 2 steps.
- Step One: Click here and fill out the online application.
- Step Two: Click on the payment button for the particular training you want to take in the chart below and make a payment.
Upcoming Trainings
Please use this page if you are paying the full workshop fee today. If you are paying the deposit at this time,
and intend to pay the balance upon check-in, please go to this page to make a secure payment.
Washington, DC
September 10-12, 2010
Fri: 6:00-9:30pm
Sat: 11:45 am to 6:45pm
Sun: 12:00 to 6:00 pm
Yoga District
1830 1st Street NW
Washington, DC
202.265.YOGA
Sponsor: Yoga Activist
YogaActivist.org is a division of Yoga District nonprofit
studios in Washington DC. Yoga District’s local outreach
programs serve the homeless, youth in detention,
at-risk youth, refugees, trauma survivors and others.
 Encino, CAOctober 1-3, 2010 Founded in 2010, Yoga Everyone provides |  Toronto, ONNovember 12-14, 2010 Broadview subway stop Fri: 5:30-9:00pm Cost: $290 USD $305 CAD |
Houston, TXDecember 3-5, 2010 3641-C Westheimer Road Fri: 5:30-9:00pm Cost: $290 | 
New York City, NYJanuary 14-16. 2011 Times: To Be Announced Cost: $290 |
Teacher Training Overview
In this training, you will receive practical, real world knowledge and techniques for teaching yoga to at-risk youth and other vulnerable populations. You will also be encouraged to dig into your personal experience in order to draw out your own joy, courage, and compassion as a teacher.
Street Yoga does not prescribe a strict methodology for bringing yoga to youth and other vulnerable populations. Instead, we help you to develop your confidence, creativity, and teaching skills in order to offer and sincere, balanced, and healthy yoga class to students in unconventional settings. We will teach you how to assess some of the immediate and long-term needs of your students, decide which issues you can realistically address, and design a safe and inspiring yoga offering for your students. We will cover some of the basic problem-solving and behavior management approaches we have found most useful, as well as “sticky” issues such as how to deal with inappropriate behavior, boundary violations, and high-intensity situations. You can expect to spend significant time covering the following topics:
* Your personal motivations for wanting to be of service and how this will shape the experience you offer to youth
* Communication techniques, including conflict prevention and de-escalation
* Useful and creative problem-solving techniques that will help you adapt common yoga postures and sequences for special populations
* Effective strategies for creating and maintaining a yoga program for youth
* How to identify and collaborate with community organizations to create supportive, engaging programming for youth
* The importance of developing a community of support for yourself and your work
In this training, we will ask you to expand your ideas of what yoga is beyond the conventional experience of 90 minutes on the mat in a studio. From our perspective, yoga might be five minutes in a hallway with one youth, helping her breathe and calm down before she meets a probation officer. Or, it might be working with 8 people at a shelter and simply doing warrior pose, downward dog, deep breathing, and a long savasana. Or, it might be working with staff to help them ground and center in their own breathing so they can avoid getting into a confrontation with a youth. If this sounds like the type of yoga you want to get involved with, then this training is for you!
Learning Objectives
After this training, participants will be able to:
* explain why they want to be of service teaching yoga to underserved populations
* explain the benefits of yoga and mindfulness for vulnerable populations, as well as their caregivers and service providers
* assess the needs of specific populations and identify helpful responses
* design a safe, compact, and population-specific yoga sequence using appropriate language, asanas, and pacing
* identify at least one new tool for improved communication
* identify potential boundary issues with students and describe appropriate responses
* identify the importance of having a community of support for this work
* articulate three important steps in the process of creating a yoga program in collaboration with local social service providers.
All participants will receive a 108-page manual that supports these objectives and provides background material for the training. To accomplish these objectives, we use a wide variety of creative teaching activities, including group practice, student teaching, break-out groups, role-playing, partner exercises, journaling, personal feedback, problem-solving scenarios, community building exercises, and personal reflection.
Intended Audience
This training is geared towards two primary groups of people:
* Social Workers/Teachers/other service professionals who wish to learn how better to serve the youth in their care
* Yoga Teachers who wish to expand their ability to be of service through yoga.
If you do not fit into one of these groups, please contact us to discuss the training, what you are hoping to get out of it, and how to decide if it’s the right fit for you. Please note that this training will not teach you how to be a yoga instructor. It is intended to help you explore the yoga knowledge and experience you already have and adapt it for youth in a variety of unconventional yoga settings. While we will cover the basics of creating a population-specific class and appropriate pose choice and modification, we expect students to have a solid foundation of personal experience in yoga and/or mindfulness techniques. Again, if you have questions or concerns about whether or not this is the right fit for you, please contact us.
Certification Opportunities
We now offer 14 hours of continuing education credits for Social Workers (through the NASW) and for Yoga Teachers (through Yoga Alliance).
What Others Have Said About the Training
"It gave me the tools and confidence to teach others and to feel what it's like to spend my day dedicated to yoga. I went home so joyful every day and it was obvious to others."
"Very useful tools offered that kept me engaged throughout… I loved the role-playing and "hands on experience." I liked the info about emotional distance...helpful."
"I learned about myself and I feel very encouraged to 'show up'"
"I really love the attention to different populations and the addition of NVC (non violent communication)."
"The training was more than I expected. It completely met my needs and objectives."
The Trainers
Mark Lilly, Lead Trainer, Street Yoga Founder and Board President
Mark Lilly is a mindfulness and communication trainer who has taught workshops all over North America to widely diverse audiences including physicians, nurses, social workers, police officers, therapists, mental health workers and countless others. Mark is the founder and Board President of Street Yoga, an internationally recognized non-profit which provides yoga and mindfulness classes to at-risk populations in Portland and Seattle.
Mark has extensive expertise in community- as well as hospital-based mindfulness practices, and is initiating Mindful Communication workshops for physicians, along with similar trainings for nurses and social workers. In addition to ongoing work with Street Yoga, he has developed the practice of Body-Mind Rehab Therapy, which he currently offers to pediatric inpatients recovering from significant illness or injury, at Portland's Emanuel Hospital. He is also co-creator of the Mindful Parents & Caregiver program which serves social workers and their client families with practical, everyday mindfulness.
Mark has developed many specialized mindfulness curricula in addition to the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings, including specialized work for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations.
Mark has extensive expertise in community- as well as hospital-based mindfulness practices, and is initiating Mindful Communication workshops for physicians, along with similar trainings for nurses and social workers. In addition to ongoing work with Street Yoga, he has developed the practice of Body-Mind Rehab Therapy, which he currently offers to pediatric inpatients recovering from significant illness or injury, at Portland's Emanuel Hospital. He is also co-creator of the Mindful Parents & Caregiver program which serves social workers and their client families with practical, everyday mindfulness.
Mark has developed many specialized mindfulness curricula in addition to the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings, including specialized work for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations.
For Mark, yoga is an everyday survival skill, a practice he has shared with thousands of youth through Street Yoga. He still lives with the tremors of traumas past and realizes the delicate line between suffering and awakening. His teaching emphasizes cultivation of the best within each of us by using the authentic stories and experiences that illuminate our being and drive our teaching to places of deep truthfulness.
Mark has developed the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings as well a yoga curricula used for specialized work with young patients recovering from illness or injury in the hospital, for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations.
Through it all, he brings a lightness and love to his teaching that is rooted in humility, grace and joy.**
Katie Arrants, Lead Street Yoga Trainer
Katie Arrants has been teaching and training Street Yoga volunteers since she developed the original Street Yoga teacher training in 2005. Katie has trained over 200 yoga instructors in cities across the nation, providing her students with a rich and challenging learning environment. She infuses her teaching with a calm, grounded, real-world approach to combining mindfulness and youth work. Katie is also currently chartering Street Yoga’s first chapter in Seattle.
As a Street Yoga trainer, Katie draws on over 8 years of direct social work experience and currently stays active in the field of social work as a Case Manager for foster youth. In this job, Katie helps youth transition to independent lives as they are aging out of foster care, a time of life in which foster youth become extremely vulnerable and are at high risk for homelessness. She carries a diverse and heavy caseload of youth with concerns ranging from mental illness to criminal backgrounds, trauma victims to teen parents. Some of her specialties include homelessness prevention, skill development, family reunification, community collaboration, and motivational interviewing for personal change. She is also trained in Non-Violent Communication and de-escalation techniques.
Katie has over a decade of yoga teaching experience and completed her RYT-200 in 2004. She has taught at the Omega Institute’s Being Yoga Conference and the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference. She has completed graduate work in Sociology at the Salt Institute and will begin an MSW program in fall 2010.
With her gentle and light-hearted approach, Katie strives to develop knowledge, confidence, and enthusiasm in all her students, so they can achieve their highest potential.
As a Street Yoga trainer, Katie draws on over 8 years of direct social work experience and currently stays active in the field of social work as a Case Manager for foster youth. In this job, Katie helps youth transition to independent lives as they are aging out of foster care, a time of life in which foster youth become extremely vulnerable and are at high risk for homelessness. She carries a diverse and heavy caseload of youth with concerns ranging from mental illness to criminal backgrounds, trauma victims to teen parents. Some of her specialties include homelessness prevention, skill development, family reunification, community collaboration, and motivational interviewing for personal change. She is also trained in Non-Violent Communication and de-escalation techniques.
Katie has over a decade of yoga teaching experience and completed her RYT-200 in 2004. She has taught at the Omega Institute’s Being Yoga Conference and the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference. She has completed graduate work in Sociology at the Salt Institute and will begin an MSW program in fall 2010.
With her gentle and light-hearted approach, Katie strives to develop knowledge, confidence, and enthusiasm in all her students, so they can achieve their highest potential.
Still interested? Please fill out an online application and click above to pay your deposit to hold your spot.
Refund Policy
The $100 deposit is non-refundable. The balance of the training ($190) is refundable up to 10 days before the training. After that point, it is non-refundable.
If paying the full amount upfront is a hardship, contact adrienne@streetyoga.org. A minimum non-refundable deposit of $100 is required.
Scholarship Policy
For each training, we offer two full scholarships (usually reserved for the host) and two to three partial scholarships, which means that the person still pays their $100 deposit, but they receive a $190 discount (the balance) as a scholarship.
If you are interested in a scholarship for a Street Yoga teacher training, please submit your online application and e-mail a specific scholarship request to jaime@streetyoga.org with the words "scholarship request" and the city in which they want to attend training in the subject line. (e.g. scholarship request portland). The e-mail should describe your need and your intention for attending the training. Priority goes to individuals with a clear intention to use yoga toward service in their local community, and with a demonstrated need for financial assistance. Final scholarship decisions are made one month prior to training dates.
Refund Policy:
The first $100 of the workshop tuition is non-refundable. The balance of the training is refundable up to 10 days before the training. After that point, the entire workshop tuition is non-refundable.
Please either pay via the PayPal or mail a check to the address below:
Mail deposits to:
Street Yoga
833 SE Main St, Box 226
Portland, OR 97214
Need More Information? Call Jaime, Street Yoga Program Manager at 503-232-0362
Namaste.
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