Training Description

Street Yoga Trauma Informed Core Training offers an inspiring and heartfelt introduction to the field of service yoga for youth experiencing life challenges. The densely packed 14-hour training focuses on a wide variety of practical, hands-on skills needed to serve youth with yoga and meditation in the real world. Areas for exploration and practice include communicating effectively, maintaining safety in the classroom, promoting healthy boundaries, choosing postures and exercises, handling challenging behaviors and situations, and collaborating with agencies.

Training Activities

Each day of training includes learning by doing, seeing, and listening through the following:

• Yoga practice
• Breathing exercises & meditation
• Sample scenarios and group problem-solving
• Short lecture-style sessions with Q & A
• Break-out small group sessions
• Role playing and skills practice
• Student teaching and feedback opportunities

Street Yoga recognizes the extremely diverse ways in which people practice and teach their yoga. Just as we see the unique traits that make each youth different, we also recognize that each trainee has a distinct relationship with yoga and his or her own individual preferences and beliefs about how to practice. Because of this, Street Yoga does not promote a single methodology for bringing yoga to youth and does not supply trainees with ready-made lists of postures or sequences. Instead, we encourage our trainees to explore how to teach what they already know in a heartfelt and authentic way that will help them engage with youth.

Learning Objectives

We strive to build our trainees’ confidence as teachers, while also discussing ways to modify and adapt their teaching skills to better serve their target audience. Trainees will be encouraged to dig into their personal experience and motivation in order to draw out their courage and compassion as a teacher. We welcome questions about trainees’ special interests or concerns and strive to make the training a rich learning environment.

Upon completion of the training participants will be able to:

• Compare factors involved in teaching yoga in a nontraditional setting vs. a studio setting
• Recognize the important role of body-based interventions in trauma recovery
• Describe ways to creatively modify poses for various populations and situations
• Demonstrate specific postures to address back care and core strength
• Design a brief, population-specific yoga sequence using appropriate postures & breathing
• Discuss potential behavioral challenges and strategies for dealing with them
• Identify new tools or strategies for improved communication
• Explain potential boundary issues with students and describe appropriate response
• Recognize personal sources of support for doing this work
• Discuss ways of effectively approaching and partnering with social service sites
• Define their own next steps in this work

*All trainees also receive an in-depth, interactive workbook that supports the learning objectives, provides background material for the training, and offers take-home exercises and references for future use.

**This program is approved by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Yoga Alliance for 14 hours of Continuing Education Units*.

Prerequisites: Applicants are not required to have completed a teacher-training program. However, because our training helps trainees understand how to use and adapt what they already know for the purposes of yoga service, all applicants should have experience with yoga and/or meditation. These hours may include any combination of personal practice, studio classes, and/or individual instruction. We suggest a minimum of 20 hours of yoga before applying.

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.

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.

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Schedule Details

Friday, June 22 — 5:30 to 9:30 PM

Saturday, June 23 — 12:30 to 7:00 PM

Sunday, June 24 – 11:30 to 5:00 PM

Price Options

$300 (plus tax) pre-registered by May 24, 2018

$350 (plus tax) after May 24, 2018

$100 (plus tax) deposit holds your space.

* Online prices include 7.5% NM gross receipts tax and 2.9% PayPal transaction fee.

Discount rates available for groups of 5+

14 CEUs available

This program is approved for continuing education by Yoga Alliance.