The Mentor Sessions
Summary: Francesca Cervero is a full-time yoga teacher and yoga teacher's mentor. She has been teaching yoga in New York City and Washington, DC since 2005 and the foundation of her teaching practice comes from OM Yoga Center’s style of alignment-based vinyasa. Her teaching is also inspired by the years she spent in physical therapy, a constant curiosity about anatomy and biomechanics, and her love of Buddhist teachings. Francesca believes that introducing more people to the deeply healing benefits of yoga has the power to completely transform our world and the best way to get more people practicing (mindful, therapeutic) yoga is to raise the bar of professionalism for yoga teachers. She hopes that yoga teaching can be a career path that is respected and allows for sustainable income. She believes that the responsibility is on us as teachers to be worthy of, and demand such respect. It is for this reason she has maintained a thriving business teaching 15 private yoga clients a week and added a full practice teaching and mentoring yoga teachers in The Science of the Private Lesson™. Here is the plan for The Mentor Sessions: Support + Strategy for Yoga Teachers---> Making the deeply healing benefits of yoga and its sister practices more accessible has the power to transform the world we live in. An important part of making smart, mindful, therapeutic yoga more widely available is for all of us to continue to deepen and evolve as teachers. I believe the depth that arises in teaching comes from inquiry and relationship, not from collecting information from gurus. I want the yoga world to have higher standards for quality teaching AND better support networks for teachers, and I want this podcast to be at the forefront of those discussions. I’m here to offer nourishing support to help you feel more confident in your teaching and realistic strategy to help you find more clarity on your career path.
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Is all discomfort good? Is all discomfort bad? What is the “right” way to teach any given asana? How do we offer the version of a pose or practice that will be most beneficial to our students right now? Being able to answer these questions with confidence comes from a depth of understanding of what I call The Yoga of Discernment.
In today’s episode I’m chatting with my friend and teacher Jason Ray Brown. Jason is a long time yoga teacher and the creator of Anatomy Studies for Yoga Teachers. It is a year long anatomy course that I took in 2010 and it had a HUGE impact on my teaching! A deep study of anatomy will change the way you teach. It is empowering, clarifying and fascinating.
The practice and study of yoga is so vast that the more we all continue to study and teach, the more this question seems to loom taller and taller: what exactly is the job of a yoga instructor? To process this out loud with me, I invited my friend Jules Mitchell for a chat. Jules has been teaching yoga for a decade, but her knowledge base doesn’t end there. Jules holds a Masters in Biomechanics, is a certified massage therapist, and is currently writing a book about it all.
When you teach yoga classes {group or private} how much are you demonstrating poses? If you have been hanging out in my world for a while you may know that I mostly advocate for a style of teaching that relies on language to convey important information, including subtle movements, instead of relying on the use of our body to teach.
Anatomy studies can be a powerful tool in the yoga teacher’s utility belt, but I know many of us don’t know where to start or how to apply it to a teaching practice. There is so much to learn and it can feel overwhelming! Today I’m excited to introduce you to my friend Dr. Ariele Foster, a yoga instructor for 16 years and a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Dr. Foster is passionate about making yoga anatomy accessible to everyone, which is why she started the Yoga Anatomy Academy.
In our initial yoga teacher trainings we learn how to teach safe and effective group classes, but what do we do when only one person shows up to class?? Or how do we teach a new student who requests a 1x1 lesson? In this episode I’ll share my four step process to help you teach better private lessons. In addition, I’ll share with you concrete examples from my own teaching to help you troubleshoot with some of your trickier clients. It’s an info-packed episode today, so go ahead and dive in.
Kathryn Bruni-Young is the founder of the Mindful Strength method of teaching and one of my favorite teaching inspirations. Kathryn has been teaching for 11 years, and while her roots are in traditional yoga practices and teaching, more recently she has become a proponent of incorporating strength training into her movement practice. She also wants to empower and equip teachers to begin to move into more strength training in a way that feels authentic and refreshing.
Do you have Schedule Drama? I certainly do sometimes! As yoga teachers most of us are freelancers, which means we run our own small business whether we realize it or not. We piece together a teaching schedule and a business and a life one random class at a time. If you feel like your schedule is overwhelming or disorganized or changing all the time, I’ll tell ya…I think most of us feel like that.
Welcome back, everyone! Today, I am excited to bring to you the wisdom, experience, and enthusiasm of my friend Trina Altman. Trina is a certified Yoga and Pilates instructor who is passionate about varied movement. Rather than rigidly adhering to one school of movement, Trina was unable to unlock the potential of her own body by combining the tenets of both Yoga and Pilates, and she brings an embodied and wise awareness to movement of all kinds.
Welcome to the second episode of The Mentor Sessions Podcast. Today’s show is going to address why teaching yoga can feel so scary. {!!} As a teacher, it can often feel like there is a great deal of pressure to know everything. And while in-depth study is incredibly important, I also want to release you from some of the know everything pressure that can make it impossible to be present for your teaching.
Hello and welcome to The Mentor Sessions! I’m your host, Francesca Cervero and I’m here to offer my fellow yoga teachers two things: Nourishing support to help you feel more confident in your teaching Realistic strategy to help you find more clarity on your career path I am excited today to be interviewed by my friend and business coach, Rachel Cook. Rachel is the founder of RachelCook.com, and she was instrumental in helping my teaching practice grow into what it is today.
