Mimamsa Yogshala

Almost everything written about the 500-hour yoga teacher training is written from the student's side: what you will study, how you will grow, how it will deepen your practice. All true, and all slightly beside the point if what you actually want to know is whether it will change your working life. So here is the other side of the desk. What does RYT-500 mean to the studio owner, retreat organiser or training school reading your application? First, what the credential literally is RYT-500 is a Yoga Alliance registration, not a degree and not a licence. You become eligible for it after completing 500 hours of training with registered schools — in practice, almost always a 200-hour course followed by a 300-hour course. That structure matters and is widely misunderstood. There is generally no such thing as sitting down and doing "a 500-hour course" from zero. The 500 is the 200 plus the 300. Schools that advertise a combined 500-hour programme are usually offering exactly ...

There is a strange silence around the 300-hour yoga teacher training. Enormous amounts have been written about choosing a 200-hour course. Almost nothing useful has been written about the one after it — which is odd, because the people considering it have already spent a month of their lives and a lot of money on the first one, and deserve better than marketing copy. So: what actually changes between 200 and 300 hours? The 200-hour course teaches you to teach. The 300 teaches you to see. That sounds like a slogan, so let me make it concrete. A good 200-hour training gets you to the point where you can hold a room. You can sequence a class, cue a posture, keep time, project your voice, and get thirty people safely from Savasana back to their shoes. That is a genuine skill and it is not a small one. What it does not give you — because there isn't time — is the ability to look at a specific human body and know what to do about it. That is what the additional 300 hours are for. The s...