Becoming a RYT® 500 Yoga Teacher
Well, 2019 has been one big, crazy-exciting blur. Lots and lots of yoga, yoga, yoga all year.
But I’d love to take the brief time to announce that I’m officially a 500-hour yoga teacher! I successfully completed my 300-Hour Foundations in Yoga Therapy Training in October. It was a pretty intense ending, as I had to write a 10-page paper summing up everything I’d learned with a topic on how yoga therapy could be used in a certain therapeutic context (I chose Lyme Disease). But I did it… and I graduated.
therpeputic Me with my certification! 🙂
As of November 2019, I have also taught over 1,000 yoga classes. Yes, you read that right. ONE THOUSAND YOGA CLASSES.
This means I’m now considered an experienced yoga teacher. If you ever wonder about the letters/numbers yoga teachers use after their names, RYT® 200 means you’re a yoga teacher that’s completed a 200 hour training; E-RYT® 200 means that I’m a yoga teacher that’s taught over 1,000 classes and has at least 200 hours of training; RYT® 500 means you’ve got 500 hours of training; and E-RYT® 500 means that you’ve taught over 2,000 classes and have 500 hours of training.
So that’s a lot of work! I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished with the E-RYT 200, RYT 500 teaching level. Now, does this all really matter? Maybe not. At the end of the day, a good teacher is a good teacher–and more certifications don’t necessarily make a good teacher. But it’s still fun…
I’m not going to lie that this year has been … extremely stretching and challenging. I was teaching 20 yoga classes a week. At the height of the summer, I taught 29 yoga classes in one week. The most classes I ever taught was 8 in a day. Oh, and I was doing a pretty intense 300-hour yoga teacher training on top of that, too. (And to be clear, not a lot of them were intense fitness yoga, but classes on meditation, yoga therapy, journaling, poetry, restorative yoga, etc).
But that’s a lot. I knew it was a season, and I knew that a season like this would never come again once it’s ended. I mean, who gets to say they got to make a living teaching yoga at a top spa in the country? Not very many people.
And there are already BIG changes for 2020 looming just around the corner. A new season is approaching. This intense 2019 is ending. But for now, I’m going to try to take a little breather, soak in this accomplishment, and finish out the year… I’m so incredibly grateful for everything I learned and how much I’ve grown during this time.
