The Overarching Design of a Journey Into Power Class, part 1 Copy

The over-arching design of instructing the class:

Show up to each class you teach being intentional. The intention is for each student to take a journey into their power and to discover new realms of vitality, power, and freedom in body and being. The instructor keeps looking, listening, and giving tools until the intention transforms and becomes alive and real. Through verbal, visual, and tactile cues, continue creating the intention into a physical reality, in a conversational style. Interweave intention through each pose of each sequence. In other words, without force, and from love, the instructor keeps standing for each practitioner having an empowering shift from the head (their thoughts) into physical reality with new vitality, power, and freedom in the body and being. Land this in their experience throughout the entire practice, beginning-middle and end, and not just at the beginning or end of class. 

We distinguish power for instructors as one’s capacity to turn intention into reality as measured in time. Therefore, your level of power in the classroom is dictated by how much time it takes to transform intention into reality in the student’s experience in real-time. 

Empower a communal environment and be a community builder. Teachers harvest students; students are not low hanging fruit. You create them from the continued work of enrollment, educating and making available what’s possible in the practice and delivering expanding results.

Be intentional as a way of being. Create global and situational awareness of the physical environment seeing every student in the space. Include the following situational and teaching principles into each class to create the classroom space as an environment for transformation, growth, intentionality, and joy. 

• Relationship/relatedness
• Enrollment – inspire, invite, and educate people into what’s possible in each pose, in the yoga practice, and being up to something bigger than yourself.
• Bridges & Pathways – making the connections to what is newly possible and what’s next at each step. Create a new future now.
• Commitment – The instructor’s commitment to the discipline of the practice inspires a commitment in the students. 

The Baptiste Yoga asana practice is called Journey Into Power. A powerful experience is the intended outcome of the class for every participant. The sequence is malleable and, therefore, adaptable for people of any physical ability, different from changing it up and getting creative with the sequence. In Baptiste Yoga, the assumption is that every human being is whole, perfect, and complete exactly as they are. How you have been in your life up until now has helped you to accomplish your life as it is right now. You have life-as-you-know-it with all of its successes and challenges, and now, what else? This “what else” is what we refer to as “possibility.” 

Journey Into Power contains 11 sections or sequences. The sequence names point to the result intended as the poses within are created on the mat. As the instructor, you are powerful and effective to the degree that you manifest the intention of each of the 11 sequences from possibility into reality (body, mind, and being).

Journey Into Power

Integration

Awakening

Vitality

Equanimity

Grounding

Igniting

Stability

Opening

Release 

Rejuvenation

Deep Rest

A standard class is taught in 60-90 minutes with the room heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and without music; however, the complete Journey Into Power sequence can be taught in 20 minutes doing one breath per pose in a strict vinyasa style. In the flow of Journey Into Power, each pose has a peak. The peak of a pose contains a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Students can adapt the practice by scaling the intensity, modifying the form of the pose, the length of time in the pose, or the number of repetitions/sets of the pose. 

Adaptation: adjust or modify fittingly

Scaling: a regression or progression of steps or degrees

•     Intensity
•     Range of Motion
•     Time 

Through the application of the Baptiste Methodology, Source Principles, and Art & Mastery of Practicing and Teaching Baptiste Yoga, the practice comes alive as a unique expression for every participant, made real in people’s bodies and hearts, every time they step to their mat for a Journey Into Power practice.

The Source Principles of Baptiste Yoga

PHYSICALNESS: Measurable, Observable, Repeatable

Where awareness goes energy flows 

POSSIBILITY: Inception, Revelation, Actualize, Manifestation

The realization of desired results, the possibility of possibility

EMPOWERMENT: Mechanics, Technique, Consistency, Intensity 

Through efficacy, efficiency, and intensity, each movement generates the needed action for achieving the desired results. Power is action.

The Art & Mastery of Practicing and Teaching Baptiste Yoga

LOOK: for True North & what is possible. Put your drishti ON the areas you want to transform.

LISTEN: Your listening makes the difference and not your knowledge.

GIVE TOOLS: That make a difference right now.

View the video, The Overarching Design of a Journey Into Power Class, part 1, and record your response to the following question in your journal. When answering, set a timer for 5 minutes. Though you might feel complete with the answer after a lesser amount of time, stay with it. Ask the question again, allowing yourself to see something new as you stay with the question. Finally, share your answers in the chat feature of this section of the course. Revisit the course and its chat, again and again, to receive new insights as you learn from the sharing of others completing the course.

1). If you have ever experienced a transformative classroom experience, what was happening in the space, in your experience?