Biotensegrity-Focused Movement for Yoga Teachers

– Are you ready to bump your understanding of fascia up to a new level?  

– Do you ever wonder how you could move with greater ease, efficiency, and joy?

– Is injury or chronic pain a regular feature in your life or your clients lives?

Join us for a week intensive of Myofascial Release and biotensegrity-focused movement where we’ll dive into all these topics… and more!

“In order to really understand fascia, you need to understand the principles of biotensegrity”

– Joanne Avison

Biotensegrity, as a new focus for movement, will offer you and your clients more freedom and ease in daily tasks. In this training we will be exploring how to move in harmony with body, mind, and spirit by deepening our understanding of fascia and biotensegrity, and by discovering functional movements from the inside out. This is particularly helpful for pain management and when working with chronic pain populations.

~

This 6-day training can be used as a 50-hour stand-alone CEU certificate, or as part of your 300-hour Advanced Myofascial Yoga and Biotensegrity Yoga Alliance registered teacher training.

*A 200 hour RYT prerequisite is required for entry into this training.

We will be covering topics such as:

• Understanding biotensegrity to understand movement, and how to get the most out of your yoga or movement practice.
• Understanding movement compensation patterns: why they happen, how to bring unconscious movement habits into conscious awareness, and where they can be changed to become more efficient.
• How to work safely and effectively with chronic pain populations.
• Understanding the true purpose of body tension, and how to bring it into balance and integrity in all body types.
• Developing yoga sequences to bring the forces of tension and compression into balance for all body types.
• Understanding the link between chronic pain and fear of movement, and how to bring safe healing back into your client’s life for pain reduction and improved strength and function.
• How to read bodies and assess tension patterns to bring about positive change for all body types.

If you are a yoga teacher working with chronic pain populations, or with athletes who want to sharpen their performance, this training is invaluable. For more information, read the detailed description below:

Understanding biotensegrity brings a focus together that is about balancing the two forces of tension and compression. The word tensegrity is the blend of the words “tensile” and “integrity.” The philosophy is that, when tension and compression are in integrity, the body is in balance and its energy can be used optimally and efficiently.  Ideally this looks like smooth, controlled, and efficient movement. When there has been injury or stress, the tension and compression relationship can get out of balance. Postural tension in one area of the body can lead to excess compression in other areas.

How do these imbalances occur? Our bodies and brains love efficiency, so when fascia restricts due to injury or repetitive stress, our body needs to adapt to the new limitations (or demands) and find new pathways for movement forces to move through. Sometimes this looks like a change in movement habits to avoid pain, and sometimes it is lack of mobility or flexibility (for example, due to muscle protection).

For the sake of efficiency, the body will very quickly “learn” this new habit and integrate it as a new normal so that we can get busy focusing on other important things. This habit then becomes unconscious, meaning that you are doing it but you don’t know you are doing it. Incorporating mindfulness into movement practices is something we’ll be addressing in this training as one of the key elements to restoring the biotensegral balance of our movements. This allows us to become aware of old habits, to shift movements into conscious awareness, and to then choose balanced and healthy movements to reflect a more balanced and healthy life.

Dates: December 1 – 6 2018

Next dates: November 7th – 12th 2020

Hours: 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Saturday through Thursday

Investment: $699 early bird rate available until November 15 ~ $899 after

Guest Teachers:

Sandra Soloski

Sandra is a physiotherapist with over 25 years of experience. She works with people in chronic pain, elite athletes, and everybody in between, with her primary goal always being to optimize functional movement patterns. She is an instructor in the national orthopaedic division, teaching manual therapy skills and clinical reasoning to physiotherapists seeking international accreditation in manual therapy.

Sandra travels throughout Canada teaching basic anatomy and biomechanics to equestrian riders and coaches. Her recent passion is Hanna Somatics, and she is both teaching classes and utilizing this movement-based therapy with her own clients. Sandra currently lives in Black Diamond where she is an avid gardener and rider.

Joanne Avison

Joanne Avison is a yoga teacher and therapist (C-IAYT) and author of the book YOGA: Fascia Anatomy and Movement, (Handspring 2015) as well as co-founder and director of the Art of Contemporary Yoga Teacher Training School, (AOCY) accredited worldwide by Yoga Alliance (USA), Yoga Federation of India, European Yoga Alliance and IPTI. Joanne is also a Structural Integration teacher/practitioner. Her considerable experience in both movement and manual therapy inspired the school’s unique approach to yoga, applied structural anatomy and philosophy.  Joanne is also a CMED Graduate (2004) and has studied extensively in human development as well as specialising in soft tissue and the links between archetypal behaviour and psychosomatic patterning. Her passion is biotensegrity and how it makes sense of non-linear biologic forms, such as humans being in moving bodies. Indeed, it links many aspects of yoga, from the physical postures to the esoteric teachings.

Safa Rahman, BScPT, CPMA

Safa Rahman has been a Pelvic Health Physiotherapist and dedicated yoga practitioner for over 20 years. Much of her experience is in orthopedics (complex spinal injuries, head/face/TMJ pain, lumbo-pelvic and hip pain), though for the last 15 years she has been focused mainly on pelvic health and chronic pain. Safa takes the utmost care to ensure an environment that is trauma-informed and non-violent. She has had the privilege of working as the primary physiotherapist within an interdisciplinary care team on the Pelvic Pain team at the AHS Chronic Pain Center. Safa is also in the Yoga Teacher Training program with the Myofascial Yoga Institute.

*Register here: