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About the Book

Anatomy isn't much good for yoga unless you learn to actually feel and control your own anatomy and see that same control (or lack of it) in others. 

Anatomy for yoga teacher teaches you how to feel and control the muscles in your own body. 

You'll learn to directly feel the function of groups of muscles and then afterwards learn the names of those muscles, points of attachment and the bones they work on. The names may then be easier because you have the experience of those muscles to hang the name on.

(And even if you don't learn the names, you'll be able to feel and control the muscles that the names point to, and that is a lot more useful.)

So how can this be relevant to doing and teaching yoga?

Teaching anatomy becomes one way to drive how you teach yoga poses. Instead of working around problems like a lack of awareness of the thoracic spine and ribcage you can use specific movements in isolation or in the context of yoga poses to help your students better feel their body. Then they themselves no what they need to do (or try to do) while doing those yoga poses.

Understanding muscles you can find ways to balance  muscle pairs making it relatively easy to sequence yoga poses in such a way that they have a balance effect on the body.

When exploring new poses, or challenging pose, an understanding of anatomy can guide how you deconstruct a yoga pose into definable elements and practice those elements prior to recombining them to work intelligently towards the targeted pose.

Stuck with instructing poses in the same way each time? 

An understanding of anatomy can give you fresh ways to approach yoga poses. Yoga poses then become frameworks for exploring anatomy and it's potential. 

Rather than having to think about alignment all of the time anatomy gives you the opportunity to feel your alignment. And its an opportunity to help your students do the same. 

The result is a yoga pose that feels good without a lot of thinking effort. 

This then approaches the actual mind state of yoga, a state of mind without thinking (but still awake, still aware) because the focus is on feeling your body and the pose you are in as opposed to thinking about it.

The yoga anatomy for yoga teachers course is designed with an initial focus on small easy to feel and operate regions of the body and shows their possible application in a variety of basic and not so basic yoga poses making it a useful tool for teaching both beginner and advanced yoga students how to better feel and operate their body. 

Using the initial building blocks as a framework the course then dives into deeper anatomy and shows how you can continue to explore your anaotmy and as a teacher help your students explore theirs.

Rather than focusing just on the human body in isolation, anatomy for yoga teachers includes exercises for exploring how the body interacts with its environment. This experience can then be used to further explore our own anatomy and how it interacts both internally and externally. 

The Anatomy of Learning

Anatomy for yoga teachers includes a theoretical framework for how we learn so that we can more effectively teach. 

If we understand how we learn (and how to make learning feel good) we can then make it easier to teach effectively.

Teaching effectively means imparting knowledge in such a way that that receptacle retains that knowledge and can recall it and use it at will even without the presence of the original imparter of knowledge.

With so many "experts" offering conflicting advice, yoga anatomy for yoga teachers is designed to help you become your 

own expert on anatomy so that you can decide (or figure out) for yourself what works and what doesn't.

About the Author

Neil Keleher

@kneelkeleher

Hi, I'm Neil Keleher

I’ve been a yoga teacher for about 20 years.

I have a degree in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Prior to that I served for five years in the British army as an armourer.

As a yoga teacher I teach my students how to feel and control their body. In this context I’m like a driving instructor for your body.

One of my other hats is “indexing specialist”. One of my current ongoing projects under this hat is designing an easy to use indexing system for Chinese characters.