When Siân decided to take the Yoga & Hot Yoga Teacher Training course at Yogafurie, she had never taught and wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to. But less than two months after finishing the course last October she opened her own studio near her home in Cornwall, where she now teaches four lessons a week.
The ten-month course has given her a whole new career, and brought hot yoga to her area of Cornwall. ‘I absolutely love teaching so much,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t have predicted it as it seemed very daunting, and I have never taught before. I just knew I wanted to find out more and see where it would lead me.’
Siân started the training course, which involves more than 230 contact hours of teaching, at Yogafurie at the beginning of last year. She had been practicing yoga for about five years, enjoying the focus and calm it provided.
When she tried hot yoga, which was hard to access near her home, she knew she wanted to find out more. ‘I had to drive for an hour to get to the nearest class, but I just love the heat so it really suited me,’ she says. ‘I felt it was helping me work out more and get more from my practice. I love the feeling of being sweaty from a tough workout, and I am sure it releases more endorphins as I always feel so good afterwards.’
When the training weekends were taking place at the Yogafurie studio, Siân stayed in a nearby Bristol flat she had found on Airbnb. Not being local was almost an advantage, she says. ‘It wasn’t a hassle to travel and I felt I was in my own lovely yoga bubble during those weekends. I could really focus on it away from normal family life.’
Siân found she was passionate about learning about yoga and hot yoga. ‘I loved it, not just the practice, but in finding out more about the human body, how it worked, and the history of yoga. We covered a lot of anatomy, which was fascinating, and helped me understand why we can’t all do the same things in the same way,’ she says. ‘We got a lot of information during the weekend training sessions, but I found the four weeks in between gave me time to assimilate and absorb what I had learned and do my prep for the next weekend. Our group was fantastic and we all gave each other so much support.’
While she had never been able to imagine teaching before she started, the course gave her the knowledge and confidence to begin planning. ‘The course had been my focus for 10 months and when it finished there was a big void in my life, I really missed it,’ she says.
A friend who ran a local gym showed her a room that was the perfect size in which to run hot yoga, and she started to wonder if she should begin classes.
By last Christmas her new studio was up and running, and she runs two yoga and two hot yoga classes every week, alongside her previous part time job and looking after her two boys.
‘I love having my own space, which I can heat to teach hot yoga, and which means I don’t have to move equipment around. The teaching has gone so much better than I could have believed, and that is because the course gave us the skills and confidence to put across our information in a safe way. The teachers do that so well, in a really encouraging way. The course has brought me so much. It has given me a whole new career that I can work around having my children and has also given me the opportunity to delve deeper into my own yoga practice.’
Want to learn more about Yogafurie’s Yoga & Hot Yoga Teacher Training? Find out by following the link.
You can find Siân’s studio in Cornwall here; Yoga at the Gardens with Siân.
