Barely a month or two after starting yoga, I decided to do a full-time month long residential yoga teacher’s training at the Sivananda Ashram in Madurai, India. I didn’t want to be a teacher.

2. Review of a 30-day
residential Yoga Teacher’s
Training

4. Sivananda Residential Yoga Teacher
Training Review
Barely a month or two after starting yoga, I decided to
do a full-time month long residential yoga teacher’s
training at the Sivananda Ashram in Madurai, India. I
didn’t want to be a teacher. My body was about as
flexible as a steel rod. Why did I embark on this crazy

5. endeavor then? In my limited time of practicing
yoga, I’d found it to be a bit of a precise science.
Just a little change in alignment here, a deeper
stretch there, and you could see a dramatic
change in physical benefits. So I figured I could
spend the rest of my life getting incremental
benefits or I could dive into the deep end and
learn from the very source in our sabbatical.

6. As a yoga novice, it was the toughest 30 days of
my life yet by far among the best decisions I’ve
ever made. If you’re contemplating diving deeper
into yoga, go immediately for a residential course
in an Indian ashram! Here’s my honest, unbiased
review of what I feels like. But first a quick
background:

7. Why I chose Sivananda? They’re very well known
for their teacher’s training course (TTC). And as I
catalog here, the Sivananda style is perfect for
beginners—traditional enough to be true hatha
yoga but not so intimidating that you want to throw
in the towel on the first day itself.

8. Where is it? They have many locations over the
world but I did mine in a rough-and-tumble ashram
in Madurai, twenty miles from civilization in the
middle of a forest filled with monkeys, peacocks,
snakes, and a wild bison.

9. What are the physical living conditions
like?
Sparse. There’s running water and occasional
power but you have to share a dorm room with
forty odd folks (quite a few of them snorers). The
four bathrooms shared by the ashram-dwellers
are outside the dorm and you better not use them
after lights-out else you may run into a cobra on
your way.

10. in your stay. And yet despite all of this, the ashram
is very clean and comfortable too! Maybe it’s the
yoga, maybe it’s just the mix of folks from around
the world, you quickly learn not to be a diva and
realize the succulent two meals you receive in a
day are all you need to be satisfied.

11. How much does it cost?
Varies by location. In India, honestly it’s way more
expensive for foreigners than it should be ($1800
when I did it) given the sparse living conditions but
hugely subsidized for Indians ($400). The right price
should be around $800-$1000, I think, but money
is maya,

12. right? I’m hoping they use the profits to build more
ashrams but even if they don’t, I’d say don’t let
money come in the way of doing the course. You
won’t find a better deal anywhere else, certainly
not in the Western world.

13. What’s the everyday schedule like?
Here’s a life in the day for six days a week. The
schedule below is followed religiously—and don’t
even think of slacking. If you miss more than three
lectures, you’re called for a talking-to by the
ashram coordinator:

14. 5:30 am: Wake up
6:00 am: Satsang (Meditation, chanting, random
lecture)
8:00 am:Asanas and pranayama
10:00 am: Breakfast (or is it lunch—since that’s
the only meal until 6p.m.?)
12:00 pm: Karma Yoga or Selfless service (Read,
sweeping the dorm room if you’re lucky and
washing bathrooms, if you aren’t.)

15. 1:00 pm: Bhagavad Gita Lecture 2:00 pm: Main
lecture in Vedanta philosophy or effect of yoga on
anatomy. 4:00 pm: Asanas and pranayama 6:00
pm: Dinner 7:30 pm: Satsang (Meditation,
chanting, lecture) 10:00 pm: Lights out

16. If you thought that was intense, you also have to
somehow fit in time for homework every day and
give both a theory and a practical exam at the end
of the course (everyone clears unless you’re
spectacularly unprepared).
Should I embark on this masochistic
endeavor?
Yes! But here’s the full balanced review:

17. Yoga Teacher’s Training is physically
and emotionally intense
You probably got a sense of the physical hardship
from above but mentally too, despite all the yoga,
no rivers of bliss flow through the body for at-least
95% of the duration of the course. Instead your
mind will likely be rebelling against the unrelenting
intense schedule daily or seething in indignation
that you have to chant two times a day when your
match.

18. com profile says you are “spiritual not religious”.
The dramatic change from your everyday routine
also brings up an avalanche of emotions and
memories, not all of them pleasant. And yet, there
are those moments of sudden silence when you
unexpectedly find yourself in a pose that you
didn’t think your body was capable of or you

19. find yourself alone in the dorm room, blissfully
empty of the usual waves of restless thought,
when it all starts to make sense. Maybe, just
maybe, surviving these thirty days will give you
some insight into a reality shimmering below the
surface, tantalizingly close but not quite visible
yet.

20. Anyone can do it. If the above scares you, don’t
let it. You’ll be surprised at how easily you get into
the groove of things and dare I say, even start to
enjoy it. Everyday, you realize you are learning
and growing and changing. One day you can
touch your toes, the next day you are standing just
a little more erect, next you know a bit more about
the anatomy or Vedanta philosophy.

21. I was woefully out of shape and kept toppling over
in headstand and sweating buckets in pranayama
when I first started while the more experienced
practitioners in class were flying all over in
impossible poses. Yet I never felt out of place

22. Somewhere you understand that we all enter yoga
at our own stage of development, some dogged
by physical inadequacies, some by emotional
challenges, but it’s all fine as long as you just
commit yourself to learning a bit more each day.

23. It’s a bit of an ideological hodge-podge
Westerners romanticize yoga in Indian ashrams
as “authentic” and “spiritual”. In my opinion, it’s
barely a little less confused. In the TTC, for
instance, one moment you’ll be learning that the
pantheon of Indian Gods and Goddesses are just
symbols of the one infinite truth, the sum of all
realities which lies both within and without. At the
next moment, you’ll be circling

24. around and putting flowers over a statue of God
treating its form as a living reality. With its hodge-
podge of chanting, worship, physical yoga,
transcendental wisdom, meditation, and
everything else, contradictions abound in every
moment. The seeker after truth always has to be
discriminatory in every moment and yoga
teacher’s training is no exception.

25. You will find your people.
What is it about fellow seekers, travelers, misfits,
that you feel instantaneously at home in their
company, more understood in a day than you feel
with friends and family back home over a lifetime?
If you’re feeling a rising sense of alienation with
the people you’ve known all your life as your
meaning-of-life questions deepen, you’ll find your
crowd at Yoga Teacher’s Training.

26. Our class of forty came from India, US, UK,
Australia, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Germany,
Dubai, everywhere and they varied in age from
twenty-one to fifty-five and yet we felt such a
deep, intangible connection with each other
almost from the first day that you know you were
meant to be there, it’s just a pity it took you so
long to get there.

27. Your life is going to change in significant ways at
the end of the training–guaranteed. And that in a
nutshell is why I give Yoga Teacher’s Training
such a thumping recommendation. I whined and
complained often during the thirty days but at the
end of it, something fundamentally shifted in me. I
quit caffeine and alcohol and I turned vegetarian—
without trying to. My body just seemed to
understand what was right for it.

28. As a result, I dropped twenty pounds and felt both
physically and emotionally lighter than ever
before. Learning how to become a teacher also
gave me an independent practice for life,
dramatically increasing the frequency with which I
practice yoga. My spine is now stronger and my
body younger than it was two decades ago.

29. Perhaps most importantly, my on-again, off-again
interest in Eastern philosophy turned into a deep,
passionate interest in understanding ancient yogic
and Buddhist text which has made me calmer,
happier, but also given me something more—a
deeper understanding of my true purpose as a
human. Now, I can’t wait to suffer through an
Advanced Yoga Teacher’s Training!

30. I hope this inspired you to sign up for your Yoga
Teacher’s Training course today. Go for it, you’ll
never regret it. And if you enjoyed this article, you
can get more tips and expert interviews on
lifestyle, writing and your spiritual practice,
including a free meditation video course, when
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