5 Steps to Writing Your Best Yoga Biography
Smart, authentic bios are essential for any yoga teacher. They serve as a mini resume, highlighting our credentials and informing potential students about our mission statement and style of teaching. Biographies are used on your personal postcards, flyers and website. The studio or gym you teach at may also ask for your bio to include on their website. Remember that often all a student has, in order to decide whether or not they want to take your class, is your personal story: your biography. It is important that you feel empowered by how you tell that story.
I also understand that for many of us it is not easy to write about oneself. Do you write in first person or third person? What do you include, and how much is too much?
Try taking these steps to write your best biography. Most of all, honor yourself in what you write. By doing so, you honor and elevate the profession of yoga!
Step 1: YOUR PHILOSOPHY
- Write out your personal mission statement.
- Write out your teaching intention: why do you teach?
- Write out your vision statement.
- Write out what yoga means to you.
Step 2: YOUR BRAND
- If you had to describe yourself in one word, what would it be?
- If others described you in three words, what would those be? Ask a couple friends, and find out if this is an accurate portrayal.
- What would a Yelp review of your personality say about you?
- If someone followed you around with a video camera all day, what would the reality TV show about your life be called?
- Your life has a soundtrack: what is the name of your theme song?
Step 3: YOUR SPECIALISM
- Write out ten things that make you a great person.
- Write a list of five things you are passionate about.
- Write out three things that keep you inspired.
- Write a list of three things you are most embarrassed about, and the expert lessons you’ve learned from them.
- Write out how yoga came into your life. What was your first class like for you? What brought you back to a second class?
Step 4: YOUR AUDIENCE
Does how you teach meet the expectations of what you say about yourself in your bio? Please don’t falsely advertise one thing and deliver another. It’s not fair to your clients.
What kind of students would you recommend taking your class? Does your bio speak to them?
What style of yoga do you teach? Be honest; just spell it out.
Offer a brief description of your class so students know what to expect. Include things like whether or not you use music, what the pacing is like (slow, medium, fast), whether you are alignment oriented, if your class heated, what level of physical strength is expected when you teach.
Step 5: YOUR TEACHERS
The best teachers remain lifelong students. Honor your teachers in your bio, those that have taught you through ease or challenge, and the lessons for you now as a teacher too. Model politeness and respect and your students will do the same for you. Karma keeps us real and humble. You are there only because your students show up as you showed up for your teachers. Give good, get good back.
Now take the input from these five steps and write out four different biographies for yourself.
- Twitter-size bio 150 characters
- Short 50 word biography
- First person biography 250 words
- Third person biography 250 words
Some tips in finalizing your biographies:
- Read them aloud to yourself.
- Stand up and read them to a friend.
- Have a friend read them aloud to you.
- Make any necessary edits; every word counts!
- And remember, as you evolve as a teacher, so should your bio. Make a point to revisit it annually.
About the Author
10 Reasons to Eat Raw During Your Yoga Teacher Training
Yoga teacher training is a life-changing experience that will require you to find focus, strength and energy if you want to learn, achieve, feel, experience and become your higher self. Being your true self means being devoid of the need to be egotistical, small-minded and petty. Remember that you are part of a much bigger picture that is inextricably connected to all life forms, including nature. Only then do you have the ability to share your knowledge through teaching.
Teaching is the absolute best way to continue this lifelong discovery at an extensive level of depth. It is a natural and likely consequence of a teacher training. In this way, sincere students learn yoga for the correct reasons and become great teachers for the correct reasons.
During a teacher training, help is needed from your teachers, fellow students, inner self, mind and body. One of the strongest tools for helping your body to function well, is eating the correct diet. Raw food has the nourishment and components that supply you with all the necessary energy, vitality and optimal cell reproduction. It helps you to keep going.
Good food has to be pure in order to keep your body healthy and alert, strong and light. Raw food helps your body and mind cope with the intense schedule and inner exploration that the best yoga teacher trainings provide. This also correlates with the first yama: Ahimsa (Ahimsa meaning nonviolence in thought, word and action to yourself and others). This promise to yourself is taken from the Yoga Sutra’s (2.35), the definitive description of yoga recorded and inspired through experiential research. I look at ahimsa as an enlightened commandment.
How Raw Food Will Help You Keep Up With the High Demands of a Yoga Teacher Training
1. Raw food leads your body towards natural health.
By eating raw you are on your way to a state of self-fixing. As the human body has the ability to regenerate cells continuously, having a raw food diet will enable your body to become pure and renewed through the intake of uncooked food.
2. Your body performs better when eating raw.
Eating in this way allows your body to feel agile and manageable. Your digestion uses less energy therefore giving you more vitality for your yoga practice. When you only practice a few times a week this might not be so important for you, but during four or more weeks of intensive training you will need your body in order to keep up with this experience.
3. Your body needs vitamins and minerals.
Raw food is rich in natural vitamins and minerals that are easily digested and absorbed by your body.
4. Raw food increases your awareness mentally, physically and spiritually.
This is important if you want to have the capacity to collect and process all the information given to you.
5. Raw food boosts your natural energy levels
In abundance, so you can rely on it to function at a top level during this extended time.
6. During a life changing experience, changes need to happen in your body too.
The body purifies itself from toxins with a raw food diet. Being clean and unpolluted allows you to reconnect with your true inner self.
7. Eating raw food puts you in a harmony with nature.
Mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). To become a more hale and hearty, happy and sensitive person you need to have a coherent, high functioning body.
8. Food promotes longevity
According to the Bhagavad Gita (xsll.8), saatvic (pure) food promotes longevity, wellbeing, strength, goodness, happiness and pleasure. They are also rich, juicy, agreeable and nourishing.
9. Raw food prepared with an attitude of love increases our prana (life-force energy)
Which is essential if we want to sustain and utilize our maximum amount of effort wisely.
10. Raw food helps to turn your body into a temple for your mind and soul.
According to Patanjali, who wrote the most classical text on yoga, “the purpose of yoga is to lead to a silence of the mind” (yoga sutra 1.2). Through yoga, commitment, patience and compassion for yourself, you can achieve the silence of the mind, the freedom of the soul and joyfulness in your life.
