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HELLO. NAMASTE. WELCOME.
We’re so pleased you’re here.

I’m Shelly Thorn, the founder of Yoga Teacher Central. It’s a pleasure to meet you and it’s my honor to support you. The gift that yoga teachers and trainers provide is so powerful — reaching people in a way that inspires and empowers them, activating positive transformation “one breath at a time.” With my whole heart, I believe that individual empowerment is vital to creating a positive future for humanity and the planet.

Learn more about me and my background here. And the 2-minute audio messages touch on my role. See below for much more about Yoga Teacher Central.

Be the finest teacher or trainer you can be.

Be inspired. Be intentional. Be prepared.

We make expert yoga teachings accessible and practical, helping you to spend less time growing your teaching or training toolkit and more time personalizing your teaching, developing your unique specialties, and connecting with students.

When you’ve completed study with an excellent teacher, what happens afterward? You leave inspired and committed to incorporating what you’ve learned into your practice and teaching, right? And eventually, a few bits of what you learned tend to make their way into your teaching. But it can be surprisingly difficult to piece everything together in a cohesive way and to translate what you’ve learned into an evolution of your teaching.

Or, how about this common teaching challenge: what do you do when you have a specific question or need such as how to adapt practices for students with knee issues, neck pain, sciatica, or SI joint issues… or when you want a more challenging or accessible version of a particular pose… or you want to incorporate specific practices to balance the effects of autumn or more ideas for integrating philosophy teachings with asana?

The questions and needs that come up over time are basically endless. How long does it take you to find reliable, expert sources to answer your question? How successful are you at answering the question you set out to answer?

We address those types of teaching and training challenges by making cross-lineage, expert sources organized, accessible and practical. You can quickly find exactly what you need without going through the dark alleys of the web or spending time going through videos and articles to learn they’re too superficial or that what you need is buried within stuff you don’t.

Just as importantly, we give you a clear pathway to progressively increase your knowledge on all aspects of yoga teaching. And with every single topic, you’ll get quick links to expert sources where you can verify information and go deeper as desired. And you’ll find that all knowledge is presented in context, making it easier to integrate and apply the knowledge you gain.

Yoga Teacher Central houses tremendous volumes (thousands of pages) of information and offers it in a clean and organized format (with no advertising clutter). We’ve consulted hundreds of expert sources from diverse styles and lineages. Every single page has gone through a strict sourcing and editing process, ensuring that all material is carefully sourced and professionally presented and is clear and practical.

Everything is organized meticulously within an uncluttered, graceful navigation without ads or other interference.

The resources for trainers are organized within an extensive library of downloadable items that may be customized and distributed as your own. With our support, you can guarantee that your trainees will have the highest-quality curriculum and knowledge base. We offer you complete freedom to build, edit, brand and distribute excellent manuals and other learning materials such as quizzes and presentations. Trainer membership includes a detailed and flexible curriculum and lessons for a foundation level training (including 200-hour) and for advanced teacher trainings (including 300-hour and 500-hour trainings plus immersions and specialized emphases). Details and free samples here.

Now you have a powerful and reliable resource you can access anytime.

Join a thriving teaching community.

Yoga Teacher Central was born in 2012, and quickly became known among teachers around the world. As of early 2017, we had over 13,000 teachers subscribed to our newsletter, more than 16,000 that follow us on Facebook; more than 2,500 teachers and trainers that have joined as paying members; and about 10,000 who access the site every month. And as I make an update in 2021, the real growth over the past few years has been with trainers, who make up a significant part of our clientele.

The vision for a support site that I began with has not only become reality, it’s been far surpassed. With this site, it’s taking less time for teachers and trainers to effectively act on the spark of their passion. Armed with reliable, applicable information, they are able to get out the gate faster, equipped to design and teach excellent classes. And with the depth and breadth of tools provided here, teachers and trainers get the support and inspiration they need to stay motivated, deepen their offerings and quickly find what they’re looking for.

With a reliable support tool, all teachers and trainers can naturally be more powerful. They’re lighting fires of transformation in more places, with more people.

That lights my own fire of passion and motivates me on so many levels. I’m driven everyday to keep bringing teachers the support and inspiration they need.

Assists, Partner Poses, Variations, Props

Mudras, Bandhas & Drishti

Breathing Practices & Pranayama

Meditation, Philosophy & More

Support for Continuous Growth

While this website doesn’t replace the need for a quality teacher training program, assistantship and loads of practice, it does give you round-the-clock access to a professional resource for continued learning and growing.

When you’re looking for something specific, you don’t have to search multiple books, go on wild web site goose chases, or flip through unorganized notes from workshops and trainings.

The compiling, categorizing and summarizing have been done for you. Now you can efficiently leverage what’s already been discovered, leaving you more energy for your own creativity.

Quick & Clear Teachings

When you want to adapt or adjust a pose, quickly viewing photos is far more efficient than finding the appropriate place in a video or book. Here you can quickly review a dozen or more photos for a single pose. You can peruse a whole range of variations for beginners, special conditions and advanced challenges. Choose from variations with no props or those using bolsters, blankets and straps to highlight actions of a pose.

We constantly think of how to make your preparation quick and straight-forward. One example is how we summarize verbal cues. We scour dozens of sources to gather up long lists of ideas. Then we cull the cues down to their essence and organize them by focus area. This makes it easy to quickly peruse options for new ways to verbalize teachings.

Save Time, Share Your Uniqueness

With this information now so easily accessible, you can target specific aspects of your teaching you’d like to expand or change up before each class. Whether you’d like more options for various experience levels, fresh languaging to guide students deeper into a pose, or more awareness of contraindications, you can find what you need quickly.

Now you can spend less time growing your teaching or training toolkit and more time and energy personalizing your teaching.

Tap Your Passion, Make a Difference

Stop spending your precious time reinventing the wheel, or wading through off-the-mark information. Now you can streamline the way you expand your teaching repertoire and research topics in order to help your students. We invite you to leverage the learning of a hundreds of experts that span lineages. Free up your energy for working more closely and creatively with students.

By making access to information less competitive and more immediate, we offer a new generation of yoga teachers an opportunity to raise the bar and evolve the field and service of yoga. We are here to ease your research and planning, to keep you growing and inspired, and to free up your time to focus on your specialties and passions.

KUDOS FOR THE TEAM

The Yoga Teacher Central team is a small and talented group of outsourced experts in yoga teaching and adjustments, web development, design, photography and other expertise. I love working with smart and passionate people on tangible, beautiful and useful creations and I recommend all of the people I’ve worked with.

Char Davidson

Back in 2011, Char designed the sweet logo and branding and it has aged beautifully.

Cami Maston

Cami spent hours and hours over many years taking and editing photos. Back in 2011, when we held our first photo shoot, her patience and skill allowed us to deliver well-aligned images of adjustments and variations at a time when they simply weren’t available.

Britnie O’Farrell, Laura Hand, Claudette Evans, Dawn Jansen, Jay Holby, Matt Nadler, Melinda Fisher, Laura Humpf, Teresa Wang and Gita Mehrotra

These kind and excellent yogis were fun and professional on set, performing beautifully as yoga models. Additionally, Dawn and Teresa provided immeasurable help in directing and aligning models during photo shoots.

Anej Mehadzic

Anej strategically planned the user experience – a very challenging task due to the volume of content – and designed the beautiful and clean look-and-feel of our new site that launched in 2017.

Yoga Teacher Central is a labor of love, one I hope can support other teachers as they give their hearts and souls to share, inspire, and support others in their personal transformation.

FAQ

Why should I pay for membership? The web is full of information on yoga.

Yes, it sure is! Yoga is a hot topic and it seems to be everywhere. Yoga teachers and trainers, however, need much more than superficial coverage, opinions and "tips." Since 2012, we have been focused on the particular, specialized needs of teachers and trainers.

How does your pricing compare to similar yoga sites?

Our site is different from other sites so we can't really compare. We provide tools that help teachers save time, plan excellent classes that meet their objectives, and systematically explore deep teaching wisdom. And we offer an unparalleled library of training materials for Teacher Trainers.

What lineage or style do you draw from?

We draw from all styles and curate content from all yoga lineages.

What forms of payment do you accept?

We accept all major credit cards. Get the best rate by paying up-front, or choose a monthly pay option, if you prefer.

How can I be sure it will actually help me?

Write us with any question at all. We love to hear from teachers and trainers and are happy to personally support you.

Does my membership automatically renew?

Trainer memberships automatically cancel after one year. Teachers, however, can select auto-renew or auto-cancelation. If you choose to auto-renew, we will refund 20% of your renewal payment.

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Ad-Free and Satisfaction Guaranteed

Not a single page of our thousands includes an ad or promoted content.

We have never obtained advertising revenue and never will. If clients won’t pay enough for what we’re offering, then it’s not valuable enough to be offering. We dedicate all our attention and resources to providing real value to teachers and trainers.

Take three days to check things out. If you aren’t fully satisfied, we will refund 100% of your payment.

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