Sakala School of Integrative Teaching invites you to answer the growing demand for yoga-based practices as a powerful complement to traditional psychotherapy.
Our 200-hour training provides the essential components and academic rigor required to become a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT). However, we go further by embedding our entire curriculum within a trauma-informed framework, a critical element often missing from standard trainings.
You will learn to weave together the practices of yoga with principles of trauma sensitivity. By prioritizing a student’s sense of autonomy, agency, and ownership, you’ll be prepared to skillfully integrate somatic practices that foster stability, resilience, and growth in your future students and clients.
This training is designed for those who find themselves curious about the body’s role in healing, therapists, counselors, healthcare providers, educators, and helping professionals, as well as those simply drawn to this work who sense there is something more to learn.
If you’ve ever wondered how to bring somatic practices into what you already do, or are simply exploring how trauma-informed care might expand your approach, then you may find this offering meets you with both structure and spaciousness for integration.
Sakala School’s 200-hour training is called ‘Witnessing Beauty,’ a name that points toward the wholeness that already exists within each person. This approach creates space for clients to access what is meaningful to them, whether that includes spiritual exploration, connection to self, or simply the experience of being seen without judgment.
Our curriculum is uniquely designed to prepare you for the growing field of integrative mental health. We weave together:
The five pillars of Post-Traumatic Growth, offering a framework for recognizing the ways clients may find meaning and strength.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) , a neuroscience-based approach to curriculum development that honors the diverse ways people learn, process, and inhabit their bodies.
Creative and experiential methodologies, ensuring you leave with practical, adaptable tools that can be shaped around each client’s unique needs and comfort.
Witnessing Beauty covers all professional essentials, including teaching methodology, the art of building a healing presence, and professional development. Every element is grounded in a trauma-informed framework that prioritizes:
Safety: Physical and emotional environments where clients can regulate and feel secure.
Choice: Practices that invite rather than instruct, with multiple options at every step.
Agency: A therapeutic relationship that empowers clients to know their own bodies and make decisions that feel right for them.
All coursework is delivered through a trauma-informed framework, empowering you to create safety and support while maintaining a strong therapeutic relationship for the client’s you serve.
To show up skillfully in a trauma-informed space, we need more than a sequence of poses. We need to understand the bodies and lives of the people we are serving.
Our curriculum includes a comprehensive study of anatomy and physiology, grounded in movement science and neurobiology. This knowledge offers a framework for understanding how the nervous system responds to experience, how the body organizes around protection and connection, and what conditions support a return to safety and regulation. With this foundation, we can offer practices that meet clients where they are, physically and neurologically, while remaining responsive to their moment-to-moment needs.
We also recognize that clients show up carrying more than their bodies. They carry history, culture, and context. Our study of yoga philosophy, history, and ethics provides a lens for understanding the worlds clients move through. This deepens our capacity to witness with humility, to hold space for experiences unlike our own, and to ensure our teaching remains responsive to the cultural and spiritual dimensions each person may bring.
Every client deserves to feel safe in the spaces they enter. Sakala School advocates for the creation of environments where all people, regardless of their past experiences, can arrive exactly as they are, without performance or pretense.
Practicing teaching through a trauma-informed lens is essential to developing this capacity. Our practicum offers a container for students to integrate everything they have learned: the neuroscience, the philosophy, the methodology, and the relational skills. Here, students begin to discover their own unique teacher voice by cultivating a presence that is curious, inclusive, and deeply responsive to the humans in front of them.
Sakala School’s Trauma-Informed Framework is built upon SAMHSA’s Six Guiding Principles of a Trauma-Informed Approach, which serve as a foundational benchmark for our practice. These principles: safety, trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural humility, inform the layers of our curriculum and guide our students in showing up with integrity, presence, and care.
Through exploration, the senses are engaged, and vulnerability reveals agency.
To feel connected, one needs to feel safe, be seen, and be heard.
This is the process of witnessing beauty in transformation and growth through Sakala.
Sakala School of Integrative Teaching is a registered school with Yoga Alliance, and the 200 Hour Trauma-Informed curriculum is approved and compliant with Yoga Alliance’s elevated standards for yoga teacher training.
Yoga Alliance ID: 358368
This training is eligible for 200 Hours of Continuing Education Credits through Yoga Alliance if you are already a Registered Yoga Teacher but wish to add a Trauma-Informed component to your training.
