What makes our 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training different from your existing 200 Hour?

I Was Looking for a Teacher. I Found a Lineage.

By Libby Rose Waite, Samāveśa Faculty

I wonder how many yoga teachers feel like I did back in 2020.

I had my 200 Hour, plus multiple additional trainings in Yin, Nidra and Vinyasa. I'd been to India three times. I was in love with āsana, deepening my practice and had just opened my own little studio. I'd also just finished a Masters in Psychology where my research focused on Jungian Psychology and yoga. I was absolutely devoted.

And yet, I wanted more. I wanted a community. I wanted more connection to source. And I didn't know how to get it. I was preparing to move to India to live in ashrams in the hope that I'd find a Teacher who could hold me, deepen my devotion and help me to stay swimming in the currents of awakening that I so adored.

And then Covid happened and India shut down. And Zoom opened up.

This is where I met Samāveśa. I happened upon a series of online classes and turned up late with minimal expectation. The charge of the transmission from those sessions was so vast that afterwards, I had to shave my head. Seriously.

It wasn't till much later that I understood why. I had been initiated into something. I had been initiated into a lineage.

Finding belonging, recognition and God everywhere everywhere everywhere.

I Already Had the Trainings. I Thought I Didn't Need Another One.

That first class was led by the founder of Samāveśa, Collette Davies. When she launched the 250 Hour Online a month or so later, I was sure I didn't need another training.

And I was sure that I had to be there.

I just couldn't not sign up. Something had already happened in that first class that made the decision for me before my mind caught up.

This is an important thing to say if you are reading this as an established yoga teacher: your existing 200 hour training does not mean that the Samāveśa 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training has nothing to offer you. It doesn't mean you should skip ahead to the 300 Hour. What makes an embodied yoga training different is not the curriculum. It is what happens when the teachings meet you in direct experience over time. What I learnt on the Samāveśa 250 Hour was something I could not have accessed anywhere else, and something I would not have been ready to receive had I tried to skip ahead.

What I found was initiation into Shakta Tantra. And whilst on the surface that might sound like a philosophy module, it is fundamentally and radically different from anything I had studied before. The Sāṃkhyan tradition that underpins most yoga teacher trainings is not this. This is something else entirely. Something that cannot be taught in the conventional sense at all.

It can only be met.

The holding of community on the 250 Hour graduation retreat.

What the 250 Hour Actually Is, And What It Isn't

My first 200 hour was in India, and it was intense. We practised asana for four hours a day, anatomy for two and philosophy for another two. We studied Patanjali’s the Yoga Sutras. I got the hang of the Eight Limbs but to be honest, not much else. But I’d diligently gone to every session, spine erect on my tiny cushion, listened devotedly. Basically, I’d been a good student. And surely that was enough?

But the truth is that yogic philosophy cannot be studied. It has to be practised, lived and met. The 250 Hour is not a philosophy course. There are no lessons where we go over the Yoga Sutras and tick a box that says Shakta Tantra. This lineage cannot be transmitted that way, because it cannot be taught in the conventional sense at all. It can only be practised. It can only be met in direct experience.

What makes the 250 Hour an embodied yoga training that is genuinely different from a standard 200 hour is that it is a fifteen month online journey. And we need this time, and the intimacy that it creates, to meet the teachings. I know that I couldn’t do that with a week in Bali. I couldn’t do it in a month in India. I did it with 15 months on a computer. Because that shared online space is alive.

The 250 Hour gives you time to sit with the teachings, to bring them into your practice, to bring them into your life, and to notice what changes. The support of the group and the extraordinary collaboration of facilitators led by Collette means that your experience is held throughout. You get feedback on what's happening for you. On your revelations. On your recognitions. And somewhere in that holding, you find yourself in a slipstream of awakening that you couldn't have engineered alone.

This is what I experienced on the 250. My eyes opened to Shakti, to Goddess, and to the specific way that creative inspiration speaks through me and my facilitation. Before beginning the training, I was all nerdy academia and āsana. After the training, I was the same facilitator with the same passions, but knew how to share them in a way that was more aligned with a feminine, embodied and experiential mode of practice that brings so much more richness into my work.

Explore An Endless Becoming: Our Signature 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training.

Philosophy through practice, experience and communuty.

I Don't Teach Yoga Anymore

I know. It sounds strange coming from someone who is about to invite you onto a yoga training.

But since doing the Samāveśa 250 Hour, I don't teach āsana anymore. I have no interest in teaching āsana. I don't even really teach meditation. I teach things that I never, in my wildest imaginings, thought I would have the conviction to curate. And I do it because I know it's in service. Because I finally know what I'm teaching and why.

This question — what am I teaching, and why — is the most important thing the 250 Hour cracked open for me. It sounds simple, it isn't. If you are a yoga teacher and you have never really sat with these questions, I invite you to do that now.

I believe that every yoga teacher offers because they have had a deep spiritual experience through the path of yoga that they want to invite others into. But that is a big responsibility. And I did not learn how to meet that responsibility from a month in India, or from any of the add-on trainings I did before Samāveśa.

I needed the container which the 250 provides. The container for my own practice, my own subtle enquiry, I needed the space to let the teachings reach back for me. I needed the depth, the holding, the direct experience of Shakta Tantra in my own body to get truly intimate with my answer.

For me, the answer is: I teach myth; I teach depth psychology; I teach soul. I teach those things because I know I see how the world longs to come back into relationship with the mystery. And I know that because the 250 Hour showed me what I am made of and what I am here to offer.

You will find your own answer. It will probably surprise you. And, it will make total sense through the lens of everything you’ve been doing, loving, avoiding, embracing and offering till now.

What You Will Find That Is Uniquely Yours

The 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training is a deeply creative journey. But what it is creating is not a curriculum or a set of skills to deploy. It is you; the unique expression of Shakti that moves through you as your unique flavour of facilitation.

I didn't know what mine was when I started. I had some sense of it; the Jungian threads, the pull towards myth and soul, but I didn't have the courage or the clarity to follow it. What the 250 Hour gave me was both of those things. The courage to trust what was alive in me. And the clarity to let that become what I teach.

What is alive in you? What is alive in the spaces you create? What is alive in the bodies that come to meet themselves through your classes? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the inquiry at the heart of the 250 Hour, and you will spend fifteen months getting intimate with your answers.

It wasn't until the end of the facilitation modules that I finally understood why I had shaved my head after that first class with Collette. Something had happened in that moment. Something had been recognised. The 250 Hour gave me the language, the practice and the community to understand what that was and to build an entire way of teaching from it.

The 300 Hour Is Not the Next Step. The 250 Is.

I want to be really clear about this, because I think it matters. I was a student on the 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training, then I began teaching on the faculty. Then, I became a teacher on the 300 Advanced Embodied Yoga Faculty and a student in the first incarnation of that training. I’ve taught across two 250 Hours and am preparing for my third, and am about to finish my second round of teaching on the 300 Hour. I know both experiences intimately, as a teacher and a student.

So I say with authority: the 300 Hour Advanced Training is not where you go after your 200 hour certificate. It is not the logical upgrade. It is for people who are already initiated into Tantric lineages, who are already teaching from an embodied, somatic place, and who are ready to go even further into advanced facilitation. It is for people who are, in Collette's words, invited to forget everything they know and get even more deep and weird.

I love that. And I can say with complete honesty that if I had gone straight to the 300 Hour without doing the 250 first, I would not have got anywhere near as much from it. I wouldn't have been ready. The 250 is where you meet the teachings. The 300 is where you go when the teachings have already met you and changed you and you are hungry for more.

Gift yourself the 250 first. Gift yourself the fifteen months. Gift yourself the time to really know what you are teaching and why, before you step into the advanced work. You will arrive at the 300 Hour (if that is your path) so much more prepared, so much more rooted, and so much more yourself.

The Community That Found Me

Samāveśa is an extraordinary community. And the beings who say yes to Collette's holding are always extraordinary.

I did not expect that. I expected a good training. I did not expect to find belonging in the way that I have. I did not expect to find myself teaching with Collette, Linda Nenne and the other facilitators on both the 250 and 300 Hour Embodied Yoga Trainings, contributing to the Depth Psychology & Tantric Psychology and Myth, Shadow and Dharma modules. As I name these modules now, I see that I get to teach exactly what it is I am here to teach; soul. And that in doing so, I support you (as does the rest of the faculty), to find what it is that you are here to teach. To help you to name, claim and offer from your own dharma.

That is what this community does. It finds what is most alive in you and gives it a home.

I was looking for a teacher, I found a lineage. I was looking for a practice, I found a path. And somewhere along the way, without quite knowing when it happened, I found my people. And they are all my Teacher. They all point me back to source.

If you are a yoga teacher who is hungry for more — more depth, more devotion, more truth about what you are actually here to teach — then Samāveśa is looking for you too.

Doors are open to the 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training.

Yogic Philosophy cannot be studied. It has to be practised, lived and met