Yoga Alliance Certification

Hi! I’m Jessica Jennings, founder of Ma Yoga for Pregnancy, Motherhood & Beyond. Thank you so much for registering for this quick chat about prenatal yoga certification: do you need it, when do you need it, when do you not need it, and what do you need to be able to teach prenatal yoga?

I know it can be incredibly confusing to navigate your path if you’re interested in teaching yoga in general, but also teaching yoga specifically for pregnancy.

Generally, I come across three basic groups of people who want to be trained in prenatal yoga.

One group is yoga teachers who feel anywhere from “I feel really nervous and anxious when I have a pregnant woman in my room and i’d like to not feel that” all the way to “I’d like to teach prenatal and include prenatal in my range of offerings.”

This second group consists of pregnant women or anyone familiar with prenatal yoga who really feel drawn to that specifically. They’re drawn to this time of life, to guiding and supporting women through it.

I’ve had people who say “I loved my prenatal class so much, and I want to give that to other people” and I’ve had people say “I didn’t have any support and I felt really isolated and I don’t want anyone to have to go through that”.

So they’re driven to create what I call like a “mama circle,” a prenatal class that isn’t in a yoga studio. It can be in a classroom, a park, a small business or online – but you’re working for YOU.

And then the third group might be doulas and other kinds of practitioners, who want to incorporate prenatal yoga into their offerings our services. For doulas obviously there’s an incredible overlap and just having more tools in your tool bag can just make life easier for mama and for you.

So those are the basic three then I’m going to talk about.

And I guess right off the bat what I want to say is that Yoga Alliance kind of set themselves up as the arbiter of who can be teaching yoga.

It started really kicking in around 2008 or 2010, the idea being that they create a prenatal yoga certification and you can apply and give them your curriculum and then they say yeah that’s fine and then you teach that and people submit their certificate of completion and get their certification.

But, in some ways, you can see they’re getting certified by whoever’s teaching them. I mean they’re getting trained by them right? So there’s a big difference between training and certification.

So the RPYT Certification – Registered Prenatal Yoga Teacher Certification – is an add-on. It’s a specialty on top of your RYT, which is your Regular Yoga Teacher certification.

Some might think “oh so I can’t really do a prenatal training until I’ve done a regular training,” which is, of course, far from the truth.

You can do them in any order, and in fact you don’t need to actually have your RPYT if you’re planning on just getting more confident teaching mama’s who come into your classroom.

Generally a yoga studio will ask for your RPYT. So if you’re trying to teach in a yoga studio then you’re going to want to have your certification.

But if you are going to have your own space, or find a mom or pregnancy related business, which is what our business model is here at Ma Yoga (or was before Covid), you don’t need an official prenatal certification.

Nobody’s ever going to ask for your prenatal yoga certification if you’re doing it on your own in your own space, I mean you could put a sign out right now and say prenatal yoga here – there’s no law against it.

But we’ll get to why you might not want to…

And then the third one is the doula, the birth practitioner, someone who wants to incorporate prenatal yoga into their practice and offerings. And again the RPYT is not something that people will, in my experience, ever ask about. So it’s not really necessary.

Okay, so that said, well then, what IS necessary to teach prenatal yoga?

I’ll give you a little background about what my personal choices were so you see where I’m coming from.

I started yoga back in the 90’s for aches and pains. It made a lot of them go away and I really wanted to know why, so I set out to figure out why yoga works – and why it sometimes doesn’t – and I finally landed on alignment-based yoga

This was this new idea that we weren’t really concerned with what our poses looked like – the outer form of it – trying to look like the picture of you know, Mr Iyengar in Light on Yoga. It was more, what are we doing inside, right?

There’s this idea that we have this natural blueprint – the spine has its natural curves, the shoulders, you know we have a we have a sense and instinct that rounding our shoulders forward is not going to support the easeful flow of prana, life force energy.

But opening up the heart and softening the shoulder blades down the back, this is an alignment action that we can do, and what are we aligning with?

The flow of prana.

And so for me, that that did it, that was the answer. And in these kind of alignment-based yoga classes, we could address anything from “Oh, you have wrist pain? Well let’s open up the flow of prana and support with our upper back (what I call the upper core) so that we’re not pressing in to our wrist and blocking the flow going into our strong center.” Or other aches and pains – and it worked. Alignment works.

Once I learned that right after my training, which was way before Yoga Alliance, and it was only three months, more like an immersion – they asked if I would teach prenatal yoga.

I was like “sure!” I know nothing about pregnancy, just the basics, so I figured I’d learn a lot and I brought my alignment in. I shared all these teachings about moving your femur bones back in the acetabulum, and supporting the knees, and it helped people out of pain, but itdefinitely felt like I was missing something.

I wasn’t quite getting what prenatal yoga was. I taken like a weekend training and I wasn’t real clear on the point.

It really wasn’t until I sort of started to ask myself, “what is the opportunity that prenatal yoga gives us? that I started to really understand what we’re doing in our prenatal yoga classes, and what the differenc is between prenatal and regular yoga.

In regular yoga we’re pushing ourselves to our edge and then breathing there, seeing what opens up. Once I started understanding the point of prenatal yoga – the opportunity pregnancy gives us, which is beyond the scope of this call, but I’ll kind of try to sum it up in a second – that’s when I really felt confident and inspired and super rewarded by my teaching, for the first time.

I started teaching other teachers, because I was like ohhhhh, I get it and I’m going to share these principles because they always work. They’re alignment based, but they also are spiritual and they’re also energetic and they’re also emotional.

These principles – what I call the Five Sacred Steps – really help us do what I believe prenatal yoga teachers are here to do and that is: to be standing at the doorway of somebody’s highest, most powerful, nurturing and wise Ma Self, saying “welcome.”

So many pregnant women are slowing down and listening inward and taking care of themselves for the first time, so as prenatal yoga teachers it’s almost like there’s this secret additional birth that’s happening, like the birth of you, in your life, being able to be a mother to yourself.

And for pregnant women, this is what allows them to really be that higher Self. In Sanskrit that syllable “ma” also means highest – it means mother in every language – but it also means wise and powerful, like Ma Kali, the mother of all goddesses.