As lifelong learners ourselves, we treasure the opportunity to share this time in your life as you discover new levels of depth in your own yoga practice, as you nurture relationships with other yoga enthusiasts, practitioners and teachers, and as you take a fresh look into the inner world of the friends, family members, students and clients you are preparing to serve.
What’s unique about the way we prepare yoga educators is the emphasis we place on generating an experiential learning environment in a way that invites relaxed learning. We place the highest value on establishing authentic relationships that encourage every individual to look to inner wisdom for the ultimate authority. We approach the experience of yoga as an inquiry into one’s own experience. Until we develop a yoga muscle that allows us to witness our life experience with non-judgmental self-awareness, we’re not that efficient at learning from our own experience. This is where the yoga inquiry begins.
We call our approach “interdisciplinary.” We explore what is common to the diverse disciplines of yoga being taught and practiced in the world today and utilize the fundamental practices and philosophy for delving into the yoga that comes from the inside out. Yoga teachers whose lives are transformed from the inside out are capable of transmitting enthusiasm for the learning process. Our shared mission is to awaken awareness of the power we have as yoga educators to invent new ways of being together as human beings. Learning together in a yoga class invites a depth of relationship that supports a depth of personal inquiry. Every aspect of each 200-, 500- and 1000-hr professional training program is designed as an inquiry into your own yoga—What’s your yoga?
When you study with us, we hope you will find a stimulating environment that will help you deepen your own relationship to life through exploring the yoga you are born to live, practice and share with the world around you.
With great joy in sharing the yoga journey, we welcome you to Nosara.
Amba and Don Stapleton, Ph. D.
Don Stapleton, Dean of Yoga Education
From his early childhood in New Mexico and Texas, Don Stapleton felt a calling for the inner journey. Stimulated by his interests in drawing and painting, his family and teachers aided him in developing his creative abilities. He was awarded a full scholarship in painting to Pepperdine University, which transplanted him into the crossroads of California at a time when discoveries in the fields of creativity, humanistic psychology and spiritual consciousness were transforming culture. Motivated by his curiosity into the creative process, he studied early childhood development and the educational climates that either fostered or thwarted creative self-expression and individuation. Pennsylvania State University granted Don an NDEA Fellowship to continue his development as both an artist and an educator. His doctoral studies in the creative learning process earned him a doctorate degree in 1976. In his career as a professor at the University of South Florida and the Philadelphia College of Art, he had the opportunity to prepare teachers for innovative approaches to education.
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One of the first things people often want to know about us is how Don and I landed in Costa Rica. Well, let me tell you a little story. Nosara Yoga Institute would never have been born in Central America had the Henderson family not decided to take a summer vacation “somewhere different.” Mom was the advanced scout and located a perfect destination.
As a member of the Business and Professional Women’s Club of the Florida Keys, my mother and her friends made a fateful decision. The year was 1967. Instead of staying at home and making apple pie, these moms packed their Samsonite bags, left their kids and husbands at home to fend for themselves and split town as diplomats to a developing country.
The lucky country was Costa Rica. How much time could the kids and Dad be without Mom? One week was the maximum. So they spent just one short week visiting San Jose, the capital city and some surrounding villages. Her little excursion was to influence the rest my life. Mom came back all excited about this beautiful little country that all of us just had to see.
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