- Bridget Puchalsky
- Wednesday Jan 8 – Friday, Jan 17, 2025
- Online Only
If you are 200-hour certified, our JOY 300 hour program will expand your knowledge and grow you personally and professionally.
The core of our program features a curriculum that addresses anatomy, language, meditation, history, Ayurveda, and foundational aspects of instruction. You’ll spend eight sessions working with Jennifer Prugh and your colleagues, clarifying your career aspirations so that you will professionally practice your passion and expertise. Additionally, you’ll participate in four seasonal Ayurvedic cleanses focused on the whys and hows of the seasonal-based asana found in Breathe Together Yoga’s Tapas classes. The combination of these will give you a deep understanding of self-care in both on-the-mat practice and lifestyle that supports you and your students.
You will round out your core classes with elective courses, which gives you additional time in an area of specific interest. For those who choose, you have the opportunity to study on retreat in a culture where yoga and mind body practices evolved as part of our commitment to providing immersive education, such as India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, or Bali.
We offer a non-dogmatic, evidence-based approach to yoga, providing a supportive, rigorous, and inspirational environment to integrate what you are learning. When you join our JOY 300-hour program, you learn from faculty members with deep subject matter expertise. Our faculty have been actively working in their fields of expertise for decades and come with much to share from their experience that will enrich your learning. Combined, our teachers have 77 years of teaching experience and 107 years of personal practice.
Registration opens April 1, 2025.
Art of Presence
Heart-Mind Practices
Mapping the Inner Life
A Practical History of Yoga
Joanne’s philosophy as a yoga teacher is to help people who seek personal empowerment feel connected to their bodies, quiet their mind, stimulate a healthy nervous system, and release tension in the body caused by stress, anxiety, or trauma. Her teaching techniques use a combination of breathwork, meditation, gentle asanas, somatic yoga, medical qigong, and neurogenic tremoring.
Joanne is an E-RYT 500 and earned her certification through Jennifer Prugh’s, YA-certified JOY of Yoga teacher training and is a Level 2 TRE facilitator. Joanne teaches classes, workshops, teacher trainings, as well as runs retreats locally and internationally. She is co-founder of the Yoga for Trauma Recovery Program and teaches trauma-informed yoga at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and San Jose, California and has voluntarily taught yoga to women incarcerated at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas and the Center for Survivors of Torture in San Jose.
Jen Walthers is an expert in wellbeing, mindfulness, and archetypal myth. She brings 30+ years of working with yoga, meditation, and Feng Shui, as well as an M.A. in Educational Leadership and certification as a wellness educator, to her work supporting more individuals in high-pressure environments to make space for themselves. Prior to starting her wellbeing work, Jen taught foster parents social-emotional learning strategies as a social worker, received awards for her classroom teaching and curriculum development as a high school English teacher, trained hundreds of high school teachers as a Coordinator of Curriculum and Instruction, and spent 5 years doing post-graduate work in comparative mythology.
Recently, she’s spent over a thousand hours combing through the latest research on the nervous system, mindfulness, and wellbeing, curating the findings and training future meditation teachers as a Guest Lecturer at the Joy of Yoga School of Integrative Learning. When she’s not coaching others on how to take their mind-body connection to the next level or how to make room for themselves, you can find Jen planning her next road trip (6 trips cross-country and counting), reading YA novels, or anywhere near water – swimming and kayaking.
After just one aerial class (actually within the first five minutes of that class) Sarah fell in love with aerial yoga. The deep stretching, the core work, the balance development, the gradual improvement in upper body strength, and most of all the inversions, became an essential complement to an active mat practice. Since that first class in 2013, Sarah has completed certifications in Aerial Yoga and Gentle Aerial Yoga through The Yoga Studio in Campbell, as well as certifications in Aerial Yoga and Low Hammock Aerial Yoga with Trilogy Sanctuary in San Diego. She began teaching Aerial Yoga at Breathe Together in 2021, first Aerial Yin, and then adding Aerial Basics shortly afterwards. Always interested in underlying theories and principles of practice, she developed the aerial intensive weekend in 2023 in order to provide a deeper experience to interested students. She also teaches a series of four workshops every year that look at seasonal yoga practices in an aerial context. Her classes stress the relationship between aerial yoga and the mat practice, and use the hammock to explore poses in ways that are unique to the aerial practice.
Jim’s journey started in Maine and eventually led him to Los Gatos. His path led him through life in many different states ranging from North Dakota to Texas, Montana to Washington, and throughout most of the other Western states. During one 3-year stretch he spent nine months of each year camping and backpacking. Eventually he found his way to Silicon Valley and a career in tech which ended after a 2-year contract working for the DoD.
Along the path, he met a fellow Scuba Instructor by the name of Paul Miller, who introduced him to meditation. Paul’s wife, Kate, introduced Jim to crystals, and his geek was on! Paul and Kate introduced Jim to Gideon and Ana Enz who opened the path to Wuji Qigong and Yang-Style Taijiquan, which led Jim to Breathe Together Yoga. Jennifer Prugh stepped in and led the way to Ladakh, India, and then to the 200-hour JOY of Yoga certification and the 300-hour JOY of Yoga program.
Naomi Wilder is a breathwork facilitator, Kundalini yoga teacher, and sound healer. She began her yogic studies practicing Iyengar in college, where she was enrolled as a dance major. Once she discovered Kundalini yoga, she became Level 1 certified by the Kundalini Research Institute at Golden Bridge in Santa Monica. She proceeded to study, traveling to India and Bali to complete her 500-Hour Level 2 certification. She also holds a Kundalini prenatal yoga certification with Khalsa Way. Observing the results she experienced while maintaining a daily pranayama practice, she became inspired to curate specialized sequences of pranayama. In 2023, she founded Infinity Breath, a course study on the energetics of pranayama yoga sequences and their effects. With a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica, Naomi also works part-time as a counselor and is an experience teacher at 1440 Multiversity.
Gideon Enz is a Sanskrit and Classical Chinese scholar with over three decades of teaching experience in yoga, taiji, qigong and meditation. He is a shifu (master instructor) of Chinese internal gongfu (including taiji and qigong) and has studied yoga, herbology, and Chinese and Indian medicine since he was a teenager. Gideon also holds a master’s degree from UC Berkeley on the comparative analysis of traditional Indian and Chinese exercise systems and has contributed to over a dozen books on qigong and Chinese esoteric practices. A longtime student of Master Duan Zhi Liang, Gideon is also the lineage holder of the Wuji Qigong method, once taught only in secret within the imperial palace. Gideon teaches classes, workshops and courses that use the easy, accessible methods of increasing health and vitality by gently but powerfully directing one’s internal world towards a state of natural integration, well-being, and flow.
I began my study of yoga in 1980. I read in a book that yoga was the best exercise ever invented, and then, within a week, I happened across an ad for the Yoga Room in Berkeley, a mile or so away from where I was living at the time in Oakland. I went to try it out, and here I am today, as I write this 38 years later.
I went through my teacher training at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco from 1982 to 1986. It was a two-year program that took me more than three years to complete. The friends I made back then are still around today, and still teaching, Clare Finn, Patricia Sullivan, Mary Paffard, Tony Briggs, and last but not least, my evil twin, Rodney Yee.
In 1987 Clare, Rod, and I founded the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California. The school had a good run, almost 28 years before closing its doors in January 2015. Amazingly though, the school was resurrected virtually the day after its demise in a new incarnation as You and the Mat, ably directed by Eric and Denise Antonini. I teach all seven of my weekly public classes at this beautiful venue.
Mark Singleton is a scholar of yoga traditions, ancient and modern. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and has published extensively on the history of yoga over the past twenty years. Among his books are Yoga Body (2010), a groundbreaking study of the modern evolution of yoga postures, and Roots of Yoga (2017, with James Mallinson) an anthology of yoga practice texts from across the ages. He was Senior Research Fellow on the Hatha Yoga Project at SOAS University of London, and remains a research associate there. He is also a certified teacher in the Iyengar and Satyananda traditions. In 2022 he was awarded the International Yoga Federation’s Patanjali Prize for his outstanding contributions to yoga.
In 2013 I was living in Denmark, where I completed my 200hr teacher training at Prana Yoga Shala, with Ann-Charlotte Monrad. In August 2013, my family and I moved to California where I started teaching a few yoga classes while settling into our new life. Since then I’ve completed a 300hr teacher training, and a few more certifications including: Yin Yoga and Adaptive Yoga for seniors with Misako Matsuoka, SATYA 1 & 2 with Tias Little, Breath & Bliss with Jill Miller, Yoga as Medicine with Timothy McCall, Face Yoga and more.
In 2018 I shifted from part-time yoga teacher to full-time and I’ve been teaching public group classes, private individual & group sessions and in corporations. In addition I teach specifically tailored workshops about stress reduction, face yoga, yoga for well-being, focus & awareness and more!
I am a Yoga Continuing Education Provider (YACEP) with Yoga Alliance, which means that drop in classes & workshops with me count towards “continuing education credits” for those who need to meet hourly requirements in 200 and 300 hour approved teacher training programs.
Tias synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhist studies, somatic practices, anatomy, massage and trauma healing. He began studying the work of B.K.S Iyengar in 1984 and lived in Mysore, India in 1989 studying Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga with Pattabhi Jois. His teaching includes precision of alignment, anatomical detail and meditative awareness.