Zuna Yoga® has run 82 residential teacher trainings in Bali since 2009, for more than two thousand participants. Our trainings run three to four weeks and are capped at fifteen people. You live inside the practice rather than fitting it around a working week or a holiday. These trainings are challenging in many ways, and 99% of the people who start, people much like you, reach a meaningful and rewarding finish.
That comes down to three things: teachers who know the material deeply, a format built to carry people through it, and a venue whose staff handle everything else so you’re free to experience yourself and attend to your education. The days are full and demanding, but a group of fifteen leaves room to ask questions, get individual feedback, and be known rather than disappear into the room.
We teach the tradition and the science beneath it, non-dogmatic, non-religious, explained rather than asserted. You’ll get the practice in the morning, then the thinking behind it, then the evidence. Same material, three angles, each day. Across this year’s cohorts, eighty-seven percent left feeling stronger, more capable, and clearer about the direction of their life.
All Zuna Yoga® teacher trainings are internationally recognized through Yoga Alliance. Graduates who successfully complete the training are eligible to register with Yoga Alliance® and receive the corresponding certification.
Read our YOGA ALLIANCE FAQ to learn more about the difference between RYT200 vs RYT500 and the benefits of Yoga Alliance registration.
Our yoga teacher training programs meet you at your current level of practice and experience. Each pathway offers a different point of entry, with opportunities to continue your education as your practice and teaching evolve.
If meditation is your primary direction, the 300 Hour Meditation Teacher Training can be your starting point with Zuna Yoga®. You don’t need to complete a 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training first.
You can watch a concert on television. It’s not the same as being there. Online study is useful, and some programs offer live sessions, but it’s still largely intellectual. There are no hands-on adjustments, and no chance to work with a range of bodies. You’re also learning alone, without a room of people meeting the same challenges, which teaches something on its own.
You study for a few hours and return to the life that formed the personal habits you likely came to examine. Without separation these behavioral patterns remain elusive, because you never leave the conditions producing them.
Better than online in many ways. You’ll spend time with other people, you’ll get more personal attention and hands-on adjustments, and it costs less than a residential training. You get real-time corrections, and you’ll see how the same instruction lands differently in different bodies.
Where it falls short is depth. Learning arrives in fragments across months, with a working week in between each one, so each session is spent recovering ground rather than building on it. And it still doesn’t give you the separation from your life’s routines that deep self-inquiry usually needs.
Step out of your life entirely and live inside the practice. Twelve hours a day for weeks, with the same people, in a place where nothing asks anything else of you. Meals and housekeeping are handled, and you’re in a serene natural setting with time to reflect on life.
That’s the point. The habits you came to examine are produced by conditions you’re normally inside of, and you can’t see them from in there. Take the conditions away and the patterns surface on their own. Once you can see them, you can decide what to do about them. No format can offer more.
Our residential trainings take place at Saridevi, a Balinese family-run retreat center in the village of Wongaya Gede, with rice terraces all around and Mount Batukaru rising nearby.
The setting gives the days a natural rhythm and more room for what you’re learning to settle between sessions. Saridevi is deeply connected to the life and traditions of the local community, and its family atmosphere gives the place a warmth that quickly feels more like home than a retreat center. The surrounding nature helps you stay immersed in the training and supports the depth of the experience. The training feels rooted in Bali rather than simply taking place there.
You don’t need to arrive as an accomplished practitioner, and you don’t need to know exactly where yoga will take you. But you do need to come ready to engage.
We ask you to come as an explorer: curious, open to feedback, willing to meet a challenge, and disciplined enough to stay with the work. You’re also responsible for your own experience, which means respecting your body’s limits, getting the rest and food you need, and asking for support rather than pushing through alone.
Your experience depends as much on how we are together as on what we do together. You’ll practice, study, teach and reflect alongside a small group, and what you bring to it shapes what everyone takes from it.
The intensity is part of the education. It asks for effort and consistency, and it’s what makes it possible to move past what’s already familiar.
Where your heart and mind go, your life force flows. In the garden of our lives, this is what we grow.
Yoga has a long and profound tradition, but we believe learning it doesn’t mean surrendering your own judgment. Our role as teachers isn’t to tell you what to believe or who to become. It’s to give you the practices, knowledge, experience, and inspiration to lead yourself.
At its heart, yoga is a path toward greater freedom and agency. A teacher can illuminate the path, but ultimately you have to trust yourself, trust your vision, and pursue the life that is uniquely yours.
Teaching is a lifelong learning process. The Advanced Zuna Yoga® Teacher Mentorship Program gives selected graduates a way to keep learning after certification, with continued guidance and hands on experience during a teacher training cycle.
Yoga is for everyone, but not all yoga is for everyone.
There is no single “best” yoga teacher training for everyone, and choosing whatever is most popular isn’t necessarily the best place to start. A training can be highly rated and still not be the right education for you.
Before making a big investment in a teacher training, you need to have explored enough to know what actually resonates with you. That doesn’t mean having everything figured out, but you should have enough experience with different teachers, practices, and approaches to recognize what draws you in and what direction you want to explore.
From there, the question becomes more practical: what do you want this training to give you? Look closely at the curriculum, the philosophy behind it, and the people teaching it. The program should feel aligned with what matters to you, while still offering enough depth and new territory to expand your understanding.
Then look carefully at how the training is delivered: the experience of the teachers, the size of the group, the amount of direct feedback and teaching practice, whether the course is immersive or spread over time, and how the school approaches tradition, evidence, and different points of view.
Finally, do your homework beyond the school’s own website. Read independent reviews, including the critical ones. Listen to graduates talk about their experience. Learn about the teachers themselves. And pay attention to your own response to what you find.
The world of yoga is vast, and you don’t want to become stuck in a narrow view of what yoga is or what it can offer. A teacher training asks for a significant investment of time, energy, and money. That investment should offer expansion, not simply more of what you already know. Look for a program that exposes you to new ideas, unfamiliar practices, different ways of thinking, and perspectives that challenge and deepen your existing understanding.
At the same time, expansion doesn’t mean constantly moving from one teacher, school, or method to another. We often use the analogy of a miner digging for gold: if you strike a rich vein, you don’t immediately abandon it to search somewhere else. You keep digging until there’s no more gold to be found. Education can be the same. When you find a source of learning that continues to inspire you, challenge you, and reveal new layers of understanding, there’s great value in staying with it and going deeper.
Choosing a teacher training is partly research and partly discernment. Use your brain, your gut, and your heart. The right training should make sense to you, resonate with what matters to you, take you somewhere you haven’t been before, and still have enough depth to keep you digging once you get there.
No. Many students join a yoga teacher training with little or no intention of ever teaching, and begin instead to deepen their own practice and understanding of yoga.
Teacher training gives you something regular classes rarely can: the time and structure to understand yoga beyond the physical practice. You study how the practices work, explore philosophy, breath, meditation, anatomy, and teaching, and begin connecting those ideas to your own life and experience.
You’ll still learn to teach. We believe the process of learning to communicate clearly, guide others, and stand in front of a group is part of the education, even if you never teach a public class.
And students often discover that what they take away reaches far beyond teaching: a deeper relationship with their practice, greater self-awareness, more confidence, and a clearer understanding of themselves.
If teaching becomes part of your path, you’ll be prepared for it. If it doesn’t, the education is still yours.
Zuna Yoga® integrates traditional hatha yoga, vinyasa, pranayama, meditation, mantra, yoga nidra, and other classical yogic practices.
Our approach emphasizes breath, body, and intention while balancing traditional wisdom with modern understandings of human physiology, psychology, and well-being.
It’s called an intensive for a reason. The days are full, and the training asks for dedication, discipline, and a willingness to stay engaged even when you’re challenged.
Your day begins in silence at sunrise with a morning practice of asana, breathwork, and meditation. Silence continues through breakfast, followed by time to journal, and only then does the group come together to discuss the morning. The rest of the day moves through lectures and practicums, posture labs, movement, teaching practice, and workshops, closing with sunset meditation. There’s one full day off each week.
You’ll be tested physically, mentally, and emotionally, but discover you have more strength and capacity than you thought. Students describe leaving with far more than they expected: a stronger practice, a deeper understanding of yoga, greater awareness of themselves, more confidence, and close connections with the people they trained alongside. Many arrive thinking they’re coming to learn how to teach yoga, and discover the real treasure is something deeper.
Absolutely. We aim to provide a strong foundation in yoga, teaching methodology, and personal practice while encouraging students to develop their own authentic voice.
Graduates go on to teach a wide variety of styles, including hatha, vinyasa, yin, restorative yoga, meditation, corporate wellness, children’s yoga, and more.
Yes. Zuna Yoga® is a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga School (RYS 200 and RYS 300), and our teacher trainings exceed Yoga Alliance’s minimum educational requirements.
Graduates who successfully complete the relevant training can register with Yoga Alliance at the corresponding level. While Yoga Alliance provides an internationally recognized framework for teacher education, we don’t build our programs around meeting the minimum. The curriculum, contact hours, practice, teaching experience, and depth of study are designed around what we believe constitutes a thorough education.
Requirements vary by training. For the 200 Hour we recommend at least six months of regular practice and a reasonable level of general fitness. Our advanced trainings require a previous teacher training and a stronger foundation of practice and study.
You don’t need to be an advanced practitioner. What matters is that you’re comfortable with a physically active training, able to engage with both practical and theoretical study, and willing to participate fully.
Most training days are full and varied. You’ll move between practice, lectures, discussion, teaching exercises, posture and movement labs, meditation, and time for reflection, with breaks for meals and rest.
The exact rhythm varies by program, but our residential trainings generally begin around sunrise and finish in the early evening. There is one full day off each week.
Group size is intentionally limited to create a supportive learning environment and allow for meaningful interaction with the teaching team. Our trainings are capped at 15 participants.
Yes, it is. It should be. But you don’t need to arrive as an advanced practitioner. You’re here to learn. What matters more is curiosity, discipline, openness to feedback, and the ability to respect your own limits while staying committed to the process.
A yoga teacher training asks for physical participation, intellectual engagement, self-reflection, and a willingness to step outside familiar patterns. There will be moments that ask more of you than you expected, and that is part of the education.
We’re all a little like gemstones drawn from the earth, carrying an essence that has yet to be fully revealed. Shaping and polishing bring out the beauty, and that takes pressure, friction, patience, and effort. But the reward is freedom: the freedom to let more of what we carry within us emerge and shine.
The best preparation is a consistent yoga practice.
We encourage students to maintain a regular practice, explore different styles and teachers, and begin the recommended reading before the training begins. Arriving rested, open-minded, and ready to learn is often the most valuable preparation of all.
Yes. All Zuna Yoga teacher trainings in Bali are residential, and it’s the only format we offer. You’ll live and learn at Saridevi in Wongaya Gede, with accommodation, meals and the rhythm of the day built around the training.
We’ve chosen this deliberately rather than for convenience. The reasons are set out above, under Residential Teacher Training.
Yes.
Graduates who successfully complete the training receive a Yoga Alliance recognized certificate and are eligible to register as a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) where applicable. Many graduates begin teaching shortly after returning home, while others integrate the knowledge into existing careers, communities, and personal practice.
Yes.
Graduation is often the beginning rather than the end of the journey.
Graduates may continue their studies through advanced teacher trainings, meditation teacher trainings, workshops, retreats, online programs, and the Advanced Zuna Teacher Mentorship Program.
Many students return multiple times as their practice, teaching, and interests evolve.
Choosing a yoga teacher training is a big decision. If you’re still working out what kind of training is right for you, these guides can help you look more closely at your options and decide what matters most.