Dave will be offering a series of modules focusing on finding balance and facilitating personal growth and life transformation.

With our lives becoming increasingly busy and complicated, it is easy for our minds and bodies to get out of balance, creating disturbances on all levels of life. To be able to live healthy and rewarding lives, we therefore need to recognize our personal needs on all levels: physical, mental, emotional, relational and spiritual.

By understanding ourselves better, who we are and how life works, we can find personal balance and take a path of constructive development by making the right choices, saying the appropriate things, and responding to life’s challenges in ways that result in positive outcomes.

Dave will be drawing on Ayurvedic principles interpreted in a contemporary way, as well as nutrition, psychology, and communication ethics to help module participants understand how to achieve personal balance and improve the quality of their lives and relationships.

The sessions will offer powerful insights into manifesting goals and realizing personal potential. It will also provide great tools for expanding capacities for yoga teachers and teacher trainers.

Understanding Our Uniqueness and Moving Forward Through Ayurveda, Diet and Nutrition

Most of us operate on autopilot, unconsciously employing old habits in the hope that we will achieve the change that has been eluding us. The truth is, if we aren’t getting what we want out of life, be that personal health, a rewarding job, or meaningful relationships, then something has to change.

These modules will focus on getting the basics sorted out: firstly finding and maintaining personal balance and getting onto our path in life; secondly eating right, so that our bodies are healthy and are minds are clear enough to be able to see opportunities and make the decisions we need to make in order to move forward and manifest our dreams.

Module 1: Ayurveda: Personal Constitutions and How to Work With Them
November 22, 14:30-17:30 & 18:00-20:30
November 23, 10:30-13:30 & 14:30-17:00

Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word meaning “the science of life”. While it originated in India thousands of years ago, it offers valuable insights and tools to help us find and maintain health and harmony on a personal as well as collective level in today’s challenging world.

This two day session will introduce and apply Ayurvedic principles to help participants understand and work with their own unique constitution, so that they can find and maintain personal balance and well-being on physical, mental and emotional levels.

Understanding your personal constitution is extremely useful in helping understand yourself, as well as others, on a much deeper level. It helps us understand our tendencies, both physiological and psychological, and what will take us out of balance and bring us back into balance at any given point in time. This can be applied not only to achieve and maintain personal health and well-being, but also to enrich our lives and relationships on all levels.

Topics for this module will include:

- Foundation principles of Ayurveda: the Five Elements, the Three Doshas, and the Twenty Attributes.
- Prakruti: Defining and recognizing the different constitutional types and subtypes.
- Finding your personal constitution.
- Understanding the health challenges of each constitution.
- Understanding the emotional tendencies and personalities of the different constitutions.
- Recognizing the early signs of imbalance.
- Guidelines for restoring and keeping balance to the mind and body.
- Food and taste in relation to the different constitutions.
- Exploring the relationship between food and awareness.
- Exercise and lifestyle considerations, including personalizing your yoga practice to suit your constitution and current state of health.

Module 2: East Meets West with Diet and Nutrition
November 24, 14:30-17:00 & 17:30-20:00

Eating right can be tricky when leading busy lives in such a convenience orientated processed modern world. However if we understand the basics, as well as what works for each of us on an individual level, we can eat well and have fun with our food, without it becoming a stressful or socially isolating issue.

This module will explore diet as a vehicle to improving personal health and awareness. Dave will look at food from a modern Western nutritional perspective, while incorporating the holistic energetic dimension to diet offered by Ayurveda and other Eastern traditions, as discussed in the previous module.

Topics for this module will include:

- Busting food myths.
- Exploring different diets.
- Food and it’s relationship to emotions and energy levels (including working with energy drop outs).
- Making good choices: what to eliminate, what to include, and replacing negative foods with positive options.
- Raw food – what to be careful of and how to get the most out of it.
- Super foods.
- Improving digestion.
- The importance of acid and alkaline balance.
- Food combining and how to adjust it to your personal situation.
- Food allergies, including gluten intolerance.
- Fasting and purification.
- Weight loss and weight gain.
- Making transitions and having fun along the way.

Integration: A Closer Look at Relationships, Communication and Achieving Goals

In these modules Dave will focus on the principles that are necessary for personal integration and how to maintain these while building healthy relationships and achieving goals.

Module 3: The Dynamics of Relationships and Transformation Through Communication
November 25, 18:30-21:30

Having healthy relationships is essential if we wish to live healthy fulfilling lives.

Life is an opportunity to become the person we dream to be and to help others to do the same. What we become is a result of what we do, both mentally and physically. Our diet and lifestyle are an important part of this, however once we have these worked out, the real test comes through how we handle our relationships, which depends to a large degree on how we communicate.

This module will look at what it takes to build and maintain healthy relationships and effective communication.

Topics for this module will include:

- The mind, body, spirit connection.
- The relationship between experience, trauma and transformation.
- Integrity: principles to get yourself together.
- Critical keys to building and maintaining healthy relationships.
- Communication tools and ethics – what works and what doesn’t.

Module 4: Managing Responsibility, Working With Others, and Setting and Achieving Goals
November 26, 18:30-21:30

In a world characterised by rapid change and ever increasing information, chronic stress and anxiety have become all too commonplace. This affects not only our physical health, but our communication and relationships with others, both personal and professional. We can lose sight of our goals and feel swamped by our responsibilities.

This module is designed to provide participants with core skills to support personal development, promote working effectively with others, and to help set and achieve goals. This is applicable to both work and personal situations, whether you're teaching, in a position of leadership, working along side others, or dealing with family or one on one relationships.

Building on the previous workshop that explored relationships and communication, this workshop will cover the following topics:

- Goal setting
- Evaluating where we are and how to move forward.
- Understanding the relationship between responsibility, stress and working with others, including the understanding and detangling of emotional triangles.
- Tools to manage stress and make good decisions.
- Building trust and finding agreement.
- Moving forward: achieving our goals and helping others do the same.