I woke up this morning still trying to figure out how to answer the question everyone keeps asking me.
“How was Peru?”
And every single time, I just smile. Because I genuinely do not know how to answer that in the way the question deserves to be answered. Like how do you take something that rearranged something inside of you and turn it into small talk? You can’t. So here I am, writing a whole blog post about it instead.
I just got back from completing my 300hr Ayurveda Yoga Teacher Training with School Yoga Institute — the 300hr YTT held at Munay Sonqo in the Sacred Valley of Peru, led by Anita Sundaram and Raquel Bueno. And I need you to know — nothing anyone said to me before I left could have adequately prepared me for what that experience actually was.
Let me tell you about it.
First, a word about Peru itself
The altitude is not playing with you. Your body will remind you, repeatedly, that you are in the Andes and not wherever you came from. The UV is intense, the air is different, and the first couple of days I was basically just existing and trying to get my bearings. But the staff at Munay Sonqo were so good about it — medicinal teas, meals that were gentle on a stomach still figuring things out, genuine attentiveness to how guests were adjusting. That kind of care matters more than people realize when you’re somewhere new and your body is trying to catch up with you.
What it meant to see teachers who looked like me
I want to be honest about something that doesn’t get talked about enough in yoga spaces — especially for those of us who are Black, brown, or otherwise not the default image that comes up when someone Googles “yoga teacher.”
Walking into that training and seeing that my teachers — Anita and Raquel — were women of color was not a small thing for me. In Western yoga spaces, that is genuinely not a given. Yoga in America has long been positioned as a luxury for a very specific kind of person, and that specific kind of person usually doesn’t look like me. So to walk in and see two brown women leading with so much knowledge, so much lineage, so much love for what they do? Something in me just settled. I didn’t realize how much I needed that until I felt it.
If you are a yoga teacher of color who has ever felt like the industry wasn’t quite built for you — this training, these teachers, this space — it’s worth knowing it exists.
What the 300hr advanced training actually covers
I’ll be real — I went in expecting something like a continuation of my 200hr training. More asana, more sequencing, maybe some deeper alignment work. I had been out of teaching for two and a half years and I was nervous about whether I’d even made the right call coming back this way.
The SYI 300-hour Ayurveda YTT is not that. We went deep — into subtle anatomy, the Pancamaya system, the vayus, the philosophy of prana in a way I genuinely don’t think I touched in my 200hr training. It reframed things I thought I already knew and filled in gaps I didn’t even realize were there. If you’re a yoga teacher looking to go beyond the physical practice and really understand the why behind the tradition, this advanced training delivers that in a way I wasn’t expecting.
And Raquel — I have to give her her flowers because she deserves them. She has this gift. Dense material, heavy concepts, and she finds the joy in it every single time. She’d weave in humor so naturally that the whole room would open up and suddenly the thing that felt heavy was actually landing. I stayed after class so many evenings just because I didn’t want the conversation to end.
Anita brings a different kind of energy — grounded, elegant, deeply rooted in the tradition. There is a stillness in the way she holds the teachings that makes you want to slow down and actually receive them. The two of them together are something you really have to experience to understand.
What I’m carrying home
By the end of the training I found myself thinking: if I could be even a fraction of the teacher that Anita and Raquel are, I will have done something right. And I think that might honestly be the highest thing I’ve ever felt about a teacher.
I went to Peru to get a certification. I came home knowing what kind of yoga teacher I actually want to be — and having seen it lived out in real time, in real people, right in front of me. That is not something you can put a price on.
If any part of this is speaking to you — whether you’re a yoga teacher ready for your next level, or someone who has been looking for a training that actually feels like it has space for you — go look up School Yoga Institute. The 300hr Peru YTT has another cohort running August 25 – September 17, 2026, and they offer financial assistance, so don’t let that be the thing that stops you from even looking.
Go. Let Peru have you for a little while.
You won’t regret it.
Resources
- School Yoga Institute
- 300hr Ayurveda YTT — Peru (Next cohort: August 25 – September 17, 2026)
- Meet Anita Sundaram
- Meet Raquel Bueno
Financial assistance is available — reach out to SYI directly for details.
Romneka G. 
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