Yoga Studies

Naropa’s Bachelor of Arts in Yoga Studies is more than a yoga teacher training and yoga certification program. Here, you’ll embrace yogic practice as a way of life. Be transformed on and off the mat at the nation’s first yoga university.

The first yoga class at Naropa University was taught in 1974 by spiritual leader Ram Dass. In a school bus converted into a camper, he spent two months preparing the course in the deserts of New Mexico and California. He not only immersed himself in the Gītā and its commentaries that summer, but even gave the inaugural lectures to a rapt audience of desert jackrabbits—a picturesque beginning for yoga studies at Naropa.

In subsequent decades, Naropa launched the Bachelor of Arts degree in Yoga Studies—the first bachelor's degree in yoga offered in America. The program has been flourishing for the last ten years and facilitates a unique merger of contemplative and academic rigor.

Becoming a yoga instructor is often life changing. For students in Naropa’s yoga studies degree program, this is particularly true. You’ll spend four years delving into yoga's history, literature, and philosophy. The methodologies of Hatha Yoga will come to life as you practice asanas, pranayama, and meditation. This is a yoga education like no other.