Aspects of Yoga Practice
My first teacher was Ranju Roy who taught me 1:1 and in workshops for five years. Ranju's teaching was based on TKV Desikachar who learned from his father Sri Krishnamacharya. I spent another five years with Jenny Beeken, another very good teacher originally taught by BKS Iyengar in India. I'm very grateful to both my original teachers, but after time I found unity and my own way.
Drift & Focus
A short focused practice can often serve us better than a long one where our thoughts have more opportunity to drift. Focus is key to practice, and I teach how you can use the breath in postures to help you increase this by joining the breath with the movement which affects the movement itself, our energy body and therefore our consciousness.
Letting Go
Vanda Scaravelli called yoga " a joyful appointment with your body " - an unfortunate saying in some ways because yoga is a great deal more which she knew fine well, having been taught 1:1 by both Mr Iyengar and TKV Desikachar. However, Vanda Scaravelli rightly placed enormous emphasis on letting go, by not forcing the postures we can open to something else, something other. This is what she meant by this saying, but we have to remember the postures link with the othe seven limbs which have an overarching deep and lasting significance.
Yoga now
The truths of yoga are perennial but so much has changed recently, especially over the last ten years or so when it has become fashionable, something that seemed impossible when I began. Not all of this is good, maybe none of it ? There's been too much dilution of what yoga is, too much focus on doing yoga so to speak, but we need to let yoga do us. It's not the same thing, it's not about how bendy we are or might become, or how we look in this or that pose, quite the opposite in fact.
Only you know what's going on for you in your body-mind. I remember, for example, being constantly chided in training for pushing too much, which was true, but where did that pushing come from ? At the time I was having to learn and absorb a completely different approach to yoga, including all the postures and and was trying too hard, but the true source of pushing myself went much further back.That's where Swadiyaya comes in, the yogic way of helping us figure things out about ourselves.
Each of us is different, we change, situations change, life is a constantly moving dynamic and can throw things at us pretty quickly across the board. Yoga embraces this, it's a journey which can move us onto different ground so we can understand who we are and why we are here.
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