Forty Years of Teaching Yoga and Still Going
Time doesn’t quite fly always. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it plods. I know it’s forty years of teaching yoga because I can add up the students I’ve taught along the way. It’s a lot!
Yoga teaching
Yoga teaching
Yoga teaching
RIP Gita Iyengar–Yoga Transformer
I always felt that Gita lived the life of a nun. She dressed in white and was steeped in the wisdom of spiritual texts. Gita devoted herself utterly and completely to the needs of her father and brother after her mother’s death. She worked tirelessly to ‘reveal’ yoga to the world, travelling and teaching, even as her health was failing.
Yoga Practitioners and Teachers: Be Tenacious
When I started teaching, my first classes were not altogether successful in terms of bums-on-mats. It took tremendous staying power in the beginning to keep coming back week after week to small classes when I wasn’t making a living. One has to continuously calm the negative mind and recreate motivation for practising and teaching. Who knows if or when one is going to make a go of it? How long will it take to be a good teacher? How long will it take to ‘be yoga’?
Take Care: A Yoga Festival and So Much More
I’ve been invited to teach at a very special festival at the end of the year called Shambala–Lost Paradise.
Now that I’ve accepted the invitation, I’m wondering what it will be like. From the description below, it sounds like so much more than a yoga festival experience. Here’s how Lost Paradise advertises itself, incorporating some of these elements:
A Hidden Wonderland…Dancing under the Stars. Nurture by Nature. Sparkling Conversations by Water. Yoga in Full Flow. Acoustic Sessions. Inspirational talks. Pop-up Performances. Twinkling Pathways. Rejuvenating Massage. Disco Yurts. Twilight Parades. Electronic Alcoves. Sumptuous Feasts. Four-Poster Day-Beds. Late Night Speakeasys. […]
Yoga Quotations: The Spice of Teaching
Why we don’t make up our own quotable quips? Why do we rely on celebrity or guru quotes, which are sometimes misquotes or misattributed)?
Yoga teachers-in-training tend to spout their teachers’ words exactly when they begin teaching. I still do. My Iyengar teacher from the eighties, Martyn Jackson, pops up in my classroom instructions on occasion. As do more recent influencers, like Donna Farhi or Judith Laseter.
As yoga teachers become more seasoned, they fashion their own phrasing. And then, their quips, quotations and word pictures will undoubtedly plant find their way into the next generation’s repertoire.
Time to Take a Break: Plotting and Perfectionism
It would have been nice to start out in my teaching career as a completely relaxed yoga teacher, but that doesn’t often happen. Perhaps that old line about it taking years to be an overnight success is valid.
Planning and plotting have been long-held habits in all areas of my life. I could also say that they have been expressed as perfectionism. Little by little, though, I have been learning to trust what I know and what I have embodied.
Yoga Lesson Plans: Surrender to Adapting
I’m part of a yoga teachers practice group which meets monthly. We get together for a led-practice and then breakfast afterwards.
It’s a mutual gathering. No one person is the boss of it. The person leading and venue of the group rotates each month. This is semi-rural Australia, so we teachers come from all over. Some have to travel 1.5 hours to attend.
Besides enjoying the benefits of learning from each other, we get to float questions. For instance, last Saturday we were talking about how some teachers present their yoga classes off-the-cuff. […]
Eve and the Art of Adjustment Workshop in Byron Bay.
I will be teaching an afternoon workshop on The Art of Adjustment in Byron Bay Sunday, August 20th, 1-5 pm.
At the risk of punning, I’m an old hand at hands-on adjustments. […]
The Beauty of Yoga Practice: Do It Now
You can start Yoga at any stage in your life. More importantly though, for your quality of life to improve and discipline become more natural, you can increase your commitment to this most beautiful practice anytime – especially today!
A New Sangha of Yoga Teachers
A bright ideaOne thing I thought of earlier this year was getting local yoga teachers together for a once-a-month practice. The idea I had was that we teachers would come together with one individual leading a yoga practice, and that that person would nominate the venue. Well, it’s happened. So far, we’ve met three times with an average of six of us at each practice. It’s been a great success, not the least seeing each others’ yoga studios. We meet early…7:30 am for an hour and a half practice and afterwards go out for breakfast. […]
Yoga: Yes or No After Cataract Surgery?
The Eyes Have It!
A couple of years ago my optometrist discovered that cataracts were forming in both of my eyes. He predicted I would need cataract surgery someday. I was not looking forward to this ambiguous ‘someday’. […]
Alternatives to Inverted Poses
Finding the Right BalanceThere’s a problem I face when developing a new workshop: I don’t know exactly how much material to put in. Typically, I get excited and create too much. Fortunately I’m experienced enough to calibrate how much I can teach in a workshop as I go along.Still, I get attached to the sequence of poses I’ve created, to having it flow seamlessly and to being able to include interesting variations.I ran into this too-much-material problem when I was teaching a new workshop called ‘Yoga: A Lifelong Companion’ at The Yoga Shed in Richmond, NSW this last weekend. […]
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