I was watching Mr Bean the other night with my son Luke. Mr Bean climbs to the top of a very tall diving tower and then loses his nerve. It’s so funny to watch him clinging to the ground and squirming around as he does whatever he can to avoid going over the edge. At […]
Iyengar Yoga helps Geelong Cats’ Harry Taylor deal with AFL pressure
The end of another AFL season sees the winners celebrating and the losers re-grouping to make an assault on the summit once again next year. In their comparatively short careers elite athletes like AFL players face the challenges of life writ large – success, failure, injury. To simply make it to an elite team is […]
Alert like a Warrior – Reflections on Gulnaaz Dashti workshop
Gulnaaz Dashti is an Indian teacher who studied and taught with the Iyengar family at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Institute in Pune, India. She now teaches outside the Institute in Pune and travels the world teaching workshops. Earlier this year she taught a workshop at the Marrickville Yoga Centre. Tiffany Lee-Shoy is a teacher trainee […]
Garth McLean: Yoga for MS, BKS says proceed with courage and caution
How I learned to love Jathara Parivartanasana
Surprisingly to me, this is my favourite pose of the moment, jathara parivartanasana. Jathar means abdomen in Sanskrit and parivartanasnana is from parivartti, meaning turning around. As I prepared for my recent JI3 assessment I struggled with teaching this pose – there didn’t seem to be much to it! And it’s a struggle to do until you […]
Life lessons from a melanoma diagnosis
Iyengar yoga teacher Linda Apps talks to movement therapist James Walsh about his melanoma diagnosis. In 2009 my friend James Walsh was diagnosed with cancer – stage three melanoma. As an ex-rugby league player, James knew that when things get difficult you’re not supposed to hide. He tackled his diagnosis head-on, displaying an inspiring strength of […]
When is ‘enough’ enough?
I don’t know if you’ve tried to give away a TV recently, but unless it’s a flat screen, no-one’s interested. And even those, the TV repairman told me, are just being left out on the street. Must be a symptom of a well-to-do society. According to Bob Brown, Australians have never been richer than we […]
Last Blog from India
Bellur exceeds expectations
Bellur was fantastic of course. We stayed in a run down but wonderful hotel – wonderful because it had monkeys, a waterslide and pool, table tennis and badminton. We met some lovely Americans, Russians, Latvians, Aussies, and Indians. Luke played water polo with some young Indian men and posed for lots of photographs. Bellur is a small village […]
The King is dead, Long live the Queen!
“You people,” (it’s a pejorative), “a grave mistake that you people make is to make the body narrow,” booms Geeta from the stage. And she is so right, as she is about everything at this Convention. Someone told me that she’s been practising all year to prepare for Yoganusasanum, and her teaching certainly has that […]