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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

Now that I’ve been sick I feel like my fear has gone and  I’ve surrendered to India. I can stop fighting it and just go with the flow (so to speak!).  After two days in bed I finally lifted the phone and whispered “doctor” to the guys at reception. The lovely doctor said “classic food poisoning” and gave […]

  Prashant’s Class I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen and reflecting how Prashant gives us the same permission to be mere humans – with all our frailties – that Leonard Cohen does in songs like “I’m Your Man”.  Aspiring to perfection but accepting the reality of our human imperfection. In this morning’s class Prashant said […]

This is the life. I can understand why Leonard Cohen spent so much time in the Chelsea Hotel! We’re living the yogi, family version though of course here at The Hotel Ketan! No domestics to do, just yoga, reading, writing and facebooking! India is amazing – truly beautiful and yet it’s concerning what’s happening to […]