Reading “The Body keeps the Score” reminds me how much we store in our bodies, and having a massage the other day I remembered and was amazed at how much pain our bodies can store. Our bodies are great friends to us, absorbing as much as they can so we can continue to function in […]
Overcoming fear and doubt with yoga practice
Peter Thomson: There is a method, and an order, in the asana that needs to be respected.
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 […]
Pixie Lillas: Always go out the door with some Yoga behind you
Pixie Lillas has been a shining light in the Iyengar Yoga world for almost 40 years. She is well known for her commitment to her practice and her ongoing support for younger teachers through her teacher training and the Iyengar Yoga assessments. She started yoga with three practices a day when she was 26 and […]
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 […]
Spread your body like butter
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 […]
Earth is compassion
Again I want to preface this by saying these are my reflections on classes, and what I understand and remember from them. In the interests of full disclosure I’ll also say that I’ve succumbed to illness, so am feeling a little gloomy! (Might have been the triple sundae!) I missed Geeta’s orientation today, which apparently […]
Dawn of a new era?
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 […]