Thanks everyone for coming to our 20th anniversary Christmas Party! It’s lovely to see you here. Some of us have grown up together, and some of us most likely will grow old together! We’ve brought up children, farewelled parents, and been through a pandemic together. Some of you have become teachers and now we are welcoming new people to the school. Over the years we have become a community, a symbiotic relationship in which you have supported me as much as I have supported you. We have our Elders who’ve been around since the beginning and I acknowledge and appreciate that – it has been great to grow our yoga understanding together. And I must thank Tadgh and Catherine and their helpers for all the re-paints and spring cleans of the yoga school!
I’d also like to acknowledge my teachers, Peter Thomson, Pixie Lillas, and the lineage of the Iyengar family – BKS, Geeta, Prashant – and BKS’s granddaughter Abhijata, who’ll be in Australia in February 2023.
As a child, I never imagined I would be a yoga teacher, although I do remember being drawn to the pictures of Betty and Veronica in the Archie comics doing headstands! I always enjoyed movement and dancing and when I encountered yoga it just felt right. I was curious about what it is that makes human beings work, and all the big questions like ‘why are we here?’. I’m still working on that one! Mr Iyengar’s books seemed to explain the mystery of life and outline a code for living that resonated with me.
After a year of doing classes with Peter at Glebe Yoga School, he talked me in to teaching. Trips to India followed, meeting BKS in Rishikesh in 1995 when he taught in a big tent besides the Ganges, decked out with a chandelier. I remember dipping in the confluence of the two rivers that make up the Ganges, high in the mountains where the water is clean, with him laughing and smiling. On my second visit I spent two months living in Pune and going to the Institute. BKS’s teaching was profound, as was Geeta’s – she had the ability to teach 400 people as though she were teaching each one individually. She seemed to be able to reach inside us and teach us what we needed. Prashant’s pranayama classes were also legendary – in one class I remember he individuated our consciousnesses, united us with the universal spirit and then returned us to our individual consciousness. Simply by working with our breath. Quite amazing!
So, it was quite daunting to set out to become an Iyengar yoga teacher! However, as we know, we teach to learn, and I have loved teaching and learning yoga all this time. It blows me away that I can still be interested in the subject after teaching thousands of classes and practising for 34 years. In fact, it just gets better and more interesting. There is no end to the philosophical exploration of what it is to be human, and yoga gives us a practical way to combine theoretical knowledge with experience and test it out for ourselves.
Iyengar was not an academic, he was a practical philosopher and combined the knowledge he gleaned from his extensive practice with Samkhya philosophy to form the basis of what we teach today.
I was apprenticed to Peter and taught at Glebe Yoga School for 10 years, before deciding to leave and open my own yoga school. It was a happy accident that it should be in Dulwich Hill – just because it was close to where I was living at the time.
Dulwich Hill was a different place then, with just one coffee shop – The Last Drop – and its days as “The Hood” not far behind it. We were broken in to not long after opening. The door was knocked off its hinges but the would-be thieves must have been very disappointed to discover only an empty room! They made off with $7 from the change tin and we were never disturbed again.
Glebe Yoga School closed and a few trusty students came over – Jo, Anne and Demeter and soon after opening I threw Jo and Demeter in the deep end and left them in charge while I went to Europe for 3 weeks, working for Greenpeace. They must have coped because everything was still standing when I got back! Demeter now has her own school in Canberra and Jo, as you know, is teaching classes here. I kept both the Yoga School and Greenpeace going for a few years, then left Greenpeace to focus full-time on the yoga school.
Unbeknownst to me when I signed the lease, there was a brothel downstairs. In Sanskrit “Bhoga” is indulgence and we used to joke that everyone had to get past the Bhoga to get to the Yoga. Or get past the Nooky Nook to get to the Yoga Nook!
Originally there was a wall down the middle of the yoga room, and our first community effort was to knock the wall down together. We lined up down the stairs and passed out the bricks one by one, with plenty of time to chat, and ate watermelon afterwards.
Twenty years is long enough to grow a yoga school and a person, in the form of my beautiful son Luke, who came with me to classes as a baby. He was always calm and quiet and never cried. At 10, he came with me to India for 6 weeks and has been to classes at the Institute and has been a big help on the photography front since he could hold a camera!
It’s been a delight to guide other mothers through their pregnancies and see their children come to classes, and to have another generation of young children and babies on the way.
On the world stage, much has happened in the past 20 years. We’ve seen floods and fires, wars and fake news, and to top it off, a worldwide pandemic! Leaping onto Zoom seemed to somehow bring us closer together, even though we were further apart. Thanks again for your support during that time.
It’s great to have the teacher trainees Jo, Andrew, Annette, Michelle and Peter, now teaching classes. With Jenny teaching the early morning led practice on Thursdays, we actually now qualify to call ourselves the Dulwich Hill Iyengar Yoga Institute, if we choose to!
A word on this elusive subject that brings us all together… This mysterious yoga that works in ways we can’t quite understand, even as our understanding grows over time.
Iyengar tells us that humans are set on the wheel of time, like a pot on a potter’s wheel, and are shaped in accordance with the predominating order of the gunas – energetic forces that weave together to form the universe and everything in it. They are illumination (sattva), action (rajas) and inertia (tamas).
Citta, the consciousness and source of our thinking, understanding and acting, is made up of mind, intellect and ego, and as the wheel of life turns, consciousness experiences the five miseries of ignorance, selfishness, attachment, aversion and love of life. Yes, love of life can cause misery, but that’s a topic for another time!
How we react to these depends on the response of our citta – our consciousness. It can be dull, wavering, partially stable, have one pointed attention or be controlled.
This is where yoga comes in – Yoga Citta Vritti Nirodhaha – Yoga stills the fluctuations of the mind so the citta in its pure state can become a source of enlightenment.
We move our bodies to cultivate our minds, so we have choices when thrown around by the waves of life. That mind and psyche training persists, even when it is more difficult to move our bodies for one reason or another. As the old saying goes, we can’t stop the waves, but we can learn how to ride them.
Now my yoga practice helps me think, it helps me rest, it keeps me strong and healthy, it gives me confidence that I can look after my body as it ages, it opens me to possibility, it continues to help me grow. It is a great gift, and one that I think everyone should have access to. Teaching yoga is also a practice in itself, and I couldn’t do that without you.
Thanks for coming out to play!
References; 1. Iyengar Yoga Retreats - Sydney to Hawkesbury NSW Australia 2. Yoga Citta Vritti Nirodhaha - Yoga and meditation in Sydney stills the fluctuations of the mind
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