About Yoga

Yoga is a moment of peace, a movement towards stillness, it is the dance of energy and emptiness, it is unity of breath, mind and body.  

Books I recommend:

Yoga Philosophy & History:

Translations of Original Texts:

Bihar Publications:

About Krishnamacharya:

Asana:

Pranayama & Breath:

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Illustrations from a manual of Hatha Yoga postures from the Punjab dated about 1830. Painted on thick card.

What Yoga Means to Me:

I love teaching people to breath fully, enabling them to experience the inner quietness and peace that resides within them, or to open their chest and submit in a supported backbend, enabling them to experience the amazing web of interconnections that support us in the moment without anxiety, thought or tension. In this way, yoga becomes a gift for anyone willing to discover and experience what lies beneath the surface, even if they were never looking for it in the first place. The greatest skill of yoga is then trying to extend the practice into our daily lives.

The Yoga Master Gurumayi Chidvilasananda wrote: you can cultivate anything you want in this body. You can let it go to waste, or you can use it as a vehicle that will carry you to God.

I read Gurumayi’s ‘God’ as a deep state of contentment, balance and joy, and as such, yoga is a tool that allows us to manipulate our awareness and refine our perception, setting us on a pathway towards our potential. When we practice with awareness we come into the body through movement and breath, and regardless of the original intention of our yoga practice, over time we build a deeper awareness of ourselves. When we breathe we tap into the universal energy of the world around us. We realise we are one with what is outside. Likewise, opening and strengthening our bodies we become stronger and more open in our minds too. Through our practice of meditation, breathing and asana, we learn how we are conditioned by our faculties of perception, which enables us to develop skills of conscious discrimination. This awareness creates an immediate sense of serenity and peace, as once we are able to sit with ourselves, without distaste, anxiety or frustration, we can be content.

Through yoga, our inner activity has an immediate effect on how we perceive ourselves in the world around us, and yoga therefore becomes a tool that reestablishes the mind body connection lost in contemporary life. As the body is a tool, we learn to value and look after it, which in turn not only affects our sense of self-respect and self-worth, but how we value the world around us.