We cannot teach you yoga. No yoga instructor can. Our job is to help you "unlearn" everything you "know" about yoga and breath, to allow you space where you feel safe to peel away the layers of your self-defence and consoling knowledge and empower you to realise that everything you need is already there.
We point you to correct alignment, but that is secondary to whether it feels good to you. If we have trod certain paths in our practice, we can simply show you the stones, and offer that you avoid them, or if we saw a beautiful flower on the path, we can point it out, and you can choose whether to stop and look. It is your practice, your moment.
Yoga should feel good. Delicious in fact.
Even the challenges we encounter in our practice, which are considerable - physical, emotional and mental - can be met with bravery and patient pleasure. The pose is irrelevant. The depth you attain is irrelevant. How it looks is irrelevant. The body and mind eventually become irrelevant. Then we move into the quiet depths of breath and energy. The grandma in the back patiently practising with her frozen hip, day by day, with no expectation of achieving the “glamour pose” is often doing a deeper yoga than the gymnast in the front row, stressing that her head doesn’t touch her bum.
Yoga works from inside out. Not from the mind in. Not by imposing a philosophy onto ourselves. Finding the ability to surrender our ideas of how we should look, how high we should be able to get our leg, is real yoga. Yoga practice is more fruitful if we leave behind all our ideas about spirituality - it’s mantras, yantras, puja’s and chants - and live those 90 minutes simply at the moment. Let go of your seeking for the perfect pose and let this moment greet you. Yoga lets this very moment be the moment you sought.
