- Iyengar, if you need a name…
One of the aims of my blog is to complement the classes I teach in the Cardiff area. Once a week I intend to post a sequence of asanas that will complement some elements of the classes – see Categories down the right for current yoga posts. These are just intended as an aid to your personal practice: something to help you off the ground. Feel free to use them, ignore them, start with them and drift off down a different route. They are in no way prescriptive and should definitely not be considered homework.
Another of my aims here is to share some reflections about my own practice, teaching and thoughts on yoga. Feel free to be inspired, or outraged, or land anywhere in-between. What I have found is that people’s response to yoga is very subjective: if I’m saying something’s right, it’s because it’s right for me. I have fairly strong views about what is good and bad in yoga: this reflects my own mis- and preconceptions as much as those of others; my own lack of imagination as well as my moments of clarity. Please feel free to challenge them. Sometimes, I think that the reason for supposed differences is that us yoga-folk use different vocabulary to describe very similar things: the language sounds mutually exclusive, and we end up thinking that we disagree, when really it’s all just yoga. Nothing more, nothing less…
I also have to bear in mind that all talk about yoga is nonsense. There is only time spent on your mat: everything else is just blah…a futile exercise in trying to intellectualise that which can only be experienced. I suppose, as a teacher I may need to concern myself less with getting my point across, and more on providing a safe and nurturing environment for students to discover these experiences for themselves.
