One day in the dressing room as I applied my prosthetic pig nose (I was Mrs. Pig in The Three Little Pigs), I wondered aloud what form of exercise I should be doing. A fellow performer told me that yoga was all she needed for fitness and health. For some reason I didn’t press her for details, and she didn’t offer.
See, I’d been a synchronised swimmer and a dancer for much of my childhood/teen years. And I’d also caught on to the tail end of the flouro high-cut leotard aerobics fad. I was already flexible. What else could yoga do for me? That was my thinking back then, anyway.
Next time I heard the word yoga mentioned was when I was forced to take an indefinite break from belly dancing. I’d been performing all over Sydney for a couple of years but had a toe injury that forced me to stop, or have surgery (which I ended up having many years later anyway). I was probably about twenty-five. A friend of my then-fiancé suggested I try his yoga school in Newtown.
And that’s where I met my very first yoga teachers. They’re kinda famous these days: Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss of Yoga Synergy. To be honest, even though I enjoyed their classes, I didn’t quite get the point of yoga. Any pose that called on my flexibility was fun, but I found the strength stuff a bit… meh. Or to say it another way, I found asana that required physical strength (of the upper body especially) very difficult and my ego didn’t like it!
Simon and Bianca are great teachers but it took me ages to listen to their verbal instructions properly (**note: this is not to call fault with their teaching at all – more, it’s just that I don’t think I was “awake” enough to be able to listen properly, if you understand what I’m saying). I clearly recall the moment when I realised what Simon was actually saying in a class, versus what I thought he’d been saying. It was a revelation really. I probably did yoga there for a year or two, but once I left my fiancé, I moved to the other side of Sydney and didn’t know of any local yoga classes. And I wasn’t in love with asana, not yet.
Til I met my Guru. Even then, I was way more focused on trying to understand Tantrik philosophy than anything else. We’d do some asana but then we’d be sitting to meditate, read or engage in long conversations on non-dualism, view or abhasavada (for example). But watching him do asana was thrilling. He was (and is) a big muscular man and yet his movements are impeccably graceful. And flexible and strong. It was… inspiring.
When I first met some of his American students, I felt very intimidated because they were so darn good at yoga, whereas I was clumsily inept. Guruji confirmed: Oh don’t worry about that – most of them are yoga teachers and they’ve been practicing for years. Uh huh… somehow, instead of feeling inspired by this, I wanted to crawl away in a corner. I thought I’d never be any good at yoga asana!
Then post-initiation, post-assault and post-toe surgery, we had our Bali retreat which was specifically focused on asana and for the first time I got it. It’s kinda easy to let it all sink in when you’re immersed in a traditional Hindu/Tantrik community. It was my first real understanding of working with yoga from the bones – inside out, not just relying on muscular strength or physical form.
Even after that and attending many more classes, I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing with yoga asana. I felt silly. I tried doing yoga at home but would give up after a few poses simply because I had no confidence in myself or my abilities.
However by then I did understand the way to structure a yoga practice: standing poses, balancing poses, back bends, twists, forward bends and inversions. But I had no flow. No sense of how moving my body was connected to my mind, let alone anything bigger than that.
~Svasti
The photo wouldn’t happen to be Ananda Cottages, would it?
@Amanda – It certainly is! 😉
This is really interesting and I look forward to the next instalment. Fancy your background being in Children’s Theatre (mine was also)
I also resonate with “Flow” being a disciple of Rudolf Laban I am very aware of flow in both it’s ‘free’ and ‘bound’ states…and it is the link, or the blend with ‘mind’
love
henry
love this post, definitely looking forward to the next segment 🙂 hugs!!
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@soulMerlin – I think I remember that from a previous conversation we had (re: theatre). Flow I think, is important. Kinda like a heartbeat!
@melita – Why thank you! Second part is now up and running 🙂
Hi Svasti
i enjoyed reading your blog (and part 2)
i think my teaching is now very different to when you first came to my class but as you would now know it is very interesting to hear how ones class and ones instructions are perceived by your students
thank you for your insights
If you are in my area please come and say hello one day
best wishes, Simon Borg-Olivier
@Simon – Thank you so very much for commenting on my post here. Just recently I met up with Seva here in Melbourne, and I believe he is a good friend of yours! Small world. 🙂
I should have been clearer in my post here – I don’t think it was your instruction that was the problem, instead I think it simply took me a long time to *wake up* and hear what you were saying. I always enjoyed your classes very much, even if I wasn’t as awake and aware as I am now.
And of course, I’m sure that like all yoga teachers, your teaching has evolved and grown over the time.
I’m just very grateful for the wonderful introduction to yoga that your classes gave me. When I came back to yoga after some time out, your teaching was the yard stick I measured other classes by.
Definitely, if I am in Sydney I will look you up and drop by for a class. 🙂About two years ago, we came out emphatically about those behind the T.B Joshua Watch. Many were those who thought we were framing innocent people up or on a witch hunt. Some events have vindicated us and the cat is out of the bag. It is said that no matter how you sustain a lie the truth will definitely surface.
In a picture posted on the so called TB Joshua Watch a picture of Angie Tonge, who we accused as the main culprit behind the so called watch inadvertently pasted her picture on the site with a different name. Why the change in name? Is it not an act of cowardice?
Here was a pastor of SCOAN in London who abused her position and was not accountable to anyone. She siphoned lots of money from the church accounts, went on a jet flying from coast to coast until the situation became so bad that she had to tender in her resignation.
She claimed it was because the SCOAN headquarters was trying to control her activities that led to her resignation.
Since her resignation she had embarked on a campaign to vilify the prophet and to peddle untruths. Now it seems the end has come by making a fool of herself by blowing her cover.
Below is an email from one of our reader to prove our point.
Info regarding TBJ watch identity
Emmanuel,
Greetings in Jesus’ mighty name.
I’m not sure if you are interested, but there was previously speculation about the authors of TB Joshua Watch as being a group including the former pastors of SCOAN London.
Today I noticed an old story from “Emma” on TB Joshua Watch, including accusations of sexual abuse.
I can prove this person is Angelique/Angie Tonge.
By what I can only assume is an error on her part, the previously anonymous “Emma” account now has a profile photo, clearly being Angie. I have screen captured it and attached it in case she realises her mistake, please find it attached.
God bless and keep youThe journalist and multimedia expert UWE H. MARTIN, who works in Hamburg and San Francisco, teaches the basics of multimedia storytelling in this journalistic workshop using practical examples from the programme of the TANZ Bremen festival. In the process, participants will learn to plan and implement all the steps of a film production (documentary ﬁlm/report) using simple means and text-based multimedia stories (scrollytelling), as well as to realise and produce their own stories.
TANZ.media, the association for the promotion of quality journalism in dance, offers this course as part of its training series ‘Futures of Dance Journalism II’ to dance journalists, to those with comparable professional experience and to dance professionals.
At the exhibition Nothing To See, the artist stage the act of listening in a play between foreground and background. Utilizing sound material that exist on the edge of human hearing perception, the installation amplify the local sounding