Anna Maria

The post I Only Wish I’d Started Sooner by Anna Maria appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

Andreas

The post Three Breaths and a Memory by Andreas appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

• People Of Yoga Films

I first met Kathy in 2019 when we were teaching together at the Bali Ashtanga Yoga conference. We had such an amazing time and I new I had met a kindred spirit. Since that time we've connected a lot and Kathy has become a close friend. In October 2024 she came to Stillpoint to teach. We spent a beautiful week hanging out. Kathy has such a zest for life and in her mid seventies is more vibrant than ever. She is one of my favourite people... 

The post Kathy Cooper: My 50 Year Love Affair with Ashtanga Yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

Alexia

The post Steadiness, Calm… So Strong, So Good – Alexia appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

The post Beginning Yoga: Why Ashtanga is the perfect practice to start with appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

People Of Yoga Films

I first met Monica this year when she came to Stillpoint, with her husband Gregor Maehle, to teach a workshop. There was pretty much an instant connection. Monica has the gentlest power, a teacher who shares so much wisdom through tender words and soft chanting.

I love teachers like Monica, who are able to hold a room with space and lightness. I knew I had to interview Monica to find out more about how she came to be one of Australia's most loved Ashtanga yoga teachers...

The post Monica Gauci on discovering her divinity through Ashtanga yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

People Of Yoga Films

Mark Darby has been a name I've been connected to since I began Ashtanga back in 2002. I remember back then seeing his name on ashtanga.com as a senior teacher to study with, and ever since, he has been one of the names I have wanted to meet. So, getting a chance to do a People Of Yoga portrait while in Goa with him was too good an opportunity to miss. Mark is such a great storyteller, with the ability to capture moments and stories in a visceral way. He has lived a devoted, rich, and passionate life. This conversation takes us on that journey, sharing many of the lessons he has learned along the way.

The post Mark Darby on Living a Life of Devotion & Ashtanga Yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

People Of Yoga Films

I first crossed paths with Joanne a few days before my retreat in April 2024 at Purple Valley in Goa. She and her husband Mark Darby were leading the retreat just before mine. Knowing they were there I arrived a few days early before my retreat. It provided the perfect opportunity to get to know Joanne and Mark, sharing meals, practice ideas and many stories with them. I was drawn to Joanne's soft, wise energy and wealth of experience practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga. We spent hours connecting. Importantly, this relaxed time we spent together allowed us to build a rapport that would later translate into an inspiring and genuine conversation on camera. 

The post Joanne Darby’s on her lifelong journey with Ashtanga yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Arnott

We warmly welcome SYL practitioner, Scott Arnott, to the SYL blog. Scott has been part of Stillpoint Yoga London now for three and a half years. 

“I’m a grumpy Scotsman, an ex Investment Manager who now runs a commercial Landscape business. Going into the Mysore room was daunting. After all, I’m not twenty five anymore. Surely everyone will notice the greying bloke sweating profusely and not knowing what he’s doing. 

Well, maybe they did, but I didn’t care! Although, on the first day, when Scott said something and everyone stood at the front of their mats, then started chanting in Sanskrit, I did think: What am I doing here…? He wants me to do what?

Well, if I’m here I might as well see where the rabbit hole goes…”

My yoga practice started because of a house fire….

In 2014 we’d had a fire at our cottage, so we rented a house in another village whilst the repairs and some renovations were undertaken. Over the Christmas period a friend came to stay who I knew practiced yoga. After some urging he agreed to show me some of the ‘moves’ in the sitting room of the rented house. After about five minutes he said, in disgust, ‘I knew it, you’ve done it before’. He then refused to show me any more but my interest was piqued.

As the rebuild progressed so did the stress of supervising the building site, running a business, fighting the Insurance Company and not really looking after myself. An offer for six yoga classes for the price of one caught my eye, so off I trotted to class. I was one of two men in a room full of women (the other man was the teacher!). Undeterred, I saw it as another form of exercise which would complement the others I undertook. I had always been flexible after all, just ask our Christmas house guest, and the stretching was good.

Deepening practice

I duly went to the six classes. Each had a different teacher, and at the end of the package they offered another group of classes at a discounted rate. Gradually, my once-weekly yoga class developed into four classes a week. It was really stress busting, and I began to get annoyed if I had missed one. This carried on for almost four years, but I started to get a bit bored with some classes – it was just someone throwing shapes at the front and lots of people trying to follow as far as I could tell. There certainly wasn’t any focus on breath and movement.

‘Oh well, I’ve only got another couple of passes then I can quit this and find something else…’

Then, when I was really beginning to lose interest, a new teacher showed up to cover one of the classes. She declared she would be doing an Ashtanga sequence which is about breath and Bandha. What was all this counting about? It was unlike anything I had experienced before.

“What on earth is Bandha?  What is she talking about…this is really challenging”

Needless to say, I was hooked.

The Rabbit Hole

After two more classes with this teacher I decided to find out if there was an Ashtanga class closer to home. Stillpoint Yoga London and Scott Johnson came up. I sent a message, writing that I had done some yoga, didn’t know anything about this Mysore thing, and I wasn’t sure if I needed to do a beginners class or not. In January 2017 Scott and I had a one-to-one session. I still remember leaving feeling like I had found something special.

>More than three years on from this first brush with Ashtanga, I’m still exploring the rabbit hole I jumped down on that day. What began as a useful stretching session has become an integral part of my life and daily routine.

Challenges along the way

Sitting quietly has been one of the most challenging practices of all. My ability to ignore that which didn’t resonate with my outlook had been a significant part of my previous success as an investment manager, after all. Single minded and determined were adjectives that appeared on nearly every performance review. As assets. If I’m being honest, dealing with people and their “feelings” really was never my thing.  Sure I have friends who know there is another side which is open, supportive, naughty and gregarious, but that was my secret!  It was just easier that way.  Maintaining a distance can be comforting.

But, gradually, I have noticed. Noticed the biases which drive me. The need to be open to other perspectives. To learn. I am a much calmer and kinder person to be around. More aware of life around me. It’s all a work in progress.

Moments

Some moments that stand out for me are:

• My first Stillpoint Spring Gathering, being in a room full of people all breathing and moving.
• My 11 hour snow blizzard journey with Scott for a weekend retreat with the lovely Helen McCabe in Studland cemented our friendship.
• A longer retreat to Eco Yoga in Scotland led to a Holiday with my partner in Goa practicing daily with Scott and Kia Naddermier.
• Belonging to a community with a common language, regardless of where you are in the world.
• Being encouraged to deepen the exploration and being supported by my new family of Yogis.
• Starting the Amāyu trainings and opening a new world of Study and Exploration.
• Spending February this year, encouraged by Scott, undertaking teacher training with Simon Borg-Olivier of Yoga Synergy exploring movement in a room of people from around the world.

‘Who’d have thought I’d be now sharing the practice with others. I’m a willing Student…’

And I always will be a Student. So, pre Covid-19 distancing, turning up at Stillpoint Yoga London each morning with Scott and I giving each other a hug and having a quick gossip has become one of the most important things in my life. It takes a lot for this still often grumpy Scotsman to acknowledge that, but the truth will win out in the end!

Oh, and I love the chanting.

The post Falling Down The Yoga Rabbit Hole appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

‘Ashtanga yoga has always felt like home to me.’

Not always a happy home – sometimes broken, fighting, fraught. But at other times solace, peace, safety. It’s a home that I have sometimes run from, and sometimes hidden within.

What Ashtanga has taught me is that this place, this feeling of home – this Still Point – it doesn’t come from the magic of being on a rubber mat, of repeating certain postures, of chanting special words, of being taught by wise and loving teachers.

It comes from inside. From being.

I don’t do yoga. I am yoga.

Realisations

This realisation is recent. I have practiced for a long time – several years. But not with the courage and discipline of many Ashtangis; my practice style is more like a flighty bird, coming to rest on the mat for a few weeks at a time, struggling, sweating, loving, fighting, hurting, exposing, healing. And then I fly away again, retreating to hide in the safety of not looking inwards, not sensing what it is to be.

I’ve always seen this as a failure: after all, if I’m not moving swiftly through Primary, Intermediate, hell maybe even Third Series, aren’t I flunking Ashtanga?

No. I don’t see it that way now.

I see it like this: the asana series, the pranayama, the chants, the meditations…these are all keys to the same doorway. And it leads to a pathway full of sunshine and shadows, flowers and thorns, stumbling blocks and beautiful vistas. It leads to being here now.

To be in the moment. To sense. To feel. Not to change, not to always feel good. To feel whatever is really here. Sometimes it’s love, compassion, contentment. Sometimes that’s sadness, rage, anger. It’s all real, and my task is just to be whatever I am at this precise second.

When I see yoga in this manner, I realise that it doesn’t begin when I step on the mat, and end when I roll it up. If I haven’t even unrolled my mat today, or yesterday, or for the last month – I can still be practicing yoga in any moment.

Finding freedom

This approach is such a relief. I can take away the grasping attachment to a physical practice, to winning, to attainment. I can leave behind my achievements, my failures, my ego, my goal-orientated perfectionism. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve done three Surya Namaskara A, or the whole of Primary Series, or one mindful breath while brushing my teeth.

And these tendrils of self-compassion, of freedom, allow me to start accepting myself as a soft easeful creature, not always a fighting warrior. I am allowed to breathe in and out, slowly and calmly. I am allowed to feel angry, to feel scared and small. I am allowed to feel mighty, determined and strong. Because however I feel, I have a home inside myself, a sanctuary that is the dropping into being here.

A meditation of self care

My practice is no longer a series. It’s a continuous, breathing meditation. I can dip in at any time – the door can be unlocked by many different keys.

It’s a work in progress, a thousand moments each day of drifting away from this awareness and pulling myself back to it. Sometimes I go for hours without allowing myself to sense my body, my mind, my now. But each time I gently reach out through the spinning tangle of my mind and simplify into the present moment, I’m honing this practice. Every return to the sense of being is both a practice of meditation, and of self-care: an opportunity to forgive myself for being imperfect and to remind myself that I’m worthy of this nurturing practice.

Practicing in moments

So this is what an Ashtanga practice means to me. I can choose to sense, to feel, to be, now. I can do this on the mat, in comfortable poses, in challenging poses. I can do it in a supermarket queue. I can do it in a moment of peace while walking in nature. I can do it in a moment of true discomfort, suffering, fear. I can do it when I feel resistance, when I shy away from what is here because it’s uncomfortable. I can do it when it feels as easy as slipping into a warm bath. I can do it always, any time. 

And so can you. 

The post Practicing Yoga in Every Moment appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

‘Spirituality must be practiced not just in solitude but also amongst people.
Open out to people around you and feel connected.
This is the true challenge of spiritual practice.’
Haemin Sunim

On 1st January 2012 I had to send probably the most heartbreaking email I’ve ever had to write…

It was to the Stillpoint Yoga London community, our newsletter list of around five hundred people, to tell them how – just the day before – their teacher, colleague and friend Ozge Karabiyik had tragically passed away. I still get a visceral feeling, the weight of the responsibility of sending that message landing in my body, when I remember pressing send…

On Monday 16th March 2020 I sent the second most heartbreaking email I’ve ever had to send…

Again, it was to the Stillpoint Yoga London community – one thousand five hundred people by now – to let them know that we had to close Stillpoint for the foreseeable future, because of COVID-19. We couldn’t risk their safety, or the safety of their loved ones.

Stillpoint Yoga London has been my life for the past twelve years. It is one of the most meaningful things that I’ve ever had the privilege to undertake; from its inception in the spring of 2008 in Upper Moutere, New Zealand (where I met Ozge), and all the way through the shifts, grief, changes of venue, teachers, workshops and countless students. To now.

Now is: opening a laptop in my kitchen, and chanting Vande Gurunam into a screen.

This shouldn’t work.

Where we were

I’ve taught Mysore, or self-practice, style Ashtanga yoga for the last fifteen years. The method is so beautifully unique. It relies on a teacher to hold space, and to encourage practitioners to develop their own yoga practice, in their own time, sharing space with others. A room full of people, all practicing quietly on their own. Silent, names unknown but sharing recognition, energy, breath, inspiration and a palpable sense of internal observation and spirit. The spirit of working yoga out as individuals, together.

It has always taken a particular type of person to take this style of yoga on. To keep going. To keep coming back, again and again. Our space created the means for everyone who walked through our doors to see what happens if they were not led. To find agency in their own experience. A deep respect and love between teacher and practitioner develops in these rooms. That’s the nature of our teaching space; one where you can have an individual and personal relationship in a room full of others. A shared intimacy that can be fostered. It’s how I was taught by my teachers, and it’s how I’ve tried to share this practice on.

Then, COVID-19 happened. Lockdown. And that second email.

Where we are now

On Monday 11th May 2020, my heart broke a little more. After watching Boris Johnson’s address regarding the softening of the UK’s lockdown, and then closely reading the government guidelines the next day, I realised that we’re in this for the long haul. The environment of a Mysore yoga studio is one of closeness and relationship. And we can’t be close at the moment, or anytime soon. So, for now, opening a laptop in my kitchen and chanting Vande Gurunam into a screen continues.

The thing is…

It seems to be working.

When I first opened that laptop I was feeling vulnerable. I was self conscious about how I was delivering. It was all new to me. But, as I continued, I began to realise that I wasn’t just an isolated figure speaking into a screen. I was still holding space. It’s just that instead of holding space in our room in London Bridge, I was holding space in people’s kitchens, hallways, bedrooms, and living rooms. In their homes. Their homes became Stillpoint, where people are nurturing their own personal still-points. Over the weeks, I’ve found strength in sharing words of compassion and self care, realising that what the world needs right now is connection. Deep, meaningful connection.

“The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.”
Coretta Scott King

Taking Care

At the moment, the world is on tenterhooks. None of us – in the West at least – have experienced anything like this before. It’s deeply tender, and what’s needed is the ability to be okay with that tenderness. To be at peace with it as best we can. To allow ourselves, if it feels safe, to sit with all the different layers of this time, in the present moment.

Practice at the moment has to be about taking care of yourself, keeping compassion at its heart. It made sense to me to continue to serve our Stillpoint Yoga London community in a deeply compassionate way. It’s what I’ve had to be to myself as I navigate all the changes and challenges this time has given me…

 

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A post shared by Scott Johnson (@scottjohnsonlife) on Apr 4, 2020 at 12:51pm PDT

Online Classes

In our virtual Ashtanga morning classes, I guide people through the Primary series, and, one a week, the beginning of Intermediate. But these classes are really just a container for practitioners to explore in ways that make sense to them. People can choose to do their own practice, just like they do in the Mysore room, whether that’s deciding to stop after the standing postures, or doing full Intermediate if that’s what is needed for them that day. What’s important is intention; the intention to care for yourself. We can’t give one-to-one attention, but we can provide space for personal inquiry with words and reassurance.

For me, encouraging that exploration is key. Our bodies have wisdom to share if we listen, and new stories that they can tell us if we’re willing to hear. In our Still Space, the weekday evening Mindfulness and Compassion sessions and Friday restorative class, we encourage listening with compassion. With gentleness at the heart of the practice. Creating the environment for a still space in our homes, encouraging stillness and gentleness to occur more often. Right at the heart of our lives…

Ripples

After I sent that first, heartbreaking, email in 2012, it felt hard to continue. But I realised that stopping wasn’t an option.

Why?

Because it would go against all that Ozge and I had created. Our first ever tagline was ‘Awaken yourself, Awaken others’ and it meant creating a space for people to find themselves and then pass it on. Closing would mean we’d stopped passing it on.

I didn’t know how to step forward, but what I decided to do was to help people see that contentment and self realisation is not some far off goal. It happens right now. When we slow down. When we learn to listen. This is what stepping on to a yoga mat in a Mysore room holds for us.

When I sent that second email in March 2020, I had no idea where it would lead, or what would come next. But I put my trust in the same process that guided me in 2012. I made the decision to hold space with as much love, compassion and care as I could muster. To help people to listen.

The ripples of sending that first email still resonate deeply in the ways that I move now. It always, always will. Because for me, there are many many times when this practice isn’t about the yoga postures and perfect form. It’s about us. It’s about the way we relate. The way we meet. It’s about connection. It’s about people.

And at the moment, the people, this virtual connection?

It does work.

And it’s beautiful…

“Your online space is so invaluable! To bring a sense of community in, to breathe with others; and share this beautiful practise with those we know and those we don’t. To know we are not alone and to know this crisis, along with the beauty of practise binds us in ways that will keep us tied in love forever. Thank you for providing a safe space, a sense of routine/order and colour to start each day, as well as space at the end of it.”
Roshni Hosseinzadeh | Stillpoint Online Member

The post A New Kind Of Sangha appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Okay, so it’s not actually the end of the decade…

That will be on 31st December 2020. But when we move into a new calendar era, the ’20’s’, it feels like a good time to look back. I also know I’ve already shared a ten year blog this past year, but for this one I wanted to just share memories. Particular memories of mine that have stood out. This particular year feels like a momentous one and there have been some notable changes happening in the Ashtanga yoga community, so the movement into 2020 and beyond feels significant. This moment feels like a good time for me to reminisce (I am nothing if not rose-tinted…) as the next ten years begins. Sharing my genuine gratitude for all the things and people I have been connected to and involved with over the past ten years feels important to me. It has been a defining period of my life.

No time

10 years does seem like a long time. Yet in the scheme of things, when you have been teaching at the same time, on the same days, when you are doing something you love dearly, it doesn’t seem like it. It just becomes 10 years. It’s a day to day thing that became 3651 days. Teaching and running Stillpoint Yoga London really is work where it can feel like time doesn’t exist and that’s because I’ve loved every single moment of it. All the people who I’ve connected with over the decade have had an impact.

Who would have thought in 2010, having started on this Stillpoint adventure in 2009, that we would still be here in London Bridge thriving on 31st December 2019. It’s been 10 years that has defined me personally and a decade that I will never forget. The friendships I’ve made, the lessons I’ve learned from both adversity and joy. Meeting so many great people each day has helped me so much to grow.

Moments

These are just a few of the moments that stand out from the past 10 years –

• We’ve changed venues six times since 2010 but have always stayed in London Bridge. It was our time at Guy’s Campus and use of the three large accessible practice rooms right opposite London Bridge station that allowed us to truly flourish and evolve.
• Including Ozge and myself, we have only had seven long term teachers who have brought such light and energy to the shala – Maria, Lee, Laura, Andy, Narmin, Wendy and Sarah.
• In 2011 we had my first philosophy teacher Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati deliver four evenings of philosophy, the only time we’ve run a philosophy only workshop.
• We sadly lost Ozge, who passed away in 2012. It was such a loss. We hosted a week of memorial sessions that will stay with me forever. We sang Kirtan with Nikki Slade, 45 of us practiced 108 sun salutations together in Ozge’s memory, John Scott came and taught a memorial class. Our community was deeply shaken but that deep loss has defined the way SYL has moved since.
• It was very soon after Ozge’s passing that Louise supported me in giving up all my other work to focus solely on the development of Stillpoint. This was a momentous point in time for me.
• Randomly on a few mornings in 2012 we had Manju Jois teaching mysore in one room and John Scott teaching in another. John had come to practice with Manju, who was teaching at Stillpoint for the first time in London, and was helping me out by looking after the SYL class while I was looking after Manju. That was such a great time. Interestingly, Manju and John came together for a memorable combined 5 day intensive in 2017. But more importantly John, and in the earlier years Lucy Crawford, has been a defining support for Stillpoint over the last 10 years. We deeply thank them for their love and generosity over the years.
• A memorable workshop was delivered by the late Michael Stone in 2013, who agreed to come to London for a midweek intensive because I had badgered him so much…
• We began hosting our annual Spring Gathering in 2014. That first one, interestingly, had John Scott and Matthew Remski delivering asana and philosophy over the weekend. However, the Spring Gathering connection that Kia Naddermier, Greg Nardi and myself have fostered since we first taught together in 2015 has been such a special part of the last decade for me.
• In 2016 and 2017 we hosted the John Scott Yoga Community Teachers CPD, which was a beautiful coming together of the JSY teaching community to share and learn with each other.
• We have hosted so many national and international teachers, many on an annual basis: John Scott, Lucy Crawford, David Keil, Liz Lark, Nikki Slade, Ranchor Prime, Michael Stone, Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati, Jeffrey Armstrong, Matthew Remski, Joey Miles, Greg Nardi, Kia Naddermier, Philippa Asher, Manju Jois, Anthony ‘Prem’ Carlisi, Eddie Stern, Martin Aylward, Peg Mulqueen, Jock Orton, Helen McCabe, Andy Gill.
• The most successful and long term teacher that we have hosted has to be David Keil, who has come every year since 2010 and has become a close friend of ours. He really is part of the SYL furniture and we love him dearly.
• This past year we released The Stillpoints Podcast, a series of meaningful and deep conversations with SYL regulars, friends and inspirations.
• Also, we beta tested our new education programme, affiliated to Amāyu Yoga, that will be launched in 2020.

There are so many other small moments in the SYL practice room that I have missed (like when I burnt my hand on a candle and ended up in the Burns Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital).

Past and Future Foundations

But, and most importantly, it’s been our practitioners who have been the foundation of it all. Everyone who has walked through the door whether for the morning classes, a workshop or retreat, who has shown their support in the way we teach yoga. It has been our privilege to help them. So as we move into the ‘twenties’, with the pathways we are forging through our new education programme and the way we are moving to help people evolve how they practice, it is this that we will always hold onto. The memories of how we have met practitioners in the past help us to keep learning how to meet new ones in the future. To always interact with people each day in a way that helps. To always support practitioners to become more than they think they can be. And to hopefully contribute to making the world a little more beautiful, even just for a moment. Continuing to offer an opportunity to wonder at the beauty of life, at the beginning of a day.

These are our foundations. They always were, they always will be.

As we let go of the 2010’s, let’s see what the 2020’s brings.

The post A Decade Of Foundations appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

The world is changing 

It can be hard to feel inspired. The news can constantly concern us. The political world, the climate, our online profiles being used against us… The world we find ourselves in 2019 seems fraught, tense, and it can seem so hard to find anything to hold onto. Anything that keeps us grounded.

The Buddha told us that the truth of life is suffering. It’s testing us now for sure. 

Yet, he also showed us a way out…

So we continue

We continue because we can perhaps see that in every moment the opposite is also true. There are countless, unknowable acts of human kindness happening. People going about their day in ways that unconsciously help others. Yes, there is so much noise. But also under that noise we all have the capacity for goodness. Humans are drawn to interact with each other in an altruistic way. A recent study showed that altruism may even be hardwired. So, with the current state of the world, is it possible that we can connect to the things we cannot see?

For me, this is so important. To know there is so much good beyond the confines of what I know gives me hope. Gives me inspiration. You see, I believe in people and the potential goodness within them. In my role I have to. As a yoga practitioner, teacher and educator, practice and life keeps me on my toes. I aim to be open to inspiration all the time, wherever it comes from. 

Creating space

So, I believe that there is an innate goodness in all of us. It inspires me to think that within us there is the possibility to see the way we can create the world, so that we can create space for others to be inspired. The more I do this work of sharing yoga and contemplative practices, the more I see people who are trying to work out their place in the greater scheme of their lives. To find what they are truly here to contribute. 

As I’ve attested to many times before in previous articles, I see contemplative practices such as yoga and mindfulness as a key to us understanding how we can relate to our lives. How we can move in the world…

We are all creative. We all have a spark in us that allows us to make a difference in our lives. We can be inspired to do better. Be better. 

Finding our breath

To inspire is also to breathe. Inspiration also translates as the in-breath, the natural process that is the flow of our lives. The breathing process. Can we see that as we really fall in to the nature of the breath, the in-breath, we create the conditions in which inspiration actually occurs?

Inspiration is as unique to us as the breath itself. It’s why we are all so unique, so different from each other. Our pursuit as humans is to own that uniqueness, to share ourselves with others who are connected to us by the inspiration that is the collective breath we inhale together. 

The creative process is unique to us all. For example, these words didn’t exist a moment ago, now they do. Each word I have inspired… 

Waking up to life

For me, to be inspired is to find the part of yourself that connects to your life and how it interacts with nature. Whether wonder, awe or something small that offers a break in a pattern, there is a way for us to interrupt our viewpoints and to see that we can be more, do more, wake up more to this life.

So it’s important that we find the way to inspiration. As a teacher at SYL I watch so many people each morning inspire themselves into the day. To turn up each morning, to place a yoga mat in a room in London before 8am, shows that people are up for ways to inspire themselves. It’s a privilege to be invited into people’s lives. Yet, beyond the room or the mat, what else is there? What else can we harness to propel us to live a more inspired life? Below are some ideas, some ways to perhaps find your own moments of inspiration. 

I’d love to hear from you if you have any others to add. 

5 ways to find moments of inspiration

1. Wake up well. Wake up!

We all know that sleep is so important. There have been many studies showing that great sleep is important for us to be healthy and alive. Yet, how we wake is so important too. 

Take a moment before you get up to fully breathe into the day. Take a full breath, an inspiration, and feel it land in your body before rising. Notice how your feet meet the floor as you sit on your bed. Take this time to check in to how you feel as you’re waking up. What the ripple of your sleep pattern is and how it is landing you into the day. 

Then move with as much awareness as you can into the process of getting ready for the day. Perhaps have a proper, formal sit. One that prepares you for what is to come. 

2. Remind yourself why you began your journey to inspire. What inspires you? Be kind to yourself by being yourself

Part of the reason we practise yoga is to remember what it feels like to be alive. To be the ground from which inspiration can form. There are so many layers to our awareness, so many things that hide us from the way we can see our lives. There are many levels of personal intimacy we have perhaps connected to over the years we have been alive that we have forgotten. Remember them. 

When we remember the things that have truly made us come alive, that have stopped us in our tracks, we connect to that part of us that is creative. That relates to the world of sensation. These can be moments of creativity, music or connecting with nature. They are unique to us. For example, a piece of music can still bring me to tears, 25 years after it was released. I love that. I want to share it because it feels deeply personal, yet inspiring. I love being moved by things…

3. Read or study books, blogs and podcasts that inspire you to act ethically and serve others. Think about how you can be that for someone else

When we give time to personal study with the things that help us to come alive, we become alive to ourselves and others. Learning to be inspired is about continually finding the things that inspire us. Content created by others is there for us to fall into. We all have a favourite book, piece of music, film. All are nature. They’ve come from an idea into form, just like this article. 

Studying wisdom is intrinsic to inspiration. The ancient texts of yoga and meditation really help us to see how we can notice the layers of perception in our lives. But more so, there are modern outlets that we can relate to as well. Books and articles that share stories we connect to. Podcasts and interviews that really help us to be inspired by those who have moved before us. Follow links to places that you are guided.

4. Return to nature, turn off gadgets – Remember you are nature

It’s easy to forget. But you are nature. And in nature you thrive… Go for a walk, swim in the sea, lie on the ground and look at the sky. Be bored and be okay with it. Sit quietly and realise your human-ness. Laugh with friends. Play with an animal. Be a child with a child. Stare at someone you love without having to say anything. Get up early and feel the coolness of dawn. Allow the rain to drench you once in a while without caring. Walk on the grass with bare feet. Turn your phone off sometimes. 

5. Find others like you, be challenged by those who aren’t – See change, be different. Be change, see difference

To find others like us is to find people who help us to evolve. I mean this is what friendships are, right? What we’ve been doing since we were small and connecting to like-minded people who interest us. But, over the years in my role as a yoga teacher, I’ve  seen thousands of people come through our morning class at Stillpoint and all of them are connected. Even though they don’t know each other. They’re connected by an idea that we’ve created. Personal practice helps you. They’re connected in the way they turn up and are finding something out about themselves. 

This is really important, because it doesn’t matter who you are. You are met and connected to others who are on the same path as you. And this is really important because then we’re able to hold those same connections when we meet those who challenge us, with our views and the way we live. Because it’s really important we are challenged. We are challenged on our views, our perspectives and the ways we live. This helps us to grow too. 

Going full circle, this is where we find ourselves. We find ourselves in a world of beauty and tension. Can we meet that? We have to… And to do so with a sense of balance and perspective to listen and create change together. 

The post How do you inspire others? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

To launch the new Stillpoints podcast, Scott shares how yoga comes alive through deep interactions between people over many years…

“Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

(Taken lovingly from this piece by Maria Popova on her incomparable blog Brain Pickings)

Simply listening

It’s near the end of her third ever yoga practice and I ask Jenny* if she’d like to finish by sitting quietly before taking rest. She agrees it feels a good thing to do. I guide her into a comfortable seated position and then offer her just these words:

“Notice and feel your breath. Be with what arises.”

I watch as her face softens. It noticeably relaxes. Yet this belies something deeper. A soft furrow appears on her brow as if a tender memory has arisen that she is observing.

“Just listen,” I offer.

She is still gently smiling but her forehead is subtly changing, going between tension and softening as if something deep is being processed. Her exhalation begins to merge with a soft letting go of her body. I watch, making sure she is safe. Soft tears come. I ask her to place her hand gently on her brow so she can get in touch with where she is perhaps feeling tension. What is here? She smiles more, as if she is getting to know a part of herself that has been lost for a while.

“Be with what’s here. Keep noticing these moments that come and go.”

She sits with it a little more then lies down and settles, taking rest.

Human interaction

I have always loved deep human interaction. I love to know what moves someone. What’s moved someone to make the decisions they make in the way that life has evolved for them. You see, the way we connect to life is so deeply intimate and tied to the way our lives have evolved and played out so far.

My role as a yoga teacher is to listen. It always has been. To listen and to see how the practice of yoga that has impacted my life so much can impact someone else’s. To listen and then hopefully offer something in response that lands in a way that makes sense. Interestingly, in my previous life, when I worked on building sites as an electrician in my 20s and 30s, I loved to work with the people no one else got on with. To see why they saw the world the way they did.

How we listen is an art

To be able to stay mindful and deeply listen to someone else is an art in itself, and to be able to listen to others we have to be able to honestly listen to ourselves first. But, we are not so much listening with our ears. The ability to hold space for someone else and cultivate the use of our wider sense perceptions is to deconstruct how we are sensing ourselves in a fuller way. When we practice ourselves we are listening fully with our body and noticing how all communication lands and impacts. When we become still we actually feel the residue in each moment of the countless words, responses and reactions we have had in our lifetime.

I have met so many people over the years in my work as a yoga teacher. I have always tried to listen to each person I have met. In ten years I can’t remember how many times I have been moved by those I have interacted with. All these relationships have been deeply meaningful and I hold them dear. They help me to continue to cultivate the relationships that are to come, with the many people I have yet to meet.

Celebrating 10 years in people

I have wondered for a while how I would celebrate ten years of Stillpoint. Nothing felt like it could really do it justice, especially as it continues quietly each morning. How do you celebrate something that has deep meaning for many people? Stillpoint has always been a place you can find in yourself. It is there to point back at the Stillpoint in you, to show you that there is always a place of peace you can find in yourself. Wherever you are.

After Ozge passed away at the beginning of 2012 I realised the preciousness of life. That in those three hours first thing in the morning we were holding space for people to just take some time to be with themselves. To be with their own lives. That hopefully they will leave a little more enriched by meeting themselves first, at the beginning of the day.

Stillpoint has been about the people. It’s always been about the people. The people who have come each morning, the people who have shared their knowledge with us, the people who taught with us, who’ve been moved with us.

So, I am celebrating ten years by sharing the people with you.

The Stillpoints Podcast

Sharing the people I’ve met and interacted with during the time I’ve been practicing (since 2002) and teaching, and ultimately sharing at SYL, will be a way for you to get the gist of what Stillpoint represents for me. For us who have shared mornings and time together here over the years. Some of you know me, some of you don’t, but I so want to share with you some of the voices that have moved me over the past ten years and beyond. I would never be who I am without them. Being able to share the way I do is built on all of them. I have learned from them all and will continue to do so.

So, the podcast will be about them. Some of the names and voices you’ll know, some of them you won’t. Some of them will be renowned teachers, some of them will be practitioners who’ve come to SYL in the past. All have a story to tell about how contemplative practice has moved them in some way.

The contemplative life

The contemplative life offers us a way to be able to navigate challenges. Those of us who have a practice, whether yoga, meditation or something else, know that it helps us to meet our life, as it arises. Helps us to make choices that meet the way we then enquire and navigate back. But contemplative practices are also not pretty. They challenge us by asking us to be with the very things that we find difficult in our lives. When we stop and drop in to our moment to moment experience we meet whatever arises. This can be so hard. It can be boring, inane, frustrating. It can create real and actual fear in us. Many things can stop us from going there. Yet, for change to happen, go there we must… Cultivating a kind, compassionate way of seeing ourselves is intrinsic to this path. If we stay with this challenge, in this way, we are able to navigate these things.

The Stillpoints Podcast talks to this. To how personal contemplative life lands in our culture. That even though we all practice, how it plays out for us is so, so different. Stillpoint Yoga London is located in London Bridge. We have always been a stillpoint in the city, a place to come and find personal solace in the madness of the urban jungle.

Human stories

To live this human life is to live a story. To live many, many stories. What contemplative practice also offers us is the ability to be with these stories, to understand how they are playing out in our lives, and then create patterns that create new stories. The very awareness that we are human, that we exist at all, should stop us in our tracks. I see, I hear, I taste, I touch, I feel. How I interact with that, if I am lucky enough, should be to again and again marvel at the ability to cultivate that awareness

Giving people our faces, time and thoughts is one of the most powerful things we can do. The podcast will share with you people who have been moved deeply by practice. People whose stories are meaningful.

Stories will always continue. Jenny’s story at the beginning of this article is just one cog in the turning of her life. That we continue to listen to each other as we navigate this is deeply important and personally profound.

I hope you enjoy the conversations I navigate in the podcast. All are a deep part of the fabric of who I am.

* Names have been changed for privacy purposes.

The post How conversations move us appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.”
– Allen Ginsberg

I’ve just talked my eldest son out of his first panic attack.

During those moments, I remember when I held him for the first time as he was born 17 years ago. He had looked at me then with those newborn eyes that cannot grasp what they’re reaching for in this new world.

Back then, there were no identifiable things he recognised. I was an unknowable image. His eyes now, though, choose not to look at me; his internal state not wanting him to be seen.

A panic attack. A first breath. 17 years between. These two things are deeply connected.

He’s on a yoga mat on the floor, where I suggested he lie down for a few moments. He’s finding it hard to breathe as he contemplates his upcoming exams that feel too much to bear. He can’t relax, his legs and fingers restless as he unconsciously deals with the stress that life is holding over him. I suggest to him that he follows his breath. I look at him with such love and pride. I tell him that. “I love you. I’m proud of you.” He disagrees.

I gently guide him to be with the knot in his chest he says is there. To allow it to be there. To feel it. I say that it’s okay to feel this way. It’s a part of life. We talk. He listens and I to him. I watch his body relax and his eyes soften, like he’s just seen me for the first time. We hug closely. We acknowledge the moment we’ve had. Then, with a deeper understanding between us, he gets up. And he begins again…

He begins again.

We both begin again…

A moment of clarity

At near enough the same time that I was helping him, I had been holding a picture of my grandfather (my mum’s father), taken in 1943. I was looking at his face clearly for the first time in my life. I had never met him and sadly neither had my mum. He died at the Normandy landings in the Second World War when she was just a baby. The photo my mum had just sent me was so sharp, as if taken on a smartphone and given a filter. He looked like a beautiful man.

I had never seen him with such clarity before and I felt deeply moved. And then here I was, having a moment of intimacy with one of his great grandchildren and I couldn’t help feeling the great expanse of time. I again felt deeply moved. The ripple of him, in the ripple of us. We are because of him…

A compassionate outlook

I think the 10 year anniversary of SYL has shifted something in me. The turning up again and again to meet people in a deep way has connected me into looking at how we move in the world as a response to contemplative practice over a period of time. I have seen over the years that meeting yourself again and again in a way that captures the spirit of your life is so rich. That’s why I feel the method of embodied yoga practice that I teach, that is deeply personal to the practitioner and their experience, is so effective. And when aligned with a compassionate outlook it forms a highly contemplative approach to changing our lives.

Contemplative practice is a groove that we can weave into the fabric of our worlds. There is no point in our lives where we can’t not learn to be kind, to ourselves or others. We practise yoga and mindfulness so that we can see the habitual turnings of our minds. Through ethical behaviours, such as the yamas and niyamas, we create compassionate grooves that can turn and shape our lives. This helps us to work with the grooves that have always been turning.

How we practise

How we practise affects how we move and every practice can be held with such reverence. Such love. We can create a meeting place for ourselves to drop into that turns us towards ourselves in a deeply held way. We can chant, become still, notice the birds or the gentle soft flow of our breath. If we meet our practice from a place of curiosity, compassion and kindness we can nurture these qualities of attention. These qualities can then become how we move.

The world is changing. With all its vulnerabilities, its tenderness, its violence and its love. It feels so imperfect. Yet we are here and it is all so beautiful and how we meet it is so, so important. How we find ourselves contemplating it. Understanding our place in it. Yoga and mindfulness are about navigating all these intimate relationships we hold in our lives. With ourselves, with others and with the planet. These practices reach through the essence of our lives and can offer deep contemplation on what it means to be alive.

Responding to choices

So, my eldest son is now back upstairs, with his books open and a renewed energy (for the moment) for his studies. He created a new groove to get him moving and now has it in his toolbox for the next time he needs it. How we get up and move is so important. The intricate nature of this flow of life in us can be difficult to navigate. We all make choices. Then we respond to those choices. How we respond to those choices is how we respond to life.

Knowing it’s a process

Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve worked with any of my children on how they’re wrestling with life. It used to be me, wrestling with mine. Sometimes it still is. But the ongoing timeframe of life offers us the opportunity to reflect. To see how we are doing. It always allows for that dance.

When I look at my three sons now I can’t really separate the different aspects of their lives as they have grown. I see them all as a process of life, as an ongoing way of integration into life as it unfolds. I held them just after they were born, I hold them when they need me again. Perhaps they’ll hold me. But what we hold each other with is love. For me, parenthood is the ultimate in being compassionate and the ultimate way to see how I myself have grown.

And when I look at the photo of my grandfather, who I never knew, I again feel the wisps of time playing out. That at some point perhaps I’ll be the image in that photo and someone whom I’ll never know, but am deeply connected to, will have a deep feeling of love that has been carried through the ages.

The post How do you move in life? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

On 8th March 2019 Stillpoint Yoga London celebrated its 10th birthday. Apart from my marriage to Louise and becoming a father, running Stillpoint has had the greatest effect on me as a person. It has shaped me completely.

With all the travelling I do, and retreats and workshops I’ve had the honour of teaching at, it’s this day-to-day work over weeks, months and years that is the most profound for me. I’ve realised teaching yoga is about turning up for someone. Being present again and again so they can trust you’re there for them.

Stillpoint Yoga London is my home. Where the deepest work has happened and continues to. Teaching in the middle of a city, creating a space for people to reflect on their lives before they start their day, is so, so valuable. It’s practising in the eye of the storm. Our job is to help people meet and transcend whatever their storms turn out to be, with as much kindness to themselves as they can.

To all of you who I’ve had the privilege to share space with over the past 10 years: thank you. It’s been such an honour. I hope I’ve helped in some way.

Here are some memories and things I’ve learned along the way…

Awaken yourself awaken others

10 years. It feels like only yesterday that we opened our doors. The two of us, Ozge (Oz) and I, embarking on a journey of discovery together, seeing what’s possible if we collaborated on a shared vision:

Awaken Yourself Awaken Others.

That was the first ever Stillpoint tagline. That was what it was about for us. To be present to ourselves so we can then be present for others. We were so excited as the first student walked in, both trying to hold back as that one student practised on that first day. Not wanting to overwhelm David with two teachers eager to help him.

A shared vision

10 Years. Those early years were about helping each other. Oz and I both had full time jobs. Stillpoint was set up out of love and we’d both go to work after it closed. Still, there was work to do. Oz had this great plan because she knew I personally had so much to do outside of Stillpoint. She saw that I had a full time job, and needed to support Louise and our 3 young boys. So we agreed that she would do all the admin and correspondence while I would just turn up and teach. But because she had such a travel bug, I would cover for her when she went away. I covered a lot… It worked perfectly and allowed me to create a deeply held morning routine that I still hold dear today. It also helped that Louise and the boys loved Oz dearly.

Embedding our teachers

10 Years. We also saw the benefit of bringing our teachers in to meet our students. We hosted workshops quite quickly after we opened our morning classes. We would only invite teachers who we knew and loved already. John Scott and Lucy Crawford came to teach (2009), as did David Keil (2010) and Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati. All dear, all loved.

This was a lovely way of embedding our own teachers into the fabric of Stillpoint. This way of having our teachers support us taught us so much. It’s the way in which we continue to invite to this day. Now we have Manju, Greg, Kia and others too, all who embody the spirit of our morning classes. Having teachers who are aligned with our principles of support, nurturing and kindness. It’s also what compels me to travel to like-minded studios and shalas today. To support their work like mine was and still is supported.

Remembering the changes

10 Years. So many ways of helping others. I remember John Scott saying to me, “You have to be able to teach 1000 people the same thing in 1000 different ways”. This statement is so true. I remember it every time I meet someone new, or re-engage with someone again. Seeing that even though you’re still teaching that one thing, the nuances of Ashtanga yoga are endless. That every practice is different and to always remember the changes that occur in every moment, whether gross or subtle. Being able to respond to those changes is key. ‘Everything changes, nothing stays the same’ is a mantra that has been ongoing for me since 2012. It rings true in every moment.

Meeting with kindness

10 years. Countless students. Countless ways that I myself have been taught by others turning up. But everyone met, I hope, with a smile and a welcome. These things were important to us both, right from the beginning. They hold true now. People have given over their precious time to spend with us. The least we could do was offer kindness, warmth and a soft, gentle way to use the practice of Ashtanga yoga to connect them to their bodies in ways that made sense to them. This was the way we met practitioners then, when we were two. This is how I hope we meet them now, when there are more teachers teaching.

Accepting our story

10 Years. Realising that connecting with the teachers that I have over the years, and with each practitioner who has come, has been enough for me. Especially when it comes to sharing this beautiful practice I hold so dear. This is just what I know and this is how I help. This is how I have evolved to teach this method. I like to think that the work we have done here at SYL has been of service to the ongoing story of Ashtanga yoga in our culture. That not being connected to the ‘tradition’ has been okay and I’ve had wonderful support from my countless friends, teachers and mentors. We’ve just not come from where it’s been ‘traditionally’ supposed to have come. And I’m okay with that. I think our students are too. I have deep gratitude for the place we find ourselves. And ultimately, how we help others.

Keeping the spirit alive

10 Years. Only a few teachers. Those who have taught at SYL have come through the ranks of SYL or my life somehow. Maria, Lee, Laura, Rachel, Siobhan, Hinako, Andy, Narmin, Claire, Wendy, Sarah, Alain, Caroline, Havva. All have played their part in keeping the spirit of the SYL room alive and kicking. Because that is what SYL has always been about. Spirit.

Evolving the community

10 years. Different places. Being able to grow slowly in central London was pivotal. The original Guys building we were in between 2009 and 2016 was a bit grubby but oh so vital for us to establish ourselves. That place was sent from above… To have access to so many rooms allowed for us to expand slowly over that time. Moving from that place was hard but it had served us so well. I’m proud of all our practitioners who were able to move with us when we had to change venues. To continue to just turn up and practise quietly, absorbing the feel of our SYL community into any new space we found, shows what we have is so special.

The power of being present

10 Years. Two people at the start. One left now. I remember Oz’s bright endearing laugh. She’d smile with her eyes. We’d laugh excitedly just to see where we’d be in a few years’ time. There was such potential with that one. Such a great loss to the world. And that’s why we are at 10 years. When she died in 2012 I didn’t know what to do or how to move. How to be. But after the incredible wave of support from our community and teachers I vowed to continue. To just turn up each morning and continue. Meeting people, helping people, being there for people. Being so mindful of the impact of my practice and how it impacts others. Because that’s what this work is really about. Being truly present for others. And getting out of your own way while doing it.

Never stop beginning

When we began 10 years ago, on 8th March 2009, it didn’t cross our minds that there would only be one of us left 10 years later. We were just excited to begin.

And that’s why SYL is 10. When Ozge died I also vowed to never stop beginning again. To never stop thinking like it’s the first time I’m meeting someone. Because that’s where the power is. That’s where the magic lies.

And that’s how Ozge continues to live. That’s how she continues to dance with us. It’s how Stillpoint has always danced. Through all the people who come.

The question I’ve always offered is: How will you continue to dance…?

The 10 things I’ve learned in 10 years

Awaken yourself, awaken others

Help each other

Support your students

Remember ‘Everything changes, nothing stays the same’

Offer kindness to all

Have deep gratitude for where you find yourself

Spirit evolves from people coming together with a shared purpose

Community is everything

Being truly present in your practice and life is key

Never stop beginning again

The post Teaching Ashtanga yoga – 10 years on.. appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

I remember when I was unhappy most of the time. In my late teens and early twenties life felt like a struggle. When I left home at 18 I was suddenly out in the world with nothing to hang on to. I craved reliving my childhood and the security of my formative years in a home with parents. Feeling nurtured. But then I remembered that that environment hadn’t really prepared me for the world I was moving into.

Finding liberation

Those first few years of leaving home were tough. I didn’t really know who I was or what direction I was facing. After going around in circles, of feeling okay then incredibly low, I found a great therapist. Finding solace in being able to share my fears with someone who would just listen attentively and share constructively was, at the time, liberating. She helped me in many ways, but the most memorable piece of advice she gave me was:

Hearing this was a revelation. I had thought I was the only one struggling and that everyone else had life completely sorted. That they all knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going. It helped me to see that all of us have things going on, things hidden from others.

It also made me think about how people saw me. Were they seeing me like that? In the way I thought of them?

When I look back at that young person I was, I wonder what he would have become if he’d had access to everything I know and feel now. Where would I be now…?

The thing is, to become who I am now I had to be that boy. I had to have that sadness. Be that sadness. I had to be that young man struggling to understand so I could begin to see how to understand. That comment from the therapist lit a touch paper…

Discovering ‘sonder’

I recently discovered a new word. It’s called sonder and is defined as:

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

When I heard the meaning of sonder it woke me up. Language does that to me. The meaning of sonder is what my ‘early twenties self’ subsequently discovered in that therapy room. I hadn’t ever looked at anyone else in this way before. I hadn’t realised it. I was caught up in my own world, thinking it revolved just around me. I had missed that everyone is just like me. Trying to work out this thing called life.

Sonder allows us to look at others and see we are a part of them and they are a part of us. Our every interaction with someone is part of their story and ours of theirs. That just as they are moving though our world, so we are moving through theirs.

I can never know what is going on behind your eyes. I can have a hunch, but I can never know. With this realisation, this can now change who I can be when I’m with you. Can I listen to you in a deeper way? Be more attentive to your epic story because of sonder?

Experiencing the moments

Who knows how life goes. It’s one day, one week, one month, one year, five years, ten years. Life is a challenge!

The real challenge is to remind ourselves that these periods of time are made up of one thing: moments. Each moment makes up time in our life that meets the next one. If we can see that as the evolution of our lives, can we see that for others? By understanding sonder we can begin to see our play in others’ moments. We can begin to see who we can be for others

This is why contemplative practices like yoga and mindfulness are so rich with possibility for experiencing these moments. We take the time to look inwards so we can capture the moments when we look outward.

Most of the people we come in to contact with we will never meet again. Sitting on a train, walking down the street, in the shopping mall. These are all people going about their day, living a life just like us. All are people experiencing moments just like us. The real challenge is can we be compelled to capture these moments again and again, both when we are on our own and when we are with others? Perhaps being kinder, more helpful with these moments. So that we impact others’ moments in a more positive, heartfelt way.

By understanding the meaning of sonder, and seeing that we are all travelling within our own epic story, can we then actually wake up to our own story? Can we change it, move it, shift it, direct it? Can we play it out with as much awareness as possible? Living our lives with agency, intention, open to ourselves and open to others.

Can we have agency in seeing our own epic story and discovering what can be possible with it? Life is there to be felt, to be nurtured, to be discovered. Life moves through us, and we respond.

Choosing a sense of wonder

As our lives shift and move ever onward we can choose to contemplate and train our awareness. We can train our awareness to see ourselves as a process of life. We can train our awareness to discover the beautiful things that are often the simplest. Being reminded of nature, falling into relationships, that letting go begets a sense of wonder. Wonder of the intimacy we have between all of us. Wonder of the intimacy we have with the world. Wonder of the way we can interact again and again with purpose, compassion and resolve for living this life.

The therapist’s words, spoken all those years ago, have become prophetic for me.

I am not the only one feeling like this.

I have acted on those words more than any book I have read. They have propelled me to where I am now. To every now and then, remember that there are moments to notice, to listen to and to ultimately fall into.

And to see that others can feel the same.

The post Will this new word change how you relate to others? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

‘For those who have an intense urge
for Spirit and wisdom,
it sits near them,
waiting.’
1:21, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, interpreted by Mukunda Stiles

2019 heralds the 10th year of Stillpoint Yoga London. For personal reasons this feels quite a big deal. When we started this journey on 9th March 2009, it was just to have a place in the morning for people to come to learn Ashtanga vinyasa yoga in a way that landed safely in their bodies and in their lives. This was as a response to how our own practices had manifested through the dedication and insight of our own teachers. Stillpoint Yoga London was born out of a genuine love for helping people. Ozge and I wanted to just keep turning up to help people…

A quiet space

We also wanted to create a quiet space that was a response to the busy-ness of a city. London. Somewhere people could come to retreat to just for a few moments, at the beginning of their day. There’s something about the early hours. I’ve spoken about this before but it’s worth re-mentioning. In those early hours of a city you can feel the potential. A quietness that at SYL at 06:30 is filled with the sound of breath.

A yoga space/shala is just a room in a building with four walls. A simple space. It’s the intention that’s created within those walls that helps it to become a place for contemplation, of people trusting to be able to find something deeper within themselves. The intention of SYL has always been to help people uncover things in this way. To create the space for that. Importantly, it’s to realise that the space you come to is also just a space you hold in yourself. In time. It’s learning that that space is movable, transient and can be taken anywhere.

Stillpoint as an idea

Stillpoint has always been an idea, a way for me as a teacher to communicate something that may have value to someone I meet. Yes, we teach and practise Ashtanga vinyasa yoga. But it’s more than that. We’re helping people to find what it takes for them to unveil the practice of yoga in their lives. We do that by helping people to find a practice for themselves, so that they’re in control of finding depth to their experience. We’re all trying to make sense of life in our own ways. Importantly, the idea of Stillpoint is not just held in that room in London Bridge. The point of Stillpoint is to move beyond the walls. When I travel to meet and teach different communities around the UK and Europe I teach them about Stillpoint. About what practising there represents. Stillpoint always travels with me. I see that every room can be a Stillpoint.

I see that people can create their own still point within them. Can we find our own still point in the city, whenever we need it? Can we see the world from our very own still point? These are the ideas we have cultivated here. The idea that we nurture and cultivate so that they can become part of us. What are we cultivating our practice for if not to be something we can call on to support us at any time?

Finding love in loss

After Ozge died in 2012 the work I felt we were doing at Stillpoint became even more important. Her death became an incredible leveller and even though Ozge was no longer there, a part of her still existed. Stillpoint has grown since then. Stillpoint became the thing that we lost in Ozge. About love. About connection. About how we can be there for each other. Importantly, how we can look inwardly, individually but still together, to find more that is possible within us. In a room. In a city.

So, the contemplative nature of yoga practice is something that I’ve begun to hold incredibly dear. Be sure of this, in my years of practice and helping others I know we’re cultivating the spiritual nature of ourselves when we’re practising yoga. I now feel anything less than that is greatly missing the point of a yoga practice.

Over the years I’ve changed within these walls. I’ve seen many others change too, as a response to this practice. But as much as I can, I’ve tried to keep the values of SYL the same. It’s evolved for sure, but the importance of keeping the quiet energy held is still there.

Becoming…

There’s a beautiful term in yoga and Buddhism called Bhavana. Bhavan translates as ‘to become’ or ‘to cultivate’. (You may know the Buddhist practice metta-bhavana which means ‘cultivating compassion’.) The practice of yoga, at its heart, allows us to continually wrestle with the way we see ourselves and our viewpoint. The cultivation of yoga has a direction, a movement. That movement is again and again to (re)discover the moment to moment awareness that is the basis of our lives. This is what we are practising for, right? To cultivate. To become. To become the thing we are practising for…

The art of disciplined yet compassionate practice can be lost in the myriad of images, posts and statuses that continually move across our timelines. How can we present an image of compassion as the base of a practice? How can I best visually document finding compassion in the way my hands touch and are received by the floor? How can an image represent the deep love that arises around the 23rd minute of my sitting practice? All I’ve learnt is that it’s mostly about the things that aren’t shared. That perhaps can’t be seen easily. It’s in a gesture, a knowing glance, a soft realising smile. The way we feel as a response to practice is so personal, as no teacher can ever truly know what we are feeling. We (as teachers) can only help light the way with kindness, support and with someone’s best interests at heart.

In my opinion practice is nurturing self love, self compassion. And if not, why not? If your practice doesn’t support a journey towards this then perhaps question your intention. Go deep and find where practice makes you come alive. We’re waking up to the love we can feel for ourselves, so we can then perhaps begin to truly love others in the same way. Can your practice become about self love, about becoming compassion itself?

Smriti

If there’s one word that has defined the last 5 years of my life it is this one. Smriti meaning to remember and Smriti as mindfulness. To remember that we have a practice we are cultivating. To remember that practice and life merge in every moment. To remember to BE compassionate. To be mindful, and to be reminded again and again of all  this. Smriti (mindfulness) is yoga in action. It’s taking the practice off a yoga mat, out of a room and integrating it into the world. Seeing, in every moment, the impact of our actions.

So I feel that with the name Stillpoint we chose well. Stillpoint was the name of the retreat centre in New Zealand that Ozge and I studied at in 2008. I feel I am now trying to return it back to its representation of that space within us that is our spark. The place where we move from and to. The place we can find within us, that has no walls. That’s what yoga is looking to uncover.

Becoming our spark. Becoming who we are. Becoming the love we seek.

The post Becoming the love we seek appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Taking stock

At the end of another year it feels good to take stock.

If ever there was a year that defined an Ashtanga yoga generation, 2018 was it. The revelations around the sexual misconduct of K. Pattabhi Jois rocked those of us who hold dear the practice of Ashtanga yoga and those who teach it.

As part of the #metoo campaign last year, Karen Rain delivered a powerful and telling blow to the credibility of our practice with her courageous statement. Rain’s statement ignited a conversation that for many years had seemed to be happening in the shadows, under the radar. Statements by other women, including Jubilee Cooke, followed. Anekke Lucas had already written an article in 2016 pointing to abuse by Jois.

Throughout this year more and more women shared experiences at the hands of Jois that put our practice under the spotlight – a spotlight that predominantly placed trust and accountability at the forefront. It felt so important to acknowledge Rain, Lucas and all the other women who had been brave enough to raise their voices.

Self reflection in the face of challenge

Being a teacher of Ashtanga yoga, it has been a challenging time for me. Carrying on as normal didn’t seem the thing to do.

I have self reflected on my role as an Ashtanga yoga teacher all year. How was I actually being with the practitioners at my shala, Stillpoint Yoga London? How was I really meeting them? Was I assisting them in a way that really benefited them? Was I being clear with the adjustments I was using? Were these adjustments really helping? Most importantly, were they needed and were people open to receiving them?

This self reflection also included my being a growingly confident creator of blogs and articles. I lost my voice for a while. After I wrote Listen Without Prejudice I went quiet. What could I share about Ashtanga yoga that wouldn’t feel contrived or pointless in the current climate? I didn’t really know what to say, I didn’t know how to be. I needed to go quiet so I could take the time to see how to respond. It moved me to a place where I felt I had to question why and how I did things. The things I had always done without thinking.

Interestingly, though, I realised that this vulnerability and being held to account is actually a good thing for me. I need to be challenged. I need to feel challenged in my role as a yoga teacher so I can serve the practitioners I support in a healthier and ever more transparent way. So that there could be a response to the voices of Karen, Anneke and others, rather than carrying on as if they didn’t exist.

Ashtanga as a force for change

A few people had told me to not think about it, to forget about it. That the students who come to us now won’t know who Jois was, so we can keep teaching the practice as it is,  with nothing changing. But I realised, that’s not the point. It is about the students who are yet to come. But it’s also about acknowledging the past students who were hurt, mistreated and abused. It’s about remembering and showing solidarity to them so that the practice can move forward in a way that holds not only the voices of the victims, but of those who want Ashtanga yoga to be a force for change. To see that the guru culture may actually be to blame for cultivating the silence in what happened with Jois. To see that by acknowledging and learning from the victims of Jois we can create a more open, receptive and kinder dialogue within Ashtanga yoga. To meet people as a response to this.

Ashtanga yoga is a tool. It’s a way of seeing the world through the awareness of the movement of your body with the relationship of the breath. When taught in a way that lands with the needs of a student it is an incredibly powerful practice. It is empowering. It empowers.

What I’ve learned this year

I feel my job is to empower. To give power to the students who come to SYL and the workshops and retreats I undertake. To get out of the way of their own personal learning and discovery. To this end I’ve included below a few things I’ve learned that have helped me shift my teaching role into a more considered, responsive and compassionate approach.

Rebuilding trust with the practice
Being available to students who have concerns about Ashtanga yoga, being open to be challenged on my own views and behaviour, and learning from where I’ve perhaps fallen down. Importantly, creating space to be with students as they are challenged and letting them know clearly where I stand and where I am coming from.

Meeting each other as people
Not seeing that practitioners are there for me but that I’m here for them. I continuously check in with my privilege, seeing that I’m not imposing my own will or the will of the practice on them. That I’m here to facilitate their personal learning. That the practice fits into their lives.

Establishing real consent in adjustments
A real understanding about adjustments. Importantly, understanding why an adjustment is needed and talking someone through the process as it’s happening. Allowing full consent for the student, so that they’re completely involved in the relationship as an adjustment happens and can say ‘no’ at any point. Importantly, that saying no is not a personal slight, but an understanding that I am not needed. I understand that the power belongs to the student.

The Mysore style practice is still where the magic is, both as a personal practice and in a shala
That the self practice method of Ashtanga yoga can still be one of the most beautiful and delicate ways of learning the practice of yoga. It’s brought me closer to the practitioners at SYL. I try to consider every single thing when it comes to helping someone. Hopefully this helps a practitioner to learn and deepen their practice through me being more considerate and compassionate. The relationship and trust you can develop with a student through this style of teaching is still to me one of the great boons of this method. But it has to be earned.

Learning that mindfulness is an evolution of practice, not more postures
That being more mindful is never a bad thing. Slowing down, taking extra breaths, and being kind to yourself are all attributes that can really support the development of this practice in your life. There’s no rush. There is only this breath…

That a student has ultimate control of their body
Eventually I get out of the way. A person’s body is their own. No is no, and there is no real need for me to be involved unless asked. And ask. Always.

Rediscovering the voice

So, I see 2018 as the year I lost my voice.

I see it also as the year Ashtanga yoga found a voice that had been kept quiet. The voice of Karen, Anneke, Jubilee and many others. Those voices will always continue to be so important to listen to.

We believe we’ve been helping to support these voices, with this year’s Spring Gathering and the soon to be announced Amayu Yoga. We hope a new voice in Ashtanga yoga is being found, with us here at SYL and elsewhere within the community.

The post Empowerment as a way forward in Ashtanga yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

There is a moment in every dedicated yoga practitioner’s life when you fall.

I don’t mean falling out of a yoga asana like headstand. I mean when you fall deep into a yoga or contemplative practice. Falling deep into practice is where we stop looking for anything, or trying to gain anything. Where the identity of practising falls away and we move into the awareness of practice itself. You’re just falling into, or we could even call it feeling into, the process called yoga.

Falling into the process is a unique experience individual to us all, but for me it’s one of the things that defines yoga. So, the practice of yoga offers us this falling. But what is it that we are falling into, and what are we falling away from?

Falling into the breath

The reason that most yoga and meditative traditions use the breath as a tool for their contemplation is that it allows us to move towards identifying what the breath actually is and away from what we think the breath is. It’s really simple but we compartmentalise our lives. I see me, I see ‘my’ breath. It can take years to come to the awareness that there is no ‘my’ breath. There is just breath. As soon as I say ‘my breath’ I am identifying with a breath that is mine. Our practice is to see that breath is not mine, breath just is.

When we notice the breath as just the breath, our sense of separateness drops. This means that the mind’s hold on the idea of the breath falls away. So when we fall into practice we are letting go of the identity of who we are. We become the thing we are noticing. We don’t just breathe, we become breathing.

Falling away from identity

Our identity, or the story of me (in Sanskrit this is called asmita), is how we engage with the world through relationship. There has to be a me that decides to practise yoga. However, as soon as I engage with the decision to practise, I see the practice itself is to let go of my identity and focus on the things that I actually am, beyond my identity.

For example, in the practice of Ashtanga yoga the focus would be the breath (through the technique of Ujjayi), the body (through the technique of bandha) and the synchronisation of those processes through movement called vinyasa. Then my practice is to cultivate a stable awareness of vinyasa, so the quality of attention stays with the alignment of the breath and the body together. It is to see that rather than doing the vinyasas, I become the vinyasas.

Falling into the present moment

Cultivating this awareness then offers us the possibility to find space in our lives. With the mind consistently waking up to the processes of the human experience during the practice, that practice is remembering to focus on the breath, we can become aware that those processes are actually our lives. In Ashtanga yoga each counted vinyasa is a moment in time to fall into and each breath is representative of the present moment. So our practice is actually allowing us to fall into the present moment. To develop the skill to remain present is one of the goals of yoga practice.

Falling into nature

Interestingly, these moments of falling are also captured in natural settings. Watching a sunset, getting lost in the flames of a bonfire, or witnessing the flickering of a candle are places where, just for a moment, the turnings of the mind can fall away. These moments can then become the experience of the sunset itself, or the warmth of the flames or the gentle movement of the candle.

One of my favourite quotes, by Huang Po included at the top of this article, offers us the possibility to consider these moments as where our life actually begins. The falling through the void. The real Dharma. Dharma means your life. Entering the real Dharma is entering the reality of your life. This one beautiful life.

So we are falling into really discovering life, our own nature. Can we see the possibility that our practice is to fall away from the turnings (vrittis) of the mind (chitta) to actually see ourselves as nature itself, like the sunset, the bonfire, the candle flame? Setting your practice with that quality, that intention, is to me what practising is about.

Falling into awareness, awareness, awareness

I’m reminded of something that my first yoga philosophy teacher, the dear Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati, taught me. She said something along these lines:

“Yoga is just 3 words.
The first is awareness.
The second is awareness.
The third is… awareness.”

To me, this is beautiful.

There is something incredibly powerful when you repeat an intention three times. Saying something once with deep intention can have meaning. When you say it again it increases the power of that meaning. When you reinforce it a third time it has the potential to reach underneath your conscious mind and land internally in a deeply embodied way. Language can profoundly move us.

So, each time we breathe we are entering our life, each time we link our breath to our movement we are entering our life. Each time we leave our yoga mat we are entering our life. We are, in every moment, willing and creating a new way of seeing of ourselves, a new way of seeing the world. Deeply dedicated yoga practice helps us fall into this.

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By Scott Johnson

The formal practices of yoga (asana, pranayama and meditation) are deep ways to understand our world as individuals in the world of others. Remembering this is the key to yoga truly having a place in our lives. Taking our time to practise elements of getting closer to experiences that happen unconsciously helps us to see more about what makes us tick.

For me there are key moments in a yoga practice that allow me to see what practising yoga brings; what it truly means to me and where I can place my attention to notice something deeper.

Think about placing your hands together at the beginning of a class at the centre of your upper chest, like we do in the Ashtanga yoga method when we chant the opening mantra. What does this action truly represent? I see it as making a gateway from the world of external relationship off the yoga mat to this internal relationship we have with ourselves. This place is then where we chant the opening mantra from. We chant because others have chanted before us so that we may also.

Practising gratitude

But, if we just stopped for a moment and listened to the deep meaning of placing our hands together, we may get an insight into why we do what we do. What is it that placing the hands together at the front of our heart centre represents? It is so personal to all of us, yet representative of the subtle psychological things we do as humans.

For me, I place my hands together in gratitude. Gratitude for how I have found a way to understand myself a bit more in this moment, through the practice of yoga being a part of my life. Gratitude in knowing that yoga is helping me to become that little more real in how I see the world, even if I don’t like what I see. I have this practice to help me clear a path through this life.

Waking up to intimacy

The late Michael Stone used these words many times, “The practice of yoga is waking up to a life of intimacy.” In a lecture I attended of his he also translated the second sutra of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, yoga chitta nvrtti nirodaha, as: “Intimacy is the ability to let go of the turnings of the imagination.”

Intimacy. I love the way Michael uses this word as a way of describing yoga. It conjures up such a beautiful way of seeing how we relate to everything we come across in our experience. That everything in our lives is so close and we touch it with the way we see it. I expanded intimacy to also mean relationship. We are always relating to an experience, a way in which the world is opening up to us, at any given time. But intimacy is a word that really captures a way to experience how we can connect to things. Can we be intimate with everything, as if we cherished it so much?

When I am intimate it allows me to connect to things in deeper ways. Learning to be intimate with life is learning to lean in and not turn away from things that may be painful or unsettling. It allows me to be curious towards all relationships, both external and internal. We are always relating, we are always being intimate. To learn to notice this in a more open way is for me the practice of yoga.

So, when I practise yoga I see that I can never become separate from anything. The challenge is that there is some far-off place in the future where everything will be perfect and I will realise the nature of all things and be happy. This is a skewed notion. The practice always lands us in the present moment. Now. We exist here and when we find ourselves here we see that life is playing out this way all the time, and it never stops.

How we understand yoga

Yoga as intimacy, as relationship. This way of speaking about yoga still moves me to this day.

It’s interesting to me because both Michael and Ozge Karabiyik, two inspiring teachers whose work I cherished, passed away tragically, yet what they stood for and the way they met people still lives with me today. It’s like the ripple of their lives exist in the way I share and live yoga through mine.

Yoga is about us. Yoga is the space I notice between the words I am going to say, the words I say and the way words land with others. When I notice this space I am clear and truthful about what I want to say. Yoga is also the way I feel because of deep practice, playing out moment after moment after moment.

Teaching yoga through intimacy

The teaching space with which I hold is, for me, a deep way to understand how intimacy works. I see that life is intimacy. How can I help you to see that too? Importantly, how can I help you to see that intimacy by being with you while you try to see it, then getting out of the way once you have?

We all understand and touch the world as a response to our own personal histories and circumstances. This is what makes our personal humanity so beautifully unique. I can never see the world exactly the same as you. Yet, I can receive it in a way that has such depth and clarity. You can too. Most of us are just reaching out toward the same thing as humans. Things like:

Yet these realisations are based on a receptivity that others will receive these things in the world. Yoga practice makes us look at how we are seeing things towards ourselves first. How do I love myself? How am I listening to things in my own life? How am I making things play out in my own life? How do they truly land?

Yoga as a feedback loop

This all really matters. Because when I do this I can hear and relate deeply to others with honesty and clarity. I can find in myself responses that are valuable for the wellbeing of others.

So, yoga starts with looking at ourselves, it then plays out in looking at others in the field of responsive action.

Yoga, then, is a feedback loop. Again and again we meet the breath. Again and again we feel how the body is telling us about the world. Again and again we return to seeing how life is happening, and again and again we notice that all I am doing is unpacking myself in this world, so that others can respond to me and I can respond to them. With love.

How do you understand yoga in your life? It would be great to know.

The post How do you understand yoga in your life? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Pausing for thought

Before reading on, take a moment to contemplate these questions as they relate to you and your life:

Recognising your intention

If you’re a beginner, just the idea of starting yoga is an intention, whatever the reason. The initial intention/reason to practise is a great boon to have and to notice, especially when we embark on a contemplative practice such as yoga. We all come to yoga for many different reasons, all of which can find a relief to the pressures of our daily lives.

Interestingly, for experienced practitioners like myself, each time I roll out my mat this is an intention too, albeit one that becomes more established over the years. I roll out my mat as an intention to discover something more about myself, whether that be to experience a deeper connection with a posture, or to feel connected to something deeper within myself.

Acknowledging the teachings

The ongoing practice of yoga changes us, and the teachings of yoga, such as understanding certain yoga texts presented to us in a way that connects, are often what can help to wake us up. This is true whether they’re translated to us through a teacher, or by reading, watching or listening to yoga philosophy.

Interestingly though, in my experience of being a yoga teacher, people have changed irrespective of knowing what the actual teachings of yoga are. Their intention has been what has compelled them to come to the mat in the first place and do the work required to see themselves in a new light. After that, encouragement from myself as a teacher has been key. So there is something that the yoga teachings represent that is akin to becoming more human. Something that is felt. That goes beyond words…

Intention as a practice

For me, yoga has intention at its base. In fact, yoga IS intention. To stand at the front of a yoga mat, or even just to stand if you don’t use one, with full awareness of breath and body, is to be open to what is going to happen next. In readying for asana, noticing the gross physical weight of the body through your feet, and feeling the subtle sensation of the crown at the top of your head rising, we can awaken to the space in between those two points of reference. Our body. Our conscious awareness. The earth from which I feel, the sky from which I sense. We are then able to notice the present moment, as it plays out for us.

It’s simple but I feel it’s so important to remember that the body and breath, with which we sense the world, IS this human life. The continuous intention to notice this understanding is the potential to connect to the moment where we experience the fluid connection of life as it arises.

So, the practice of yoga is the intention of experiencing this human life as we place certain conditions on it. These conditions are asana, pranayama, meditation and chanting.

Yoga as a formal contemplative practice

Answering the questions posed at the beginning of this piece is a worthwhile exercise, and continually asking ourselves why we practice is noticing how yoga is changing us. All things are born out of intention but something like yoga, which is a contemplative practice, encourages intention in a deeper way.

Yoga offers us a way of truly understanding ourselves. I see it as a formal contemplative practice. This is a practice which we place as a benchmark, or front and centre, in our lives. One where we practise to notice ourselves intentionally and to return to it regularly. It is placed as incredibly important, because it is a process of seeing ourselves in a clearer way. We are able to work through and wrestle with all the physical and subtle aspects of our lives. It’s where we give actual time to the noticing and navigating of our awareness. How many see yoga as this possibility? How many have yoga as this intention? I’m not sure, but changing your view of yoga to seeing it as this potential is no bad thing.

Discovering our habits

There is, though, a deeper reward as a response to the intention we place on yoga practice. Because yoga is about feeling, noticing and becoming present, we begin to see how we see things in our lives. After a while we’ll be able to use practice to reflect back on what is going on in a way that helps our understanding of ourselves. Having a good yoga teacher is a great way for us to be helped with this.

Importantly, dedicated and regular practice should help us see our habits. Habits we may even have in practice itself, whether these be while we’re sitting quietly watching our breath, flowing through a surya namaskar, or trying to hold a handstand for longer than 5 breaths.

Waking up to the changes

So, with the possibility of all this practice, all this contemplation, how does it change us? It changes us because we are moved by the process of practice itself. Giving ourselves time to place conditions on the way we see and experience our lives allows us to notice our lives in a different way. We can let go of stories we have held for a long time.

It’s a simple premise, but having the intention of our practice as a formal contemplative process can help give us the focus to look and feel it as such. To actually become the thing we seek. To actually become yoga. Just for a moment.

As soon as I realise that I am being changed by yoga I can wake up to yoga. To what is new. So, yoga changes me, therefore I change. It’s an experiential, guided process, helping us to feel more alive.

As we practise, as we deepen, intention changes. But intention is always there. It never stops. It’s in the way I stretch when I wake up in the morning to feel my body. It’s in the smile I give the barista as I thank her for my coffee. It’s in the litter I pick up left by someone else. Being open to intention as a drive that shapes the process of our life is to be open to how we move and wrestle with this thing we are given TO notice. This breath, and the next one. And the next one…

The post Are you aware of the intention behind your yoga practice? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“Yoga begins with listening. When we listen we are giving space to what is.”

These opening sentences to one of my favourite books, The Mirror Of Yoga by Richard Freeman, offer the reader a direct insight into what entering the yoga experience is truly about: listening. But this isn’t just listening through the ears. It’s a deeper listening. It’s listening to the way that our own life is playing out through experience, all the time without stopping. It’s listening to the space that arises as we process our moment to moment awareness of being this human life. It’s listening to how I respond or react to every relationship I wake up to. For me, Freeman captures in 14 words the perfect way to enter and begin to work towards the yoga experience. They are like a personal sutra that I continue to return to and unpack.

To listen is to notice

If I am listening it means that I am noticing something as it arises. Something other than me. It means that I am noticing something in the relationship with myself; and then I am listening to the response to what has arisen. The practice of yoga for me is this understanding, that I am always in relationship with myself. I can never turn away from this, it is the process of my life and it will only end when I take my last breath.

It’s important to remember that the practices of yoga and mindfulness are imbued with developing the qualities of listening with love and compassion. Can we see the thoughts we have and at the same time develop kindness to ourselves while experiencing them? This is the ongoing challenge we face, which ultimately allows us to meet and heal the processes of our awareness and adopt new positive outlooks.

Noticing our narratives

Quite often, though, this deeper listening can be hard for us. We don’t initially like what we hear. The stories/narratives that play out in our lives are ingrained and deeply habitual. But through the practice of being with them we can reveal their feeling in our bodies, their tones and sensations. We can notice how they play out, we can feel them. We can ultimately, in time, let them go and allow how we relate to them to change. This letting go happens through creating new stories, through creating new positive habits. This is deep practice. This is yoga. So the way we habitually respond to things is deeply body oriented. It is learning to feel again. To notice. Our practices want to be waking us up to this experience.

The process of a yoga practice is to be with these narratives. To see the way we see things as narratives in our lives. As stories. Because, as Freeman writes, practice is giving space to what is. Importantly, giving space in this way allows us to notice when we are falling down. When narratives are clouding our view of the world. We all do it. We all have thought processes that catch us. To consistently listen to this is to be with the difficulty of the way we see things. For me, this is one of the most important teachings there is.

Learning our truth

My interpretation of ‘giving space to what is’ is ‘seeing things as they are’. The term in yoga philosophy for this is vidya. We are learning to see things as they are for us. Our truth. Even if our truth at the time is not easy. This process of learning our truth allows us to move in the world with integrity. It is where our ethical values can arise and can be how we meet others and move in the world. In yoga philosophy we want the discovering of our own truth to be how we then practice the ethical limbs of Ashtanga yoga, these being the yamas and niyamas.

But what happens when we listen to ourselves so much that we stop listening to others’ truths? We’ve been cultivating our truth for years, right? A deep yoga practice, cultivated over years with a teacher, will create a positive narrative in our lives. I have created this in myself with my own teacher. This can be the hardest narrative to unpack, especially as this narrative has changed our life. If that narrative is challenged, then we can find ourselves pushing up against the way it is being challenged. We can find ourselves choosing what we listen to and how we listen to it. When we give space to ourselves but don’t give space to listening to others’ views, we stop being open. We stop listening completely.

Challenging our stories

We know that the opposite of vidya is a-vidya. This translates as not clearly seeing, i.e. not clearly seeing our truth. This can be caused by addictions to our own habits and stories and this is one of the major obstacles to the yoga experience. And it’s where we see the most friction when it comes to human relationships with each other. You have your story, I have mine.

Importantly, what this boils down to is our own stories. How are my stories playing out and am I addicted to those stories? The story of my life. Our yoga practice should always challenge this very strand. To see that our stories are always in constant flow. Life is in constant flow. When we consistently challenge our stories, we are open to change around them. Importantly, we need to be able to be flexible in the way we meet the world and its innumerable, ever changing, circumstances.

So, yoga teaches us to not only listen to our own stories, but also consider those of others.

The Ashtanga yoga community, March 2018

Importantly, our Ashtanga yoga community finds itself in this exact conundrum at the moment. People are hurting, have been victimised and abused. Many women, such as Karen Rain, are calling out their pain as a response to the behaviour of Pattabhi Jois. They are pointing at the obvious: that their experience doesn’t match that of many others who practised with Jois at the time and we are burying our heads in the sand. We are not truly listening. We are caught up in our own narrative of Ashtanga yoga because it is so close to us. Because it has meaning, depth and connection to us. Because it’s Ashtanga, because he’s ‘Guruji’. “He enlightened me, so how can this not be others’ experience?”

If Ashtanga yoga was this practice that’s there to enlighten us, we would be truly open to the suffering of others, even if the suffering was dealt from those closest to us. We would engage with it. Consider it. Wake up to it. But we are not doing this. In other fields where this is happening, people are starting to come forward more and more, and we are actually starting to listen. This is powerful, encouraging and necessary, but it cannot stop there. Now that we have the light shining on our community, how we move, how we listen, is so important.

We need to listen. We need to listen more than ever. And we need to be uncomfortable. It has to challenge our view so that we can respond in an appropriate way.

We need to listen so that we can acknowledge the hurt of those who have suffered. So that we can then begin to heal the story of our own addiction to a narrative. Do we move along this path of yoga looking out for only ourselves, or listening so that healing can take place for those who’ve been harmed?

If yoga is about listening, how can we listen even though it challenges the very base of our own personal narrative?  Even with evidence that challenges the very fabric of our method?

Father first, teacher second

I have been teaching Ashtanga yoga for over 13 years now. The practice has moved me profoundly, and continues to do so. It is in my DNA. But, I have been a father for longer. I watched our first son being born in 2001, then our next two in 2004 and 2006. Those experiences moved me more. To bear witness to the birth of life, I became witness to this thing we squeeze, we breathe in and that we wrestle with every moment of every day. As they develop, I want no more for our boys than to have clarity of insight, to adopt an ethical outlook and a way to find joy in life. To be able to listen.

I want there to be a clear way that they meet others, so that there is no ambiguity, but most importantly that they meet people on an equal level. That they never place themselves above others’ experiences, but see how they can become part of the growth and integrity of others’ movements in the world.

Looking at the current situation in the yoga world helps me to see what I want my boys to learn. To be honest, open, transparent, with no way of people misunderstanding their meaning. But most importantly, to listen to those who are speaking and hear them with as much clarity as they can, especially when they are hurting. To receive and acknowledge the hurt.

Humble acknowledgement

“Vande Gurunam Charanaravinde”

This is the opening line of the Ashtanga yoga opening invocation that precedes every traditional practitioner’s practice. They are prophetic words. Loosely translated they mean, “I bow to the lotus feet of the supreme gurus.”

Guru in this context does not mean a person, but the yoga practice itself. The yoga practice is, and always will be, the teacher. We wrestle with the practice ourselves so that our stories can fall away and we can open up to experience.

When I chant these words myself, I am acknowledging and thanking the countless and innumerable people who have practised before me so that I am able to find my place on the mat that day, that moment. Every one of them. I feel their place in the world, I hear their breath in mine. Then, I breathe with them. I continue breathing with them, knowing that my breath is continuing this age old pathway forward. This for me is parampara. I include those who have suffered. I imagine that if those who have suffered, such as Karen Rain and others, had called out their abuse and been heard at the time, I may not be practising now. I bow deeper. It humbles me. And I listen harder.

Listening with love and compassion

So, the very words we chant at the beginning of our practice ask us to humbly acknowledge and listen to others. Too many of us are listening to the sound of our own Ujjayi breath and not listening to the wider sounds that are being made. Being voiced. These voices need to be heard.

So for me, I am listening. I am open to the uncomfortable and challenged by the new narrative. I am listening to those who suffered with love and compassion. I am hearing and believing their stories. I need to acknowledge and understand why people didn’t see and listen at the time. So that I can learn to be as open and responsible as I can in the way that I meet people in the many roles I have – as a father, a yoga teacher and, ultimately, a human being.

The post Listen without prejudice appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Taking a moment to imagine…

Before reading any further, close your eyes and imagine if any part of your life had been different. Any part of your life at all. If at any moment a certain point that felt meaningful had gone a different way. Think of concrete examples. If you had chosen being too self conscious instead of travelling. If you had gone to Mysore. If you hadn’t gone to Mysore. If you had said no instead of yes. If you had said yes instead of no. If you had never stepped foot on a yoga mat. But, once considered, ask yourself the questions: Where would you be now? What would you be thinking? What would you be feeling? How would you be seeing the world? Go on, take a moment to consider this before you read on…

Skilfully reflecting

We know these questions are all hypothetical, right? But they are questions I feel it good for us to reflect on. You see, reflection lands us in the present moment and helps us to see where we are right now. To see where we’ve got to. Where our past decisions have brought us to. So, what thoughts are arising right now when I consider these questions? What feelings arise as a response? Are there emotions too that come up? We are learning to notice what thoughts, feelings and emotions have brought us to this present moment.

For those of you who are a yoga or mindfulness practitioner, this is very much part of a sadhana or spiritual practice. Yoga and mindfulness practice is about skilfully reflecting all these things in the present moment and knowing that by noticing these things we are establishing a root towards how our future plays out.

Smelling the roses

I notice in myself a constant movement between what is past and what is to come. This is because, of course, I am a product of my past moments. For example, the main personal decisions I have made in my life have culminated in me becoming a father, a husband and a yoga teacher. It wasn’t always like this, but it’s my reality now. There are other self proclaimed roles that all play a certain part and have meaning, but these are the ones that I feel define me.

However, If I think of them too much as roles then I can get caught up in what they are meant to be or the role I am meant to play. This can be defined by the culture and society I play them in. This can then perhaps define what I feel I have to be and the meaning by which I judge myself against others. If I look at these personal roles they are all about me relating to others. Seeing how other people and myself are responding to each other through this thing called life. If I stop and reflect, using the skills I have nurtured through my ongoing spiritual practices, I can experience them as they play out in my life. I can use the experience of the role to see how far I’ve come as I continue to play it. For me this is important. That I am constantly evaluating how I relate to others based on where I find myself.

In my life I can push hard for things to happen. I am really eager but I need to notice to what effect. Smelling the roses, remembering what’s brought me to this moment, helps me to understand a healthier way to move forward with consideration.

Meeting practice with clarity

When it comes to my role as a yoga teacher, I’ve had many practitioners come to me with issues surrounding where they are stuck in their personal yoga practice and problems that they face as practice continues. These issues could be physical, mental or emotional. They are all in some way how the practice is responding to their lives or where they are moving in the world.

What we often do is look at the practice as a microcosm, seeing how we’ve developed just as yoga practitioners. What we perhaps forget to notice is how the practice has developed us as people. We can look at the difficulties we face in life and perhaps see how we would face them without a yoga practice. Can we see how our practice is working on us?

For me, a yoga practice is about refining my observation. My own observation of myself. Rather than noticing where I am stuck, perhaps I can stop and see just how far I’ve come to be able to notice I’m stuck. To notice this actual time of reflection. I see this way of being caught as a very common thread in many people. I see it in myself too.

As a yoga practitioner, can I also observe all the moments of practice that have got me here and use that as the gatekeeper of the moments yet to come? I ask many people to contemplate this. To actually see how far they have come. Nearly always I receive a wry, knowing little smile.

Collecting our past present moments

It’s this juxtaposition of noticing the past that has brought me to this moment, and this moment being the place that takes me to my future that allows me to become present. It’s simple to say it, but my present is made up of all my past present moments. Observing my breath and body in awareness, whether through asana practice or meditation, really allows for me to hone the sensitivity to become present.

Remembering that yoga can be a way to unlock your own unique human nature, creating the ability to listen anew to things that may be uncomfortable, is a powerful reminder of the strength and potential of a long-term yoga practice. With all the imagery of incredible yoga prowess and yoga rhetoric that gets posted online, especially on social media, reminding ourselves that the practice is here to really move us, to shift our awareness to a more present relational nature, is so very important.

There’s so much we look forward to, so much we regret, so much that we hope may happen and so much that we are scared may happen. But we continue to practise yoga and in yoga practice we can forget how far we’ve come. A gentle reminder is key, always.

So, to actually come to this moment and notice how far we’ve come since we started a yoga practice, can be a significant way to waking up to what is yet to be…

The post Have you noticed how far you’ve come? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

As we move into the new year, I thought it would be nice to look back over the past 12 months and highlight some popular posts from the SYL blog to help take your practice into 2018.

If you’ve read my article 5 things I’ve learned from starting a yoga blog, you’ll know that blogging didn’t always come so easily to me. But I wanted to share my experiences of yoga, of challenge, of transformation. And we all have to start somewhere. So I dived in and haven’t looked back since.

I discovered a profound and deep enjoyment in finding the ability to write again. In fact, it’s been transformational for me and I realised that writing regularly is just as much a spiritual practice as yoga itself.

So, here are 3 SYL blog posts from 2017 to help you move into the new year with a fresh perspective on your practice:

1.  Starting over: How to keep your Ashtanga yoga practice fresh

Starting over: How to keep your Ashtanga yoga practice fresh: The Never Ending Beginning Of Ashtanga Yoga
By Scott Johnson

In this post I reflect on the importance of keeping a beginner’s mind in order to keep your Ashtanga practice fresh and stay grounded in the present moment.

“I feel it’s important that we continue to hold the energy of the beginner in our lives. Of beginner’s mind. One of the many pleasures of being an ashtanga yoga Mysore teacher is cultivating a room that holds many different kinds of practitioner. All are welcome, and the set up of the self-practice method allows for both new and experienced people to be able to nurture their practices together, yet alone.” – Scott Johnson

2. Five ways to soften your Ashtanga yoga practice

5 ways to soften your Ashtanga yoga practice: How To Soften The Edges And Nurture A More Gentle Side Of Your Practice
By Scott Johnson

An Ashtanga yoga practice can be strong, dynamic and intense. In this post I share how to soften the edges of the practice and to perhaps nurture a more gentle side.

• Begin with stillness: Sit. Breathe quietly before you begin your practice.
• Widen your listening: Go beyond the inhale/exhale and notice the quiet space between the breaths.
• Let go: Notice when you are pushing and stop. Let it go, feel the body, then start again.
• Slow down: Slow the practice or vinyasa down.
• Remember why: Remember why you are practising yoga.

3. Combining mindfulness and yoga can change everything

Combining mindfulness and yoga can change everything: Exploring The Relationship Between Yoga And Mindfulness
By Scott Johnson

In this post I consider the relationship between yoga and mindfulness, and share how cultivating moment to moment awareness completely changed my long term yoga practice.

“Mindfulness captured me in my practice and created a more open attitude. It widened the focus of my practice and helped me to let go of those things in my mind that held me back. It’s not easy – there are constant unconscious reminders and life keeps coming at you – but, for me in practice, it always comes back to the tiny moments.” – Scott Johnson

I hope you’ll continue to read our blog posts and come to our classes and workshops in 2018 and beyond. Join our community below to stay in the loop and receive priority event booking.

Happy New Year!

The post Reflections from the Stillpoint Yoga London blog appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

It’s the beginning of 2012, nearly 3 years since we opened our yoga space, and I’m sitting quietly at Stillpoint Yoga London. There are flowers in front of me, surrounding the picture of a woman looking softly, directly, through the frame. She has kind eyes. Candles burn and the delicate fragrance of incense fills the air. The silence is palpable, cut only by the soft sounds of tears being shed by others behind me. Our dear friend, colleague and teacher Ozge Karabiyik had died the night before. We have come together to make some sense of it. Together. I look into those kind eyes and gently close my own. In the darkness I turn toward my own version of grief as I understand it, in that moment. I wrestle with the knowledge that I will never physically see Ozge again. She is now a memory.

I grapple with the confusion that ensues, turning the inner turmoil over and over until I can’t really stand it anymore. I try to go quiet and I do. In the silence, a voice appears. It’s hers. “It’ll all be okay,” she says in that joyful infectious way she always did.

It captures me. Her voice seems so clear. It’s not what I thought I would hear, I think.

I’m supposed to break. To feel like the world is caving in.

I smile.

It’s not what I’d thought I’d do. But the clarity of that voice belies my emotional state. It moves me to action. I take a punt on what I’m supposed to do in this situation and turn around.

Sitting with vulnerability

I spend time with each one of the people there. They are all students of ours from Stillpoint and have come to sit with their own version of grief. I speak softly with them. Listening. I sit, hearing every one of their words as closely as I can, then I offer my perspective of holding on to whatever Ozge represented to them. If we hold that close, she still lives on in our lives.

The action I take that morning becomes the framework in which I move Stillpoint forward. What can we learn from experiences we have that can shape our lives? Can a practice really help us to change the way we see the world? Can I wake up to this life right now, with all its intricacies? We continue. As a response to Ozge passing, Stillpoint became about how we ourselves could feel more alive and listen deeper to the people who came to us. Yes, we teach traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga in a way that really helps, in a way that twas taught to us and to our own teachers. But is there more we could do?

The big retreat

We share yoga at SYL in a busy city in which people can lead busy and stressful lives. There can be so much distraction that personal sensation, embodiment and focus can become dissociated. We can identify ourselves as the work we do, the roles we have in life, as the emotions we feel, and we can see our place in things based on the circumstances of this world. These perceptions at times are needed for us to be able to navigate life. But, they can overtake our lives so much that we become defined by them. What if we could identify as something other than these patterns? Something else. Something not yet known. Moving into this new awareness can take courage. Courage because we are moving into the unknown.

The late Michael Stone used to share this Zen poem in his workshop (as he did when he came to teach at SYL):

The small retreat is to go and practice in the woods, the rivers, the fields. The big retreat is to go and practice in the city.

What if practice never stopped?

SYL became about how people can actually meet their lives and see how they can wake up to their lives through a dedicated ongoing yoga practice. It’s our view that practice never really stops. Like the Ashtanga yoga practice, in life there is always another breath to fall into. Another breath to notice. We see this as the practice. But, creating a bridge between practice ending and life outside of practice starting, allows for there to be a division created between ‘my yoga practice’ and life. We began to ask the question, ”What if practice never stopped? What would that look like, feel like?”

This is all eight limb stuff, right? Ultimately, though, Stillpoint became about truly meeting people with kindness. About listening to them. About not taking over their lives with dogmatic ideas about what’s right or wrong but allowing them to wake up to their own inner voice, all within the framework of developing a disciplined physical yoga practice based on breath awareness. This has become our default position. This has become the Stillpoint practice. The Stillpoint way. Listening. So that we ourselves can remember to listen.

Practice. Community. Life.

For me, and in my experience, practice and community have been integral in developing a life that has meaning. In the aftermath of Ozge’s passing, all of us in the SYL community continued coming together in practice and friendship to hold each other. We found solace in reminding each other of her life by coming together in practice. We need something that helps us navigate the world in a way that keeps us embodied and to notice the vulnerabilities of our lives. Contemplative practices such as yoga and mindfulness allow us to feel, sense and relate to the word and all its relationships. From moment to moment.

Michael Stone also said:

“All of this stuff – meditation, therapy, pharmaceuticals – is bullshit without friendship. You can’t heal all by yourself. In no culture did anybody heal by him or herself; you can’t do it alone.”

Community and friendship helped me to see my own strengths, nourish them and ultimately hold myself beyond it. They helped me to navigate SYL beyond the tragedy of loss. The loss of Ozge. There was support and connection in shared practice so that away from this space I was able to hold a continued sense of practice myself. This helped me so much. To be able to look after myself and feel that strength beyond our community was so rich. It meant so much. It’s why nurturing a community spirit became a deep part of my work and the SYL identity. It’s obvious, but in this life, we can never be apart from others.

Yes, we live this life as an individual, but we do so in a world of relationship. We never truly know what is going to happen. We only know that we have ourselves, the people we bump into through our lives and those experiences to reflect on. Doing so with the utmost awareness is, I feel, one of the main reasons we continue practising through the years.

The post Coming together: Nurturing a yoga community appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

I’ve seen so much while being involved in SYL over the years. In holding a Mysore space and getting to know people in a more personal way through the one to one teaching environment, I’ve met many people who have taught me so much about life:

• The lady who came in to say she wanted to use the practice to become stronger after recovering from cancer, and subsequently feeling her body again in a positive way. And the tears of comfort relief that flowed as a response.
• The man who gently realised it was okay to feel sadness, cry and be held by another man in comfort.
• The lady who began to see that strength was in the kindness shown to herself and her body, when for years that had been hidden, alien.
• The tenderness of the many as grief in the loss of someone close and loved turns into acknowledgement of their memory, the legacy of their life, and the gifts that will always be there in holding that dear.

These things seem so personal and of course they are. Yet I have encountered all these things in my role as a yoga teacher, in the frame of someone who guides and helps people to meet themselves through a personal yoga practice in a tender way over days, months and years. The longer I do this work the more I see that I am supporting people to develop more than just a physical strength related to yoga asanas. I notice that something else evolves too.

Strength in equanimity and balance

Strength can be awakened in a myriad of ways. From the gross to the subtle, a yoga practice offers fertile ground for discovering and nurturing parts of ourselves that are unseen, yet to be experienced as something we know in ourselves as strength. Whether it is a stronger body or a stronger mind, long term practice can wake us up to this. Yoga wakes us up to noticing that we can experience the world in an infinite number of ways. And the strength is in learning to do this with equanimity and balance, whether it’s with the body or the mind. In fact, yoga nurtures both. Yoga is both.

Seeing the body not just as a powerful tool to realise physical strength, resilience and energy in achieving physical goals, but also as a way to experience the softest, quietest of moments, feelings and emotions.

Experiencing the breath as not only a source of immense strength and power to be able to call on, but also as a way to experience the deepest relaxation and letting go.

The focus of the mind to achieve not only the strongest of wills and achievements, but also the deepest contentment that can be open to our experience.

Turning toward awareness

If we’re careful, long term yoga practice and personal sadhana (study) can turn us towards these moments. To help us see that we can hold both the strongest and gentlest awareness at the same time. That these experiences move together like the inhale and exhale. Always together, always part of each other. There is strength in this awareness. To be able to hold strong and gentle viewpoints and see the same in both. To be able to experience both the in breath and the out breath and see one in the other.

Importantly, this happens when we allow ourselves to become still. Learning to become still at the beginning and end of practice allows us to reference how we meet what happens in between these points. We can see what takes us away from being still and notice the layers of our perceptions that divert us. Ultimately, it can let us hold stillness as a fuller way of being in and seeing the world.

Strengthening the relationship between body and mind

In practice, connecting to stillness can happen in the pause between the inhale and the exhale. The letting go of concepts and stories can happen when we notice the peace between thoughts. These are ways our practice can evolve and strengthen the relationship between the body and the mind. Ultimately, in stillness, language and the way we speak to ourselves becomes known. The subsequent letting go of that language and story allows us to meet moment-to-moment awareness.

The physical practice of Ashtanga yoga opens this up to us. Over a period of time we realise that to achieve some of the postures we are wrestling with there has to be a letting go. A release. Something has to fall away so something else can open. This is how life is. Constantly meeting new moments in a way that allows for us to be present is what yoga proposes, and challenges. It’s a letting go that happens over time. Through practice itself.

The challenge and the goal are the same

When undertaking a change of direction, meeting a difficult challenge or coming up against problems, it is our awareness of it that allows us to respond. So, when we meet ourselves regularly with a consistent contemplative practice, it helps us to see ourselves like nothing else. As ourselves. With viewpoints that need challenging constantly, with a body that needs wrestling with so we can truly understands its knots. The beauty of yoga is that the challenge and the goal are the same. To realise that meeting the challenges of our lives can allow us to become open, more compassionate, empathetic and stronger versions of ourselves, and that we never stop opening.

I feel so privileged to be able to share and use this practice as a tool for people to help discover whatever strength means to them. For me, strength comes in the way we can hold ourselves while we meet others. How we can hold ourselves as we move through the many, many layers of life. Over time, we can grow this awareness, let go of things that challenge us and really see what’s possible for us in this life. Our challenge is not only to grow this in ourselves, but to also cultivate it while relating to others.

We are all growing old, but we are growing old together.

The post Cultivating a gentle strength in yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

The Summer At Stillpoint 2017 season, which ended last week, has been a bit of a momentous one. When I began SYL back in 2009 with Ozge Karabiyik never did I think we would have a summer like this one. We have played host to, connected with and talked to the largest number of highly experienced Ashtanga yoga teachers we’ve ever had here at SYL, with practitioners coming from all over the world.

In May, Kia Naddermier and Greg Nardi came and taught with me for our annual Spring Gathering. In June, Anthony ‘Prem’ Carlisi taught his first UK workshop with us in 8 years, then surprised students when he dropped in to help me for our regular morning Mysore class. David Keil came and taught his annual SYL 7 day Mysore and workshop marathon. Then in August we teamed Manju Jois and John Scott for a stellar 5 day immersion into the teachings of K Pattabhi Jois. Danny Paradise popped in to say hi too. Manju also stayed to teach an intermediate series teaching intensive. We finally finished last week with Philippa Asher teaching a 2 week Mysore intensive. During this time I tried my best to uphold the real work SYL does: meeting the daily regular students who are the bedrock of SYL and make it what it is.

Connecting with others

Never did I think we could hold such a strong line-up, based on the foundations of our work as a morning Mysore shala. Yet here we are… because I am fascinated and passionate about every aspect of the Ashtanga yoga practice. There is nothing more enjoyable than connecting with teachers and people who inspire me, and then connecting those people with others. The SYL daily Mysore practice evolved from Ozge Karabiyik and myself being deeply moved by our work with John Scott and Lucy Crawford. The SYL Summer At Stillpoint workshop season grew from my inviting teachers I felt could add value to our community.

So this summer, with so many highly experienced teachers coming, there were lots of conversations over coffee and food, looking at how we as a wider Ashtanga yoga community are sharing this practice today.

All the teachers who passed through our doors this summer show humble allegiance to the method of Ashtanga yoga that Sri K Pattabhi Jois developed with his teacher Krishnamacharya. They share it through the filter of their own time spent with Jois. Of course, there are discrepancies between a lot of these teachers. These are based on their own personal filter of how they experienced the practice and learned from Guruji, taking into consideration the timeframe they were there. One worked with Jois as a father/son family relationship before westerners had even stepped foot in Guruji’s home in Gokulam (Manju | 1960s/1970s). Some had been in Mysore with maximum 8 people in Jois’ room (Prem, John Scott |1970s/80s/90s) and some had been in the bigger shala as it moved to Lakshmipuram from Gokulam in 2002 (Greg Nardi, David Keil, Philippa Asher, Kia Naddermier | 1990s/2000 onwards).

One method, one practice

We at Stillpoint have our lineage connected back to Guruji through our teacher John Scott. Even though I met Jois only a handful of times, I hold his teachings and lineage, and the ongoing teachings of Sharath Rangaswamy, with such love and admiration as through the years we have seen how our work at SYL has affected the students who come through our doors. Yet I teach through my teacher’s filter, sharing the practice I discovered through John Scott’s study with Jois. But we also connect with many, many people who have been affected by different aspects of many different Ashtanga yoga teachers.

When it comes to sharing the method, who is exactly right? Are we sharing it in a way that is preserving the exact method? Or are we sharing it in a way that preserves the tradition but blends the method to the individual? I think this is where we find the differences at the moment in Ashtanga yoga and I feel they can all be held and respected. Many different people come to SYL from many different teachers. We meet them all and ask, “How can we help?” A John Scott student, a Hamish Hendry student, a Nancy Gilgoff student, a Radha Warrell student. So many students from so many different places. So many different ways to learn, so many rich teachers. Yet one method. One practice…

A wider conversation

We can only teach from our continued learning and research from the people who come and teach with us and, more importantly, those who practise with us. It is good to remember that every one of the students who comes and places a mat in our space is teaching us how to teach, to begin again in sharing this method anew.

I feel a wider conversation needs to be had. With so many different filters how are we teaching/sharing? What are we preserving? Are all the individual methods valid, even though they may differ over the years to what is being taught exactly now? They have affected so many people in profound ways, and continue to move people and change their lives. This must be acknowledged …

Keeping tradition alive

Ashtanga yoga has such a rich tradition and history. It is one of the pre-eminent yoga practices that defines yoga culture, a base to much of the vinyasa yoga that is practised today. Sri K Pattabhi Jois lit the touchpaper from his little shala in Gokulam, Mysore that has ignited innumerable people worldwide. As more people are practising Ashtanga yoga now than ever, how do we keep this practice true? Do we adhere to the call of Mysore? Or do we look toward the many different blends that came from those who worked with Jois? I think it’s both.

Last month I watched Manju Jois and John Scott, 2 of the tradition’s most highly respected teachers, work a Mysore room together at SYL. They had never taught together before, and they teach the same practice in a completely different way. Yet the week ended with a rich coming together of respect, admiration and love between them, both holding and respecting the other’s way of sharing. Both holding and respecting the method they individually learnt from their father and their teacher…

The post The many subtle flavours of Ashtanga yoga appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

When a new student comes into our Mysore room I’ll stand at the back next to them. We’ll watch the many practices that are unfolding in front of us quietly for a moment. Together. Importantly, I’ll watch them watching and there is so much I learn from that process. I can see excitement, fear, anxiety, curiosity. I always ask them what they see. What they feel. Whatever is coming up for them, I say, is all okay. To just begin from there. Generally, when people do stand there ready to meet the room they feel that they are throwing themselves into the lion of a space that seems to know itself. That is somehow separate from them.

“Everyone is experienced apart from me,”’ they say.

“And yet we all once began,” I reply.

I then point out the many different practitioners that are participating, mention that everyone was a beginner once and then I point out the ones that were just like them the week before, the day before. Where they are standing now. With me, at the back of the room. Watching.

The process of beginning

They’ll then place their mat down. I’ll stand next to them and say, ”Are you ready?” They’ll nod, and I’ll say, “Follow me, ekam, one – inhale”. We’ll both raise our arms up and begin the process of relationship between teacher and student, meeting Surya Namaskar A (sun salutation) together. Before you know it, I’ll have stepped away from them, leaving them quietly beginning the process of synchronising breath, body and mind. I’ll move on knowing they have started on that process and begin with the next person, wherever they are. Our new beginner will have blended into the room, becoming another piece of the process of breath and movement that makes the room come alive.

Then, another brand new person will come in. I will stand at the back of the room and we’ll watch. “Everyone looks so experienced,” they will say. And so it continues…

Moving beyond language

A Mysore room is a playing field of so many different varieties. People from all walks of life learning in their own time, under their own steam. The beauty is all of it can be held there. Everyone is validated and there is no hierarchy. As a teacher I know everyone, yet not many people practising in the room actually know each other. People recognise faces, energies, the sound of a breath but may not know each other’s names, or lives. This is okay. There is a sense of something becoming known, that can go beyond names. Moving beyond language is something cultivated in a yoga practice, trusting in the sensory process of feeling and noticing without having to name.

When I stand at the back of the room with that new beginner, I myself will begin too. Begin again seeing the room as if for the first time. With feeling. With fresh eyes, just as they are. What is there that I can see that is new, that I haven’t seen? That is opening up to being seen. That never stops opening up to being seen. It is a gentle and beautiful reminder of how we can remain open.

Sometimes when someone is new I’ll put them next to a more experienced practitioner, someone perhaps a little like them. Someone who I feel their practice will speak to in a way that captures their imagination and can perhaps light a little spark. There may be a knowing nod, or expression of connection, a gentle acknowledgment of each other. Nothing more. Then sharing the space together, practising next to one another. One responding to experience, the other to beginning something unfamiliar.

Holding the energy of beginner’s mind

I feel it’s important that we continue to hold the energy of the beginner in our lives. Of beginner’s mind. One of the many pleasures of being an ashtanga yoga Mysore teacher is cultivating a room that holds many different kinds of practitioner. All are welcome, and the set up of the self-practice method allows for both new and experienced people to be able to nurture their practices together, yet alone. Because we are helping people to develop a practice of their own we are able to meet each person exactly where they are. But in this room it’s easy for beginners to feel that they are new, are fresh. What gets more interesting and challenging is perhaps keeping that freshness as we become more experienced. It’s easy to get complacent and then lose the love for practice. To think, “I know”, “I should” or “Why isn’t this happening yet?”

What if, as we get deeper into the practice of yoga, we continue as if always a beginner, never letting beginner’s mind fall away? Can we meet our practice with a quality where everything is always new? Everything is always fresh? Every breath always free?

Nurturing the quality of beginning again

There is always an opportunity to see things anew. This practice always offers us a new breath to focus on, a new sensation to hold, a new perspective to adopt. When we let go of our stories and drop in to what is present as we practise, we can become open to what is arising. And there are always things arising, things that are new, that can be seen and met in an open way.

A yoga practice is a beautiful way to nurture and nourish this quality of the never ending beginning.

Each breath is fresh and new. Each movement is fresh and new. Importantly we are establishing a feeling tone to the way we are connecting with our body and this feeling is never exactly the same. Depending on the day, the quality in which we find ourselves in practice gives us the space to see what comes up in that moment. And each moment is new. Always.

So, rather than looking at our practice as just about developing strength and flexibility, how about we develop the ability to notice these moments, moments of interest, freshness, clarity and vitality? Of nurturing the quality of beginning again.

The post Starting over: How to keep your Ashtanga yoga practice fresh appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

In 2002 I started practising ashtanga yoga. In 2013 I began practising mindfulness. In 2013 my ashtanga yoga practice subtly changed forever…

Cultivating synchronicity

A completely balanced practice of breath/movement synchronicity is what we’re developing as ashtanga yoga practitioners. Returning to the mat is to cultivate and work on that process. Cultivating this synchronicity can be hard, but that’s the point of returning regularly. It is, though, completely possible to keep that focus. Dedicated ashtanga practitioners are in this for the long run so anything that helps to keep us on the path is good, right? Life changes, we adapt. How we adapt is key.

In 2013 I took an 8 week mindfulness and compassion course. It helped me begin to notice deeper parts of myself and my life in a wider context. This wasn’t long after Ozge had passed away and I had taken on the role of running SYL myself. For the first part of the course we were asked to undertake a body scan for six days out of seven. A body scan is a formal practice in which you lie down still for 40 minutes and bring your attention to your whole body. It was interesting. It was boring. I got distracted. I came back. It was interesting again. However, over time it became very effective in its ability to concentrate and direct my attention. To concentrate the attention at a single point in the body, then eventually to widen that attention to the whole body. It was still sometimes boring. But it was mindfulness training, so I was enquiring into the boring. I mean that’s the point.

It did wake me up to the feeling and sensory tone of my body and allowed me to nurture a wider awareness of my body itself. Also, to be able to recognise moment to moment awareness. With this new insight, I decided to bring this body scan practice and lay it on top of my ashtanga yoga practice. I mean it couldn’t hurt, right? It would be an interesting exercise at least. And it would be less boring too.

In fact, it was a revelation…

Moment to moment awareness

My practice moved to a much deeper place. It became a felt experience, meaning when practising I was aware of the whole body in a process rather than a system of separate postures linked together with breaths. The breath was felt, the body was felt. I was only ever focused on that one breath with that one movement, in that one moment. The vinyasa became the moment to moment awareness. I soon realised that mindfulness was actually about the body. A body awareness practice. Being with what arises – and an asana practice is the perfect place to cultivate this. I also noticed the reverse, that the yoga practice helped shape what I thought. So yoga practice became about the mind too. About being mindful.

In Indian tradition the word citta has the same root meaning for heart as well as mind. So we could also translate mindfulness as heartfulness. So we not only learn to sit with whatever comes up for us (getting close to it, learning not to push or pull), but just to be with what arises. And perhaps with heartfulness we can learn to be more open in our acceptance of it too. Seeing if the filter of our emotional awareness can capture sensations. Seeing if we can move beyond language to capture something that we can’t explain, only feel. Cultivating a heart for our practice. A heart for life. Holding our life in open awareness with love, and perhaps loving our own life like we hold and love our closest. Not only can this filter into our practice, this can also filter into our lives. Can we meet our lives not only with a mindful quality but a heartful quality too?

A kinder approach

Importantly, what underlay this experience was the feeling of compassion. That I was practising to really look after myself. To be kinder. Not particularly to get any better (that was a byproduct), not to go in any particular direction, but to use this practice as one that supported me leading a more meaningful life.

I remember now. I began to meet my practice in this way all the time, with a mindful/heartful quality. There was a strong recognition that something was different. It was the same practice that had lasted for 11 years but there was a deepening of my connection to it. I had just changed the way I saw it, felt it and practised it. I think it might come down to when we practise we learn not to hit internal walls too hard. If we have a personal practice, whether in a yoga studio or at home, when we hit walls in our practice we learn to bump off them rather than crash into them. Eventually move through them. Keeping an open and honest approach to how our lives are developing, with the help of a yoga practice, helps us to merge when there are powerful indicators, like mindfulness, that land in us.

Mindfulness captured me in my practice and created a more open attitude. It widened the focus of my practice and helped me to let go of those things in my mind that held me back. It’s not easy – there are constant unconscious reminders and life keeps coming at you – but, for me in practice, it always comes back to the tiny moments.

The tiny moments

The subtle shift of weight across the soles of the feet. The soft feeling of that first bead of sweat dripping from my forehead onto the floor. The delicate sensation of our hands being received as we place them on the ground. Capturing the pauses between breaths. Catching the inner wind of the breath, as if we could feel it gently moving inside us. Moving our imagination toward bandha. The energetic shift. The change in awareness as a particularly challenging posture is met, then held. That moment in shavasana as practice falls away and the gentle sensation of movement turns into stillness. Capturing the moment that post-practice shine falls away and something else emerges. Reality…

As these tiny moments opened up for me in practice I began to notice the tiny moments of life. Those moments that we take for granted, but are always there. These moments, in fact every moment, can become a tiny moment of clarity and awareness. Remembering to notice them is the practice of mindfulness and the practice of yoga.

There are never places that can’t be noticed, looked for or dropped into. Practising yoga with a mindful quality creates a wonderful relationship of delicate movement with unlimited intimate connections to be discovered. This is how the ashtanga yoga practice can be. This is what’s mindfully possible…

The post Combining mindfulness and yoga can change everything appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

When I started a dedicated yoga practice I was 29 and already a father. On the second to last day of a family holiday in Sydney, Australia, I found an Ashtanga yoga class. I walked away from that class feeling deeply moved. I had connected to something in myself that felt so so precious. After the class I met Louise, my wife, and picked up our 6 month old son, Herbie. He looked even more radiant. They both looked even more radiant. This was what it felt like to be connected. Who knew I’d embarked on a practice that would fundamentally alter the shape and direction of my life? That I’d eventually begin to see relationship and shared experience as another path to waking up?

Present day, early June 2017: Here I am celebrating a sixteenth birthday with the same Herbie, wistfully looking at his baby picture I still have in my wallet, while also taking in the fine young man he’s become. It’s a cliché, something you can really experience as a parent, but time does go so so quickly. Yet something else came to me too. Perhaps I could continue to look at him and how he’s grown and at the same time extend beyond seeing the young man Herbie has become, and take a look at the person I’ve become since that first Ashtanga yoga class in Sydney.

You see, my yoga practice is near enough the same age as Herbie, and anyone who’s held their hand to the fire of Ashtanga yoga knows that when you take on this practice there really can be no half measures. We are a devoted bunch. Herbie also has two brothers, Noah and Ethan, both born within 5 years of him. So not only have I been developing a yoga practice, but with Louise I’ve been growing a large family too.

Developing a sustained yoga practice and a family are both things that take time, discipline, courage and a sense of the unknown. Deep commitment is required. I have done my best to navigate both of these together and you can read more about this in an interview I gave for Ashtanga Brighton on Ashtanga practice and fatherhood.

Yoga and fatherhood: what I’ve learned

Importantly, and in relation to yoga practice, I have found many of my yoga teachers, peers and colleagues spent years developing their yoga practices first before they had families. I had to hold down a full time job, help grow a family of five, yet at the same time develop a spiritual, contemplative practice from scratch. Was there a difference in what I did, compared to my friends who already had strong practices before starting a family? Fifteen years into practice, what do I feel I have learned by doing both at the same time? These are a few of the things that I’ve noticed.

Intimacy

Intimacy is being up close with love. There is a shared intimacy in family. There is deep intimacy in spiritual practice. Intimacy requires honesty and an ability to dig deeper into yourself. To find new places that are unclear in you and to give of yourself. I have noticed in my experience of family that intimacy is shared. This means being able to balance the shared needs and intimacies between each member of the family. Finding that balance is tricky, especially when you have four other family members to negotiate. There are relationships with the individuals that need to be nourished as well as the whole family itself.

But with spiritual practice intimacy is personally cultivated, meaning cultivating love, truth and honesty within yourself. This is so valuable. Just as there can be many family members, there can be many sides to us as individuals. We need to be intimate with these sides so we can be up close to them with love.

Being able to meet our own intimacy and family intimacy together, we can continue to develop deep love for ourselves and each other.

Truth and honesty

Cultivating truth and honesty within ourselves is not easy. Things may come up. In fact, things will come up and we may not like what we find. But taking that intimacy and being open, allowing our practices to navigate these areas, allows them to be known and met. This is so valuable because we can then meet our families with this same truth and honesty. Learning to adapt to the needs of a family is a great way of learning to be true and honest to ourselves.

I’ve dropped the ball a few times. But the shared intimacy and relationships cultivated within the family have allowed for love to be present. Things can break down, but with a shared understanding of each other, with honest and open hearts, they have the ability to adapt and transform, and move into a new, more open, space together.

Nurturing

Just as we’re there for our families as they grow and change, and we watch them take their first steps in navigating new relationships, so we see our practice in the same way. Nurturing a yoga practice, like a family, is a long game. But the wider picture of both yoga practice and family is growth, support, love and encouragement. We need all of these things.

Nurturing our practice the same way we can nurture family is to see that we ourselves are always changing. We age. Our circumstances change. Being open to the shifting sands of time, navigating with openness to our own spiritual progress, allows us to stay present to our own versatility, something we need to negotiate this world of relationship with. Having a nurturing quality to our yoga practice allows kindness to be always present. Gentleness too. As if we were taking care of our own.

Hope and faith

What is left? Why are we here to share intimately in the growth and development of each other? Because we want the best for our loved ones. For each of them. We want them to integrate and live the life they have to the fullest. To be able to continue in the open development of themselves and be the best they can be while living this life. We can create hope for them. Hope that they are open and available to find the joy that can be present in this life. Hope that they can go on to meet this life with meaning, abundance and openness, and create the faith and belief in themselves to find this.

And this is the same for our yoga practice too. We can nurture these qualities in ourselves. To see the potential in ourselves. To notice that life is ever changing but that faith in our own process, the process of intimate connection, is what makes this life stronger, more potent. That as we set the qualities of intimacy, truth, honesty and nurturing for our families, so we set the tone of these qualities for ourselves too. That these tones can create the hope in our own lives.

Present day, late June 2017: I’m in the kitchen making tea after coming in late from a class. Herbie comes in, says hello and gives me a gentle hug. A sixteen year old boy, giving his dad a hug. I hold him a little tighter, close my eyes and breathe it in…

The post Navigating both a yoga practice and a family appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Writing the SYL blog when there is such raw uncertainty in the world is always a challenge for me. I’m aware that you may want to know about yoga related things, but when there are major national and international incidents going on it’s hard to turn away. However, I personally feel that yoga practice and the world are deeply inter-related and that yoga practice has the power to transform how we relate to all of life. From our own internal dilemmas to the dilemmas the wider world has to face.

Connecting in nature

We can use yoga practice to reach deeper into this human life. Our ongoing practical relationships with our physicality, feelings, emotions and ever-more subtle areas of experience mould each of us into a more sensory experiencing individual. We then get to move like this within the framework of all the connections we have with this world. Through practice we can begin to see ourselves as part of an incredibly complex, intimate, yet utterly beautiful pattern of nature. When we connect with this nature in us we can then notice that others have this same innate nature too, and perhaps see that we are a community of people cohabiting on this planet together. Cohabiting with others of the same nature.

We share experiences. We share lives. Yoga practice is as much about our relationship with others’ nature as it is about our own, and practice begins with recognising our own intimate beauty. If we do recognise it we can then see the beauty outside of ourselves, whilst continuing to notice and nurture the beauty within. So how can we develop this? How can we relate in this way?

A meeting of nervous systems

On the recent Spring Gathering in May that I taught with Greg Nardi and Kia Naddermier, a fellow teacher and participant Jess likened teaching yoga to two nervous systems meeting each other. Not people meeting, but nervous systems meeting. I’ve contemplated this since and I feel it has real value. If we can meet each other on this level we can relate to something deeper than character and ego. We can meet each other in natural relationships and perhaps feel something deeper going on. Because it is for us. Connecting on this sensory level allows us to get underneath the stories and viewpoints in our lives and connect as human beings.

Then if we work from the main principle of yoga, ahimsa (do no harm), we can begin to really listen inside and see how we can act in the world. And then how we can integrate with society, culture and politics so that we have choices in how we align our principles with those of others.

Communities without walls

In uncertain times it helps to recognise and establish these ideas and principles. We do relate through politics, society and culture as a national and global community and we should remember we are fortunate to live in a culture in which we have the choice, freedom and liberty to hold these ideals. When anything happens to make us feel vulnerable we naturally hold each other tighter and come together with those we know and recognise in solidarity, perhaps just for a moment. We use our communities to make sense of each other whilst navigating the world beyond the community. But how can we create communities with no walls, so that everyone can be part of the same one? How can we expand communities that are rich, inclusive, adaptable and based on the principles of love or ahimsa?

My dear mindfulness teacher, Cathy Mae Keralse, wrote to our mindfulness community, Clear Mind Institute, last week after the traumatic event in Manchester (which has since been turned into a blog) and she included these words:

“Courage, compassion and community naturally emerge at times of trouble. We seem instinctively charged to want to help alleviate the pain and suffering – the human spirit appears glorious and defies the social constructs that otherwise divide.

Atrocities and catastrophes shake up our world and commonly prompt us into action. As part of a longer-term response, one of the things we can do is to educate ourselves. To listen to people who talk about creating a better world for all. To listen to leaders who talk of love. To fathom how we might use our skills and talents through actions that give expression to our thoughts and words, our vision.”

The heart of yoga

I believe the heart of yoga practice, and life, is basic goodness, love and generosity. As they evolve in our lives these are the things that we can share, and the fruits of our practice we can give away in helping others. This is a place we can move from. How can our practice increase the love we have for our own hearts? Our practice needs to be about the evolution of our compassion for ourselves and the world and the ability to hold everyone we meet with the same love and tenderness we would want to be held with ourselves. If we share love in the world, surely that means we want to be loved ourselves in the same way.

With the many many different viewpoints around us, how can we hold ourselves accountable? By continuing to practice in a way that shines our own light. Cultivating our own hearts through ethical conduct, balance and imagination allows us to connect with things in us that shine. This then allows us to connect with the hearts of others, and others with us.

It’s not easy, but it’s possible. With practice.

The post How can yoga transform our relationship with life? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“Write a blog,” my friend Guy from Wildheart Media said. “It’ll be great, you’ll be good at it.”

It’s now been a year since I started a blog about our work here at Stillpoint Yoga London. It’s been a very interesting time to start a blog and a very interesting year too. I thought I would offer this particular post as a reflection of what I’ve learned over the last year and also off the back of one of our most successful blog posts yet – our interview with Anthony ‘Prem’ Carlisi.

Uncertain times

When I began the blog, in June 2016, I didn’t know that I would be learning the ropes during the most politically unstable time we’ve had in many, many years. But that’s how the year turned out and became one of the craziest years in my lifetime. What first began as conveying what we do at SYL and how we try to help, together with sharing a beautiful interview from my friend and fellow Mysore yoga teacher Kia Naddermier, turned into ‘how does our practice help us to meet the world when structures we live through suddenly become incredibly unbalanced?’ (see Is this the new normal and How to create fierce compassion for the world).

Overcoming obstacles

Writing a blog has been harder than I thought. In fact, I’ve personally found that writing regular content is a skill that has to be honed (this very post has taken me to the deadline to get finished!). The process goes something like this: finding regular topics, procrastinating, then comparing myself to other blog writers who I see as far superior in expression and feeling incredibly self-conscious compared to them (I’m looking at you Peg Mulqueen and Theodora Wildcroft). Let alone actually putting myself onto the world wide web and sharing my views on yoga and the world. All these things can play out when you’ve committed to sharing something about yourself and it can actually stop you from putting any words onto paper or the screen itself. This is what has stopped me in the past.

Yet, here’s the thing. There are so many people sharing their own personal viewpoints about yoga, about what it means to them, how it’s moved them, what they have learnt and what they want you to learn. Perhaps they all felt like me at some point: vulnerable and self-conscious about pressing ‘publish’, ‘send’ or ‘share’ for something they have created and written. Isn’t putting myself out there just me being another voice in the field and hoping that what I share perhaps connects with you in some way? We all have to start somewhere. And that’s part of what I connected with. Just start somewhere. Just start now.

So I thought I’d share a little of why I started this blog and, importantly, what I’ve learnt after a year of sharing pieces that I felt had value.

Why did I start this blog?

1. Because I felt that the way we share yoga here at SYL, and also the connections I had made, could be communicated beyond the physical space that we hold for people every day.

We work with many people and each person we meet has such a rich personal history of life that brings them to the point of connection with us. When we come to a yoga class, yoga centre or yoga retreat we are all in one way or another saying, “I’d like to see how this yoga practice can help me.” So we try to help. A Mysore room is limited though, with the time you have with practitioners and what you can express to the group. However, there are many, many individual connections and collaborative ideas that go unnoticed, but are based on real people having real relationship breakthroughs with themselves. It’s these breakthroughs and ideas that I can hopefully plant into people’s practices through the expression in my articles.

2. Because I felt more comfortable in my ability to convey what practising and teaching yoga means to me and to share it beyond the Stillpoint walls

After Ozge, co-founder of SYL, died at the beginning of 2012 I got my head down and focused on just teaching the existing community and all those who joined us. No frills. It was about nurturing the community. We were, and always have been, a room in a college where we hold space for other people to allow something to happen in their lives. The loss of Ozge changed me as a teacher and a practitioner. It made me see human vulnerability and the deep preciousness of life. But more importantly it showed me the power this practice has of waking us up. Really waking us up to life. Over the past few years I’ve noticed how much I’m being moved by the way we’re helping and the impact of that help. Sharing this movement was a natural next step for me.

3. Because it pushed me out of my comfort zone

It allowed me to not stand still and to share my voice in a different arena and, though challenged by that, I felt that I was ready to meet it. The internet is still a very vulnerable place to express yourself, but I feel that our yoga community has strength in its ability to listen and perhaps absorb each other’s’ voices. If there was any community to learn to blog in, then it’s this one. With Brexit and the Trump presidency we also had practitioners at SYL who were directly affected by these political waves and I felt that I couldn’t turn away from mentioning these as they arose. Not shying away from the conversation allowed me to see how these world events and yoga practice may meet. This felt uncomfortable but necessary.

4. Because I was encouraged

When you have people behind you it helps. I had my friend Guy from Wildheart Media, who had encouraged me in the first place, on my back to produce something every month. There’s nothing like being given a deadline to hold you to account. I also had friends and fellow bloggers who were happy to help, edit and proofread. Theodora Wildcroft has been a great resource for a few of the articles. With this encouragement comes the ability to start trusting in what you’ve written.

5. Because quite quickly after starting the blog I found creativity in me that I hadn’t touched for decades.

What came up as a response to writing a blog? The best thing – a profound and deep enjoyment in finding the ability to write again. In the English language. In communicating something meaningful. In being a student of words. Just words. In seeing how words could become an expression of my unique viewpoint of the world. I discovered a voice that I thought was lost since I was a child at school and I remembered that English classes was where I had thrived. I discovered that I so enjoyed sharing things in words, I became inspired by other writers. I found that I had always been inspired by other writers. I lost myself to the practice and creativity of writing. It’s been transformational. Part of me is sad for the lost years, in seeing what could have been if I had continued writing and not gone off the rails. But mainly, I am emboldened at finding it again. The creativity it offers. Seeing what comes.

The connection between yoga and creativity

And you know what? My yoga practice has led me to all of this.

My yoga practice has been at the base of this discovery. I had to move into something deeper in myself to see that there was creativity waiting to arise. To be able to rediscover this dormant part of me has been me reconnecting with this part of myself. Of nurturing communication and language that I can understand and resonate with through an inquisitive process. Which has also led to trust. Trust in the process. And trust in myself that I can share something in a way that resonates, that I feel I can stand by because it’s based on a truth. My personal, ongoing, discoverable truth.

If that works for you then I hope you enjoy what I have to offer. If not, then keep searching. The world wide web is an awfully big place. You’re bound to find something that resonates, somewhere.

The post 5 things I’ve learned from starting a yoga blog appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

Introduction by Scott Johnson

The thing I love most about being involved in the world of yoga is people. I’m always so fascinated by the many reasons people come to practice yoga, why they start, why they continue, the struggles they have, the victories the feel they’ve achieved. All are part of a key that makes up the intricate nature of people’s lives and the discoveries they have about themselves. For me this interest is wide, whether they are practitioners at SYL, personal colleagues or senior teachers who I look up to. I see that the study of yoga in our lives allows for the play of the world to open up to us, then the practice of yoga is how we play. How people play intrigues me so much and there are some people I’ve met through the play of yoga who really stand out in my memory. Anthony ‘Prem’ Carlisi is one of these people.

Prem began practising ashtanga yoga in 1978 and was part of the first waves of western practitioners who spent a lot of personal time with Sri K Pattabhi Jois. I met him in 2008 after reading his book The Only Way Out Is In, a meditation on his life as an ashtanga yoga and Ayurveda practitioner. It was a great read which inspired me to contact him and connect as a yoga student. As a result I ended up hosting him and his wife Radha for a UK workshop in 2008 and then again in 2009. They came to stay with our family – myself, Louise and our three boys, Herbie, Noah and Ethan. The boys were young and I remember he spent a long time just chasing Ethan, who was then 4, around the house. There seemed something quite vital about him, childlike even, that perhaps years of practice had honed. When I see this in people it fascinates me.

Prem and I have been friends ever since, taking an interest in each other’s lives from afar – me in London, he in Bali – and between that time and 2012 we regularly kept in touch. Then in the summer of 2013 he sent me news that his daughter Shanti had died in a car accident. You can never be ready to hear information like that from a friend. All I could do was send our condolences and offer love and support. We lost contact for a while after that. SYL was busy and Prem, with his wife Radha, was growing his Ashtanga Yoga Bali community. But I would continually check in every now and again to see how he was.

We reconnected last year, in 2016, and I asked him if he would talk about his life in an interview for our blog. Importantly, I wanted to ask him about how yoga has shaped his life from the beginning to where he finds himself now, after nearly 40 years of practice. Also, being one of the first western practitioners of ashtanga yoga, how he has seen the evolution of the practice as more people have taken it on in that same 40 year time frame. And in a very tender way, with a little space now since Shanti’s tragic passing, if and how his yoga practice has helped him with grief.

What transpired – and what now follows – is Prem’s very personal, very passionate view of the world of ashtanga yoga and all its intricacies. He shares how he is navigating the changing nature and evolution both of the teaching of ashtanga yoga and how it is playing out in his own life. Enjoy…!

– Scott Johnson

What compelled you to begin your yoga practice all those years ago and what kept you going? Perhaps you could give us a brief history?

I was not interested in yoga at the time. I was 21 and fresh out of university, wondering what was next. I was approached by some friends of mine saying that this “Ashtanga Yoga” they were doing was the best thing ever. They knew I was athletic and very physically oriented, so I went to appease them. I walked into a full room of people practising. It blew my mind watching them flow from one pose to the next with such grace and ease. I was hooked the moment I entered into this sacred space.

I began practising the day after observing my first class in the autumn of 1978 and I haven’t stopped since. I radically changed everything in my life from that point on. I became a vegetarian and cut out all drugs and alcohol. Three months after I started, Guruji (Pattabhi Jois) came to the US from India and began teaching at our Yoga Shala in Encinitas, California for around 6 months. The following year I travelled to Mysore, South India, to be with him for 3-4 months in the autumn of 1979. I made an annual pilgrimage to study and practice with him for years until I got married. Once my kids came into the picture it was more difficult for me to get away for extended stays. I did, however, see him on subsequent tours of California and Hawaii during the 80s and 90s, where he would stay for months at a time. When the kids were older I began to go regularly again to Mysore.

I had a very close connection to Guruji and he treated me like part of his extended family.  He gave me the name “Raghava” on my first trip to Mysore in 1979. From that moment forward he always referred to me using this name. It’s another name for the revered king Rama from the epic tale, the Ramayana. I was always given preference over the hoards of students who came. Needless to say, he was like a devoted father figure. He helped me tremendously in those critical developmental early years. He kept me inspired and enthusiastic during the hardest of times.

What has also kept me practising for decades is the tremendous physical benefits that I have received. I’m now at the ripe age of 61 but I certainly don’t feel or look that age, and I give most of this credit to yoga. Along with this has been the deeply gratifying pleasure I’ve had in sharing it with thousands of others. It has been and still is a rewarding experience,  offering one of the greatest gifts to humanity… radiant health.

Can you tell me more about those early years with Guruji in Mysore when the numbers were small? Did he give people different things related to the practice? And did he really have a little pad that he was making notes on about you all?

The early years with Guruji were magic! He was so personal. I got to know him intimately in the Mysore yoga shala and in his home. I spent numerous hours just hanging out with the family – his wife Ama, daughter Saraswati and grandchildren Sharmila and Sharath. I shared with him many things about my life. I asked many questions and he told me what he could in broken English. He knew me inside and out. He addressed me differently than others. He made a point to connect with me as an individual. He knew when to be stern or gentle. He respected me for who I was. He would make me repeat the most challenging poses, the ones I hated the most. He knew when I was truly weak or just plain lazy. He was a master at reading the human body/mind. He was the ultimate “coach” or teacher in the true sense of the word. He of course pushed all of us to our limits. He was altering things all the time to test us. He knew how to get the most out of us. From his teaching in this way, I learned for myself what was a real need and when my mind was messing with me. This was one of the greatest gifts he gave me. He empowered me and gave me the strength I needed to discover on my own what is real. From this direct transmission I have been able to carry on the tradition with his blessings. If I did not have this direct experience it would have turned into a “religion”.

This is what I see now happening to this method. Students who are becoming teachers are merely imitating what Guruji said in the past, or what Sharath is repeating now, as “the way” or the “gospel truth”. It is not something they know deep within themselves. It does not come from their experience. It is mimicking like a parrot. This is what I mean by “religious”. It has  become dead. There is no life to it! Even now you see it in the current name of the yoga shala in Mysore – it is called “Krishna Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute”. The original name was “Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute”. There was no ownership over ashtanga yoga or authoritative demand put on you. You didn’t have to memorise or do it like he did. It was ongoing research which he did and we did along with him.

Also, please note that not everyone in the “old days” became teachers. There was not necessarily a desire to teach. We all started with a passion to learn more about ourselves.  Some had the propensity to teach and Guruji saw this and encouraged it. He was not handing out certificates. He personally told people to teach back then. The concept and business of “Teacher Trainings” in all traditions is complete non-sense! This is where everything in the yoga world went downhill. It is the biggest money maker in the yoga business. Everyone wants to be a teacher. And almost every yoga studio around the world is advocating their teacher training programs to pay the bills. The advent of teacher trainings became the downfall of the integrity of teaching and passing it on. It has diluted the ashtanga method as well.

Guruji did go up into his office every day and write notes about our classes (asana/pranayama). He was formulating research for his institute (the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute). He did not write on a pad in the room but he went upstairs into his tiny office. Manju Jois (Guruji’s son and rightful heir to the kingdom) reaffirmed this and said he had stacks of notes that he wrote over the decades. He also told us that Guruji made up the sequences or series (Primary/Intermediate and Advanced) according to how he saw fit. I can attest to this, as the “original” way in which he taught students pre-70s/80s was quite different than today! We never had a led class in the early days; he only taught “Mysore style”. He introduced the led class after the numbers of students grew on his tours. He varied the order and method as the years went on as well. It was not written on banana leaves and eaten by ants! This was a myth that he perpetuated for years to keep it mysterious. It gave the allure of this ancient method from the yogis in Tibet. There are many sources to back this. You can do your own research or talk to Manju and any of the other older students.

This does not take away the potent energy around the method of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Asana practice that was created from Pattabhi Jois. Look at how BKS Iyengar and TKS Desikachar (Krishnamacharya’s son) taught asana practice – completely different to Pattabhi Jois, yet they all refer to Krishnamacharya as their Guru! They all took what they learned and made it into their own method – based on sound Hatha Yoga principles (bandha/breath/chakras, etc.) – but arranged as they saw fit. This is why I’m bringing it up now. We need to approach this scientifically and look at how all these yoga asana geniuses in their own right taught us various tools for health. Nothing more and nothing less. Asana and pranayama practice is for your health! There is nothing spiritual in it! They deal with the chakras (energetic centres) below the eyes. We miss the mark if we take the physical as spiritual. It is a foundation for a sound body/mind in the eyes of the yogis. The spiritual path begins from the eye centre, the third eye or sixth chakra. Guruji wanted to teach more but he never felt we were ready for the higher limbs of ashtanga yoga.

Manju told me directly after Guruji’s death that he wanted to teach the other limbs of ashtanga but we westerners were obsessed with the exterior, only asanas. We wanted more and more of the gymnastic asana stuff. We were good at it, just like many are now. Just a note about pranayama as well: He taught only the most elite of the asana crowd the method of pranayama. Only those of us who had completed the advanced asana series were allowed to practice pranayama under his guidance. What is important here is that we learned only the foundation of ashtanga yoga. The main method of yoga is an inner journey. We missed the boat! This is why I explored other aspects of yoga, since I knew deep inside this was not the only way. I felt stuck with only this method.

Meditation is the key that unlocks the mystery within. Intuition is seated at the eye centre, the sixth chakra. The sixth centre is where we enter into the spiritual realm. We make contact with the seat of the soul here. The soul force is what animates the mind/body complex. Asana and pranayama, along with yama/niyama, are preliminary steps to focusing the mind/body to go within! Guruji emphasised the first four limbs. The higher levels of ashtanga were not encouraged until these were mastered. He felt if you did not still the restless body/mind it would be impossible to sit. This is true to a certain extent but we spent way too much energy on cleaning the vessel instead of filling it up.

The focus needs to be elevated by withdrawal of the senses and concentration (pratyhara/dharana). Dhyana is the stillness obtained by the pull within. Samadhi is the effect of perfecting your concentration and locating yourself behind the eye centre. From there it is all grace. We then travel home. The entrance into the realm of spirit is at the tenth gate or door, the eye centre. Jesus Christ has even said, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22). He also said, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7). The nine doors below the eye centre are the opening to the world (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, mouth, genitals and anus). Again, this deals with all the chakras below. Asana and pranayama work with these energy centres. The entrance into the spiritual realms lies at the eye centre! When we sit and withdraw our attention to behind the eyes we leave our physical body. We go through a process of dying while alive! Again, don’t just believe me… discover for yourself if what I’m saying is true or not. Never believe anyone! You must be able to verify it. This is why I have a problem with the current teaching. Everyone is just “following the leader”. Instead we must open our third eye to truly see. Unfortunately the “re-search” has stopped in Mysore! Some of the brave, courageous souls continue on with the tradition as it was meant to be. The rest follow the herd… BLINDLY! Third eye blind!

How did you see the growth of Mysore over the years, when more and more people came and there was a loss of a close intimacy with Guruji – did that change things?

Over the years I was more and more reluctant to go. The number of students swelled to unmanageable amounts. Guruji could not possibly handle everyone. His original room in the Lakshmipuram area of Mysore held only 10 students. When I first went there were only 7-8 of us at any one time! Then slowly more and more people came to Mysore. He would start class at 4am and sometimes continue until 12 noon! So students would be lined up the stairs of his three-storey house all the way to the rooftop, waiting for hours to get in the room.  Again, I was fortunate to get preferred treatment. He always gave me a first class slot which meant I got him fresh with no waiting! When he moved to Gokulam it became a showroom of exhibitionists. The energy in the room became less respectful of the practice and more about how good you looked. Everyone started to lose sight of why we were there. It became a circus! The most advanced students – the ones who could do advanced postures – were looked upon as Gods. Everyone aspired to be or look like them. If being able to perform advanced poses is spiritual then we all need to go touch the feet of Cirque du Soleil acrobats. People were also fighting to get in the room! There was only enough space for 70-80 students. You got little or no help with anything! My last trip to Mysore was just before Guruji passed in 2009. I hear it continues to be run the same way with Sharath. Everyone seems to be chasing the pose and the piece of paper you get to teach.

How has it been for you since the passing of Guruji in 2009? How did his death affect you and has your practice and teaching changed? Do you still share the way he taught you?

When Guruji died Radha and I were teaching in Hamburg, Germany. I knew he was not feeling well. I told Radha one morning I had a vision in the night of him passing. I checked my email and it was confirmed. The evening I felt him leave his body I got this profound feeling of responsibility to uphold his teachings. A wave of energy surged in me that morning and afternoon teaching in Hamburg. I somehow felt Guruji working through me from that point on.

I continue to share with students what I have learned from him. I also add to this by sharing what I have learned from my own extensive research into this practice and beyond. I have not altered the essence one bit! I have, however, added my own insights into what I have personally experienced over almost 40 years of study and practice. I have had the rare opportunity of working with thousands of students as well. I know this method works if you administer it correctly. It is like being a true doctor. Someone who respects each individual and gives them the appropriate medicine if needed.

In ancient times yogis who taught asana were attuned to their students. Now most yoga classes have become merely aerobic stretching with music. A far cry from its origin. Most practitioners are not practising what they preach. It has become a watered down version of its true form. Back in the day when I learned, we practised for the sake of deepening our consciousness. Now it is a goal-oriented, outer chase for more. It is a sad but true direction modern yoga has taken. Even within the ashtanga world it has become a rarity to enter a class with respect for the student as the number one priority.

You are also an Ayurveda practitioner and therapist. Was it Guruji’s influence that compelled you to study and practice this discipline? And how does it blend with the ashtanga Mysore practice that you share?

Yes I am considered an Ayurvedic doctor in the eyes of my teacher Dr Vasant Lad. Dr Lad is world renowned in the field of Ayurvedic studies and has authored many books on the subject. He also has an institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Ayurvedic Institute. I studied with him closely for almost 4 years back in 1983. I have since then incorporated the wisdom of Ayurveda in everything I teach. Guruji was very fond of Ayurveda and we discussed it over the many years we were together. He had studied it in school as well. Krishnamacharya was also an advocate of this science. Guruji mentioned it many times in his sessions with us, saying how important it was to study it. I was one of the few who really took him up on it. I feel it is very important as a “Mysore style” teacher to understand Ayurveda. It gives you the ability to address each student individually and appropriately according to their dosha/age/enviroment/season, etc. If you don’t understand Ayurveda it becomes “generic” medicine and a one-size-fits-all method. This is not how it was taught to me from Guruji! Nor is it the way yoga practice was taught in its original form. You do not need to become an Ayurvedic doctor to apply the basic principles to your own life and living.  I do feel it is a prerequisite to learning this method of ashtanga yoga, especially for teachers.  If you cannot distinguish the difference between individuals and their specific needs, how can you possibly expect the results to be positive? Please enquire within and notice if this resonates or not.

You have built ashtanga yoga communities in different parts of the world (Sri Lanka and Bali). Can you speak a little about this process of setting up and growing a Mysore yoga community?

I have had the opportunity to build many communities of ashtangis over the years. One of my first was in Phoenix, Arizona. I helped build a thriving community there when I left in the mid 90s. I went on to help my brother Eagle with Pineapple Yoga in Kauai, Hawaii. Eagle is now in his 15th year of teaching there. I had a retreat centre in Sri Lanka which was opened in the year of the Tsunami! It was not a good start to what turned into quite a story (read my book for more on this). It was, however, a rewarding experience on many levels. From the standpoint of growing a Mysore yoga community in Sri Lanka, it allowed people to come and practice in a setting like a resort. We provided everything. Not recommended, though, as I felt like I was running an adult day care centre most of the time! I had too many duties around other things that I was not interested in (food, housing, entertainment, etc.)

My centre in Bali, Ashtanga Yoga Bali Research Center (in honour of Guruji), is set up very much like his was. Students come from around the world and stay for around one month.  We have that as a minimum requirement. We have many repeat students learning and growing with the centre. We are doing our own research on the practice. We are using the techniques we have learned over the decades to help students in their understanding of personal challenges. Everyone has unique issues so we address them accordingly using the method of ashtanga yoga and Ayurveda. When they leave us they feel empowered and ready to return home with renewed vigour for continuing on. We want everyone to experience how it can be done when they return home. We are not a retreat centre or vacation yoga centre. We help people recognise the importance of daily practice when they go home.

This is where centres like Stillpoint Yoga London keep the flow going and support the local community. It’s like what going to church was meant to be – a place of worship within that transforms you. You actually did something that made a difference. Hence the most famous saying from Guruji, “Practice and all is coming”. It is all about the actual practice, done regularly and consistently, when change happens. It is not a wish or a dream.  It is participating fully to unravel the layers of ignorance held in our body/mind. Part of the prayer that we do at the beginning of the practice states Samsara Hala Hala (the poisonous nature of the mind loop). Really it is a “mind” practice and the body is the mechanism with which we play to shift the mind. All the tools we use in the practice are to get the mind to co-operate with the body. The breath is one bridge to this connection. Bandha is another. Dristhi is yet another. Guruji spoke of this a lot! This is why his emphasis was so strongly physical and asana oriented. He told us to start here. Our main laboratory was the body/mind. Change your breathing and the way you shape shift your body to change the nature of consciousness. It laser focused our minds to then be able to enter into the higher stages.  For, without a calm body and mind, there was no way you were going to be able to sit still.  From there he wanted us to do our own research on the other limbs.

I’d like to touch on something very personal – you tragically lost your daughter Shanti a few years back. Can you talk about that and how/if your spiritual/yoga practice helped you in any way? How are you now?

The loss of my daughter Shanti has been the most devastating thing that has ever happened to me. I was completely and utterly unprepared for this. I had two wonderful daughters who I loved and cherished. I was at the top of my personal and professional life. I had just gotten married to the most amazingly beautiful woman, Radha. I had successfully built a thriving ashtanga/Ayurveda centre in Bali with her. I had all the money I needed. I was healthy beyond my wildest imagination. I had everything anyone could ever want in life.

Then I received the news… Radha and I had just returned from California after being married on June 21, 2013. It was July 18th, 2013 when we landed at our home in Bali. I opened my computer and my youngest daughter Mira had emailed me with the subject line, “CALL ME IMMEDIATELY”. The pit of my stomach dropped and I immediately called her.  She answered and told me the tragic news that Shanti had died in a car accident. Needless to say, I have been deeply affected to this day.

Has my ashtanga yoga asana and pranayama practice helped me with my grief and loss? Yes and no. I have had to go through hell and back! It forced me to look more deeply than I could possibly ever imagine. It left me naked and feeling alone. I got severely depressed at one point. I have had to come to the absolute bottom of myself to rise up again. Thank God I had this practice to keep me relatively healthy through the hardest thing any human being can possibly endure. Everyone has told me over and over again that it is the most horrific event that can possibly happen to anyone. I would agree!

My meditation and spiritual teacher, Ishwar Puriji, has helped me the most. He came into my life when I was ready to give up and quit. I was sent a link to watch a Youtube video of him. I watched several talks that he gave about meditation and life. He touched me deeply and I had to meet him as soon as possible. He helped me by initiating me into the path of Surat Shabd Yoga (Yoga of the Soul Current). This soothed my aching heart and fed my soul. It attached me to the healing balm within. Of course, my mind still tries to sabotage my discovery but I have Ishwar there with me all the time. I believe everything in our lives is pre-ordained. This was orchestrated perfectly for me to awaken inside the real meaning of this life and where my true home lies. I’ve now explored more intensely than I could ever have done if this had not happened. Now I can look at it as a gift whereas before it was a living hell!

How has the practice changed for you over the years? Importantly, now you’ve been practising for over 30 years what do you feel you’ve learned, and perhaps are still learning?

It has changed gradually as I have aged. In my early 20s I was very enthusiastic about the postures and accomplishing the advanced series. I did this quite quickly and easily. I was extremely athletic so this was a great challenge for me. I had been a star athlete in school and was an avid surfer. My attraction was purely physical at the time I learned. After I had mastered many of the advanced poses I was left with “now what?” This led me to explore more of the mental and spiritual aspects of the practice, but this did not happen overnight!  As I’ve said, the most profound awakening came from the loss of my daughter Shanti.

Of course, the wisdom of being an “older” practitioner/teacher has given me the added benefit of being able to give the proper perspective for beginners to advanced asana practitioners. I can see the overly enthusiastic young up-and-coming practitioners getting obsessed with the form as I did. It is only natural and part of the process. I can encourage them to move on, but also know they have to go through their own process to figure this out.  It took me years to see how ridiculous all the gymnastic poses are for any deep realisation/ spiritual gain or better health for that matter. I “wasted” so much energy in chasing this! But again, it was part of my growth process, being young and ignorant.

Now in my 60s I have an asana practice that fits and suits my age. I am not busting out advanced series poses, nor do I have a desire to do so. I have an appropriate set of poses consisting of Surya Namaskara, standing and seated poses from Primary and Intermediate that work for me. I am feeling great! I just recently went through a complete western medical exam in Bangkok, Thailand. I had every possible thing tested and the results were positive. The doctor was impressed with my results. I laughed to myself and chuckled out loud as we went through the lab results together. Every organ was working perfectly and all blood results were in order. Although I must admit, these last few years have been the hardest on my overall health, I can attest this clean bill of health is down to my ashtanga practice, along with a good diet (healthy but not obsessive) and a good sense of humour.

I have learned and proved to myself that this practice works if you use it correctly. Correctly means according to the principles of Ayurveda (dosha/age/environment/work/family life, etc.) You must address the person as a unique individual! It is out of deep respect and reflection to honour each human being with the utmost care. Most teachers have no idea what they are doing because they are not aware of their own needs. How can they be sensitive to their students? It is in epidemic proportions the amount of himsa (harm) to the individual using this tool of ashtanga yoga incorrectly! My job as an elder in the tradition with wisdom about this ashtanga yoga asana/pranayama practice is to share what I know from my experience.  What is being proposed now is a generic, robot-like version of the practice. It serves the overall population poorly because of the insensitive nature in which it is being taught. Hence, the emphasis I put on the Ayurvedic approach in using it as a tool for enhancing balance for each individual. This is the most appropriate way to address each unique human being in a group situation. Mysore style self practice was devised as a method to teach groups of people while still adhering to individual needs. There is no other way to do this in a group!  This is unfortunately not the case at most ashtanga shalas around the world.

We live in a different time and place than the origin of this system. It must be adapted to suit the current situation and individual. This asana practice is a “householder” practice. It was taught by men (Pattabhi Jois/Krishnamacharya) who had families, not wandering monks or sadhus. It is based on sound principles that can be done every day on a regular basis to help you live your life to the fullest. To be better at whatever you have the propensity towards. Whether you are young or old, male or female, there is a way to do this posture practice. This yoga will keep you strong and resilient beyond your wildest dreams. I can again attest to this from my own experience and from teaching thousands of students. I have seen the effect it has on them. I know of no other form of exercise that addresses every organ, muscle, tissue, bone, blood, etc. It is by far the best there is. It is keeping the body temple clean and clear for the higher practices of worship within through meditation starting at the eye centre. If you know of something better please tell me!

So, what’s next…?

My mission at Ashtanga Yoga Bali Research Center and abroad is to teach this method appropriately with wisdom. I know I can pass this on in the most beneficial way if I take the time to explain and demonstrate to the world how this can better serve them in their lives. I want people to benefit as I have for almost 40 years but there must be wisdom applied to this very powerful method, otherwise more and more people are going to be damaged inside and out.

I’m committed to keeping the research alive! Religions are dangerous! Help me to keep ashtanga yoga alive! Please do your own research and help me to keep this method from dying completely. There is still a spark left. If you explore with an “open mind” you will see if what I’m saying is true or not. The real work begins from the inside, not out. You are merely cleaning the vessel when doing only asana and pranayama. If you’re stuck only on asana you’re making an ass-ana out of yourself! I wrote a book that is perfectly titled The Only Way Out Is In. There is no other way out of this rollercoaster ride of a life we have all been given. We came for an experience in the physical realm. I’m done with it. Are you? Again, see if what I say is true or not.

The true meaning of life awaits you right behind the eye… not the ego “I”. There is a battle between the dark force and the light. The positive pole at the eye centre and the negative pole at the root, muladhara centre. The force is with you if you move towards the light. I encourage each and every one of you to use your inherent “common sense”. My spiritual teacher Ishwar Puriji has said, “Common sense is very uncommon”. I agree wholeheartedly. Cultivate your intuition which resides at the eye centre. It is a built-in bullshit meter. It is the override within the Matrix. It is beyond the body/mind. It is rising to the level where you witness and observe clearly how to use your vehicle. Our mind is running the show and it is the negative power. The soul is the witness. It is Krishna steering our chariot, holding the reins of our five senses. Let Krishna steer and sit back and enjoy the ride! Otherwise you are doomed to repeat over and over again the same mistakes. This is the real meaning of Samsara Hala Hala.

What I have shared with you is my own personal experience. I know this information is contrary to popular belief but I’m okay with being a rebel with a cause. Are you?

To hear more from Prem and his perspective on ashtanga yoga, watch this video interview he gave to Stu Girling in August 2016:

The post Continuing the research to keep ashtanga yoga alive appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

The world seems like such a crazy place at the moment. Things are happening that are like shifting sands daily. What to do? Keep practising, right? But what are we practising for? To become numb to the outpouring? We need a practice, but why? Perhaps to help us look after ourselves through all of this.

My last post was about softening into practice, about letting go. What happens when we soften? And what can we become open to when softening occurs?

Deep intimacy

Ashtanga yoga practice has many, many layers. All these layers are, in some small way, unique to the practitioner and evolve in their own time. You need drive, purpose and resilience to keep going on this particular path of personal self discovery:

• Drive: to continue to turn up each day to discover something about yourself.
• Purpose: to have the inclination to be open to discovery as it arises.
• Resilience: to be able to keep going when things get tough.

This is how I see the practice. Making the same shapes with this body day after day, month after month and year after year allows for a deep intimacy with yourself to evolve. “Allows” being the operative word because it is up to us to see how the practice changes us and moves us as we develop through the years of our lives. To develop a practice over a long period of time is to cultivate awareness as we change, as our bodies change and as the world changes around us.

We have a particular student here at SYL who I have been working with over the past few years. Her name is Tina and she’s happily agreed to let us share her story. She has really taken the practice on in a powerful way and it has been such a pleasure to work with her. Last year, in 2016, she came on retreat with us. I delivered an afternoon session on mindful practice and she took on board some of what I taught into her own self practice the next morning. It was a revelation for her. And not an easy one. She fed back to me that for the first time she had experienced the breath fully in her practice and that it was powerful enough to have moved her greatly. That for the first time she had felt what practice meant in her body.

And the outcome of all this, the teaching for her? She had to protect her breath. Rather than trying to achieve a posture through stretching, reaching or pushing herself, she discovered a need to achieve the posture and not let it affect her ability to breathe fully. And not affect her ability to feel.

Protecting the breath

This changed her practice completely. She realised that her trying to achieve a posture and make it look a certain way was getting in the way of her fully feeling the breath coming in and coming out. Her practice now was to protect this ability to breathe fully, and make it not so much about achieving a pose a certain way.

What a beautiful way to understand oneself! What a beautiful way to understand and develop your practice! Tina was upset that she hadn’t seen it like this before. I supported her with the understanding that her whole practice had brought her to this point. Understandably, after that experience she had a number of powerful realisations and these have now empowered her life greatly. She came up against the thing that we put aside first: the ability to feel. It is the ability to feel in our practice that can move it beyond the scope of just trying to make shapes, to really opening us up to our lives.

Tina realised that coming to practice is about making time for herself so that perhaps new discoveries can open up in her life. That for each of us taking the time to contemplate through a physical, embodied yoga practice offers us the ability to look at ourselves differently and notice what arises. It took a number of years for Tina to discover that for her the practice was about protecting her breath. Now she is able to take her practice further with this very powerful and deep realisation.

Importantly, she had to go through a personal crisis to see this, but it has ultimately allowed her to feel kinder and more compassionate to herself. That now, even though she may feel that some days are really tough because of an unknown fatigue limiting her practice, she knows that turning up allows her to find herself. To feel her breath in her body, even if doing the standing poses are hard.

Protecting the breath, letting the breath be the thing that we cultivate rather than pushing into postures, allows there to be a gentler quality to how we notice our practice. When there is this gentler focus we can then see ourselves in a more open way.

Practising with kindness

So, ultimately Tina found that when she turned her quality to protecting her breath it changed something in her. It allowed her to take more care of herself. To be kinder to herself. This was a great realisation for her. She really noticed for the first time that she was important. This then transformed the way she moved through her world.

It takes a moment to change the way we look at ourselves. It takes practice, though, to realise we have the ability to make that momentary change in our lives. That we can develop the quality to be able to look at ourselves in a kind and compassionate way. Can we develop a quality in our yoga practice that allows for kindness to arise? Importantly, can we cultivate a quality that allows for kindness to be the base of our experience of the world? If we can be kind to ourselves, we can then be truly kind to others.

Starting the day with the focus that we are cultivating a quality of kindness can transform how we move, how we act and how we relate. That we are truly important. That not only are we protecting our breath, we are protecting the quality of the most subtle part of our life. We can perhaps then learn to protect ourselves from the negative things in the world, and open up to the world in a kind and compassionate way.

The post Are you protecting your breath? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

It’s obvious to say that ashtanga yoga is a very physical practice. That it develops deep focus, a strong will, stamina and a vibrant and healthy body. But it’s worth remembering that these attributes really help to change the awareness we have of ourselves, both in positive and negative ways. Positive because it helps wake us up to new feelings, sensations and processes in the body. Negative because if we are not careful it can reinforce old subtle habits. But to develop a daily, or very regular, personal ashtanga yoga practice shows a high commitment and regard to changing something about ourselves. And either way, with the right intention, that’s no bad thing.

In my experience of teaching daily Mysore self practice classes for the last 7 years, I have seen many people undergo real change in their lives. I have also seen those who can give themselves a really hard time. Just as ashtanga yoga can help wake us up, if we are not careful it can also help to reinforce the things that we find negative about ourselves. We can actually use the practice as a stick to continually beat ourselves up with.

So, when people come to share their practice with us at SYL we help them to nurture the practice in a strong and focused way. But, at the same time, we see if we can help them to soften the edges around the intensity of how a traditional ashtanga practice can be. We help them to cultivate a softness in their strength.

When I say soften, I’m not saying that the ashtanga practice doesn’t stop being strong, direct and focused. As I mentioned earlier, it will always be a very physical practice. But it’s a practice that we use to wake us up to the body; its limitations as well as its possibilities. I’m saying that we can use our intention to stop pushing ourselves so much and nurture our practice in a different, deeper way.

We can gently nurture our attitude and use the practice to listen to what our body is saying. There is deep intelligence in everything that we feel, everything that we see, everything that we are. We can practice in a way that is always uncovering this process.

Perhaps, then, it’s about how you practice. About your intention. About deep listening rather than blind faith. One of my favourite quotes from my long term teacher and friend John Scott, who has just spent two weeks with us here at SYL, is when he says that the ashtanga yoga method has 3 faiths:

Faith in the method | Faith in the teacher | Faith in yourself

I believe that faith in the method of the practice is not only about trusting that the method of ashtanga yoga will work for us, but also having faith that the internal intelligence around how we cultivate our yoga practice will arise too. Remember, this practice is challenging us to wake up now rather than meeting some far-off point in the distance when everything will hopefully be okay.

So, here are 5 suggestions that you can perhaps integrate into your practice to bring a softer, lighter and more open quality to how you feel and experience your ashtanga yoga practice.

1. Begin with stillness

Sit. Breathe quietly before you begin your practice.

So, rather than putting your mat down and going straight into the chant and sun salutations, sit quietly before you practice. Whether counting your breath or just noticing its rhythm and flow, allow for mental space to be noticed, acknowledged, accepted and perhaps spaciousness to be cultivated.

This spacious feeling, with breath awareness, can then be channeled into your practice and allow you to gauge when you slip away from that breath connection. Postural, physical yoga is there to trap our awareness and challenge our perception of the present moment. Sitting at the beginning and nurturing presence sets a beautiful tone to experience a fuller connection within your practice.

2. Widen your listening

Go beyond the inhale/exhale and notice the quiet space between the breaths.

One of the foundational practices of ashtanga yoga is free breathing. We use this as a tool to tie our awareness to the sound of the breath. But there is no end to how we can become awake to breathing in our practice.

A lovely way to keep your intention wide and open is to focus on the spaces between the breaths, or what I call the pause. When you focus on the pauses between the inhale and the exhale you expand how you connect with your breath. This cultivates a wider but softer approach and inevitably leads to experiencing the breath in a fuller, more complete way. This also helps to nurture the physical, spatial transition between vinyasas, where the movement actually blends into the next movement. See if you can hold your attention there too. Where the vinyasa meets the vinyasa, cultivate space.

3. Let go

Notice when you are pushing and stop. Let it go, feel the body, then start again.

Drop the ‘trying to get somewhere’ idea in asana. Stop forcing into postures and feel your way in. Remember, a yoga practice is a long term thing that has no end. The beauty of the practice is it will take care of you if you let it. Forcing a body into position can create negative patterns that can lead to injury.

Observe when you are forcing, when there is pain, and know that this is a trigger to change something. Pause. Notice. Then move differently. See if there is a different, more open way to achieve, and sense, a position. Use the exact feeling of forcing the issue to stop and notice the opposite. Let go.

4. Slow down

Slow the practice or vinyasa down.

There really is no rush. Feel. Take your time. Sometimes we can lose our way in our practice by moving too quickly. We can notice this by the way our breath and body lose synchronicity, or we struggle for breath. We can skip vinyasas or perhaps sidestep a certain position we don’t like. Meeting a posture or vinyasa with awareness helps us to open up into it. If you’ve bypassed a certain position, acknowledge it, then meet it again with a fuller, wider focus and try accessing the breath. This allows there to be more presence cultivated around it.

5. Remember why

Remember why you are practising yoga.

Every now and then, drop into the experience of the practice as it moves through you. Because that is what it is doing – moving through you. You eventually don’t practice ashtanga yoga, you become ashtanga yoga. Notice the moment. Witness the breath and body united in motion. In harmony. Then become that experience without pushing, forcing or harming yourself. Let the practice unfold in a beautifully open way. Importantly, remember what you are cultivating the practice for. What are the fruits of practice to become in your life…?

These are my suggestions. I have personally found them to be a profound way to deepen something that is already deep. And to help me meet the world in a more honest and open way.

The post 5 ways to soften your Ashtanga yoga practice appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“Samasthiti…”

Guruji called. Then 150 practitioners came together in unison, with one unified intention.

“Om, vande gurunam charanaravinde…”

This is how I remember the times I spent with Sri K Pattabhi Jois in the last decade when he came to teach in London. The call, the response. The joining together in breath and attention was palpable when the guru called us up.

When Guruji made that powerful call it felt like he was calling me out of my unconscious mind. ‘‘Samasthiti – your breath, your body. You remember. No more practice. Pay attention…

… Wake up.”

That booming call has stayed with me. I make the same call each morning to the practitioners at SYL when we come together to chant at 07:10am.

A unifying call to attention, to come together and chant. To remember, individually and collectively, why we are here. For just a few moments in the practice room, to join together as one and remember why we come.

Equal standing

Samasthiti is commonly translated as sama (equal) and sthiti (standing). We are standing equally. Balanced and still. We are noticing the complex framework of what it actually means just to stand with equal balance, equal stillness, in that one moment. We are seeing how balanced and still we are in our lives. In fact we could also say the opposite is true and that we can also notice how out of balance we actually are. We notice it so we can perhaps begin to find balance.

In ashtanga vinyasa yoga, samasthiti is held at the beginning and end of each posture*. Because we are only ever in samasthiti for one breath we can find that the posture is both a transition and a point of reference. And that one breath point of reference we find ourselves in is an exhale. A letting go. We are returning to equal standing, to balance and stillness. To neutral. Where neutral means to see what opens up when we let go into ourselves. It is from here that we move.

A deeper meaning

With the understanding of neutral the meaning of samasthiti can be a deep practice all of its own. The intention when you begin your practice, from standing, creates the tone of what is to follow. When you are at the front of the mat, in neutral, are you ready? Samasthiti – then be ready. But be ready for what?

Ready to move

Be ready for what takes you off balance. Be ready to keep your focus steady when it wobbles. Be ready to not turn away from whatever comes up. Be ready. Ready to move. To move where? To move into wherever arises. But most importantly…

Be ready to be moved

I see samasthiti not only as a posture but as an awareness practice all of its own. In fact as awareness itself. And the awareness of ourselves in posture is really what I feel we are cultivating through our yoga practice. The awareness of samasthiti is the still and balanced focus of the whole practice that follows.

Notice where your attention moves. And what moves your attention. See that this movement is subtle and that practice moves us in a deep way. We know the body moves. Look deeper. Feel deeper.

Ready to move on

For me, this is the practice we are taking off the mat. The deeper held focus of seeing that it’s not only my yoga practice I am being ready for. I am cultivating that same readiness in my wider life too.

The ripple of ‘Samasthiti – Ready to move’ is the real teaching that I take from my yoga practice. That I am ready for the movement of change whenever it comes. Ready to meet people, ready to feel, ready to engage, ready to listen, ready to truly understand, ready to act, ready to be moved by the whole damn world. And ready to see it all, standing equally.

To remember

Remembering this is key. Yoga practice helps you see that your life is always moving. It’s also a training to be ready.

For me this time of year is incredibly poignant. It is now 5 years since Ozge Karabiyik, co-founder of SYL, passed away (2nd January 2012). I remember a dear dear friend, a colleague, a practice buddy, someone I could call a sister and a beautiful practitioner and teacher. Time flies. What seems like yesterday turns into today and will turn into tomorrow. But at the same time it doesn’t seem to move. She remains these things in my memory. When I think of her she continues to move me. She helps me to be ready for my life. In each moment.

Being ready for all that comes is key. How will you move in 2017? Are you ready?

*On the understanding that you’re practising the full vinyasa method based on the full vinyasa count.

The post Are you ready to move in 2017? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

2016 – what a year that was! It seemed like the end of times and the beginning of times all at the same time. I now find myself here at the end of the year writing a blog that was to be a retrospective look at the past year, with a working title of Looking Back, Looking Forward – What can our practice teach us about the next year for us? Then November 9th happened. With the turmoil and dismay surrounding the election of Donald Trump, that title seemed a little skewed. But then I wondered, can our practice teach us something about this?

Change can be tough

Really tough. Yet yoga can teach us that change is the one thing that is consistent and being open and fluid to that change is what we are practising for. But perhaps reflect on this: Changing ourselves is easy compared to change when you have to consider the whole street, whole town, whole country, whole nation, whole continent or even whole culture you live in. When seismic decisions that effect change are chosen by a great number of people, and black and white choices are the options, we start to see that perhaps we aren’t as in control as we thought we were. Or so we seem to have seen this year anyway.

When I look back at 2016 in ten years’ time, it will be so interesting to see how I see it. Only time will tell. At the moment though, both personally and collectively, here is how I’ve seen it play out.

SYL in 2016

My personal life this past year has been more productive than ever, but with the challenges increasing. At SYL we had to move from our home of 6 years (Room AR2 in Boland House). I found this personally challenging as there was so much history and beautiful energy in that room. It was hard to let go. We moved to a brand new facility in the same campus but, due to an increase in rent, had to put our prices up for the first time in 7 years.

On the flip side we had the busiest workshop summer season ever, with so many people coming to see us at SYL. We had our Summer at Stillpoint where practitioners met teachers like Manju Jois, David Keil, Philippa Asher, Greg Nardi and Kia Naddermier. And more people found us for morning practice than ever before.

I was personally also being asked to travel a lot more to meet yoga communities nationally and to share my experience of yoga practice. So 2016 was a big year of change for both SYL and myself.

The world in 2016

Collectively, though, many of us could say that the past year has been the most radical shift of any year we can remember. With the UK choosing Brexit and the US electing Donald Trump, it felt like times changed forever in a few moments. This shift has led me to a number of questions that I’ve been pondering this month:


Can we really turn away from what is happening in the world at the moment and carry on like we always have?

Can we say that the election of Trump and the movement towards what seems an inevitable hard Brexit is something that yoga practice can prepare us for?

Can our chanting ‘aum’ at the beginning of the day allow us to move in the world? Just by practising yoga have we done enough?

Can our yoga practice alone shield us from rising inequality, division in society and families, increased climate change and a media that increases its vitriol and divisiveness by the week?

Does looking after ourselves mean we can look after the world?

The answers to these questions seem to have changed over the year. Perhaps the ultimate question is:

What is our yoga practice now preparing us for?

I think those of us in the world who are householders, have families and are bringing up children, and those of us who care about living in a world where there can be compassion, aren’t able to distance ourselves from this. In 2016 we are living in countries where things are unravelling. Walls are falling down and new ones going up. Change is coming.

How can our practice help us to become more engaged and active in this new world? How can our yoga practice wake us up to inequality? And, as a leader of a community, what can I do?

A learning curve

Personally, I feel I’ve been on a great learning curve over the last few months in relation to the past year. I’ve never been more interested in learning about politics, I am learning what ‘alt-right’ actually means and how to push up against it and how the ‘overton window’ is affecting the way our viewpoint of the world and its narrative is twisted.

This is something I’ve had to do because it affects me and it will affect my children. And as I’ve moved into this new understanding, my mindfulness teacher has pointed me toward my own white privilege and the inequality that is already systematic in our society and our culture. Even yoga culture. At times it has left me feeling overwhelmed and a little vulnerable. But at the same time humbled.

So, how can we tie this all back to a yoga practice, a yoga room, a yoga community? I ask again:

How can our practice help us to become more engaged and active in this new world?

Yoga practice

I’ve always tried to create SYL as a sanctuary – somewhere people can come to create a little space in their lives at the beginning of the day; supported to look a little deeper with the help of experienced and embodied teachers. And I do this so that people can learn that they can ultimately do this for themselves.

For me this is the incredible beauty of the Ashtanga yoga Mysore self-practice method, which we share at SYL. It’s a practice you can return to. A practice to measure yourself against, not as a sequence of postures but as a moving, embodied, relatable experience of breath, body and mind. To see where the imbalance of these three things lie and to train how to re-balance them.

Any yoga studio is just an empty room in a building where people come together and an intention is created – the intention of mindful, compassionate interaction with yourself. You can create this intention anywhere. And that’s powerful. We create the space so that people can discover, learn and nurture their own compassionate power.

Equanimity leads to compassion

In this recent podcast that I contributed to, where Peg Mulqueen from Ashtanga Dispatch interviewed my teacher and friend John Scott, John spoke of the four Brahma Viharas. These are Karuna (compassion), Mudita (Joy), Upeksha (Equanimity) and Maitri (Love). The conversation was rich in metaphor and story which, if you know John, is a very warm experience. But what Peg really connected to was the idea of equanimity.

John explained that in our little lineage that connects us back to Guruji we mirror the ability to be equal with one another. So we can help each other. John can help me and I can help John. That we as teachers are not teaching people but helping to introduce people to themselves.

“I have to introduce the student to their own teacher.” – John Scott (35:23)

Then we can begin to develop compassion for ourselves. Then we can develop compassion for others.

Fierce compassion

I think currently, and more than ever, we need to nurture and create that steady compassionate power in all of us. We need to be able to do this so we can meet the incredible challenges that are coming up in our societies and the increased impact of global climate change.

We don’t know yet what these challenges will bring. But we must meet them. And with these big challenges we need to meet them with compassion. Fierce compassion. Fierce compassion for holding the flame for what is right and just, and fierce compassion for each other. Fierce compassion so that those who are leading hear not only the voices of those behind them, but are strongly held to account by those who aren’t.

Embracing the future

We practice with fierce compassion. For ourselves, so that we can help meet the challenges that we all face.

We engage as a community with fierce compassion so that we grow as people and stand together and not let fear, rage, hatred and negativity win.

We practice so that we can be of service not just to ourselves and our loved ones but to the wider world and humanity itself.

Let’s do this. Together.

Some recommended reading as a companion to this article, from which I found inspiration:

• An amazing call to arms from Theodora Wildcroft
• A Buddhist Monk explains mindfulness in times of conflict
• Hope is an embrace of the unknown: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times

The post How to create fierce compassion for the world appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

In the beginning

When I first began Ashtanga Yoga back in 2002, I remember turning up to my first workshop particularly stressed. Two of my close friends were fighting with each other and I was stuck in the middle of it. I left my young family for the weekend because I’d only been practising Ashtanga for 6 months and wanted to discover more about it. I was transfixed by it. Transfixed enough for it to have changed my life to take such a trip away from Louise and Herbie.

My first Ashtanga teacher Les had told me about Oxford and how there was a rich Ashtanga yoga community there. I decided to go and see John Scott who, at the time, was one of the most prolific Ashtanga yoga teachers – and I believe still is. I chose him mainly because I had his book. And he looked kind. And bendy. This was way before YouTube!

Although I was very new to the practice, I had fallen for it. I was enjoying the way my body had strengthened and opened. The sensation after each practice was warm, new and exhilarating. Then I met John. His workshop was a revelation. I remember being deeply moved by the way he taught and shared the practice – for the first time it felt deeper than just a physical practice for me. I also remember trying to convey how I felt to him afterwards but making an embarrassment of myself (or at least I certainly thought so).

Driving home after the workshop I reflected on the whole weekend. Even though the situation between my close friends hadn’t changed – there was still tension between them and I was still stuck in the middle – I wasn’t being disturbed by it anymore. I couldn’t stop feeling a deep sense of peace and contentment in myself. This was so new. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling the way I was. I just was. This was the first time yoga had really moved me. And it was in that moment that I realised I’d found a teacher who could point me to something deeper than I could find myself.

Yoga as movement

“Yoga as the movement from one point to another, higher one” – TKV Desikachar

This is a great explanation of the meaning of yoga by the teacher TKV Desikachar (The Heart Of Yoga, Chapter 8: The Things That Darken The Heart). This is a really lovely definition and I see so many ways that this meaning can be translated. In fact, the understanding and meaning of yoga can be so personal that each person can individually relate and connect to their own as yoga plays out in their own lives. Yet, Desikachar’s reference speaks to me particularly. Yoga has moved me and it continues to do so. Since I began in 2002 it has moved me to a place I never believed possible. But what I find interesting to ask is: What is being moved? To where? And what does “to another higher movement” mean?

A still point of mindful awareness

When we practice yoga we are breathing and moving and directing our attention to those two things: breath and movement. We are training the observational qualities of our awareness and learning to focus our attention on the things that support us being alive: our breath and physical bodies. This can allow us to notice the very essence of what it means to be alive.

In the practice of Ashtanga yoga we are learning to focus on the body in movement in one breath, then the body in movement in the next. The movement of breath and body from one moment to the next. And what is it we are noticing? The point that notices. We are training the awareness that notices the breath and body and allowing that to stay attentive to whatever arises. So, even though our body is moving, our attention is staying still and focused. A still point of awareness.

When we become that still point we find we can get nearer to truly moving into ourselves. A state where time feels like it can stop and we become present to just where we are and what we are doing. We just feel the body as the body and the breath as the breath. Without labelling. Then we feel our life as our life. Without labelling. This can allow us to see and feel that little bit more clearly.

Even if you are a beginner, that sensation at the end of a class where you have rested your body is you having moved from one place to another. I say to all our beginners: really notice how you come in and then notice the effects when you leave. It’s these points in time I find so interesting as a practitioner: how a practice moves me from one state to the next.

Where can we find our own still point?

We all have still points that just arise. When we see a beautiful sunset and are transfixed. Perhaps when we are watching a bonfire late in the evening and are taken away from our thoughts into the light and flicker of the flame. These are naturally arising moments that can just happen. But they are states that we can re-discover. That we can cultivate.

In a yoga practice, this place comes up mostly when we are taking relaxation at the end of our practice. When we’ve let go of having to be anything, having to do anything and allowing ourselves to let go. This is why it’s so important to relax at the end of practice. To let the movement in our body go, and then reintroduce movement back into the world after relaxation as quietly as possible.

Movement through relationship

“Being still does not mean don’t move. It means move in peace.” – E’yen A. Gardner

This autumn, 14½ years after that first John Scott workshop, I spent a much-needed 5 days practising with John in Scotland. Since 2002 we have become friends. I was with some other really close friends and it was a time to “just be” after a particularly busy 6 months. When I turned up John asked me if I wanted to practice with him in his teaching group after the main class. I politely and respectfully declined. I wanted to be a student again. His student, just for 5 days.

A new friend Peg, and her daughter Meghan, were also there to practice with John for the first time. Over those 5 days I watched Peg and Meghan be moved the same way I had been 14 years earlier, even though they’re far more experienced than I had been. I watched as John gently changed their view of their yoga practice so they began to feel and notice themselves practising in a deeper way. I also watched how they moved from one place to another, to a lightness in how they looked, with deep warm knowing smiles being the new look. How seeing their practices in a new, slightly different way helped them to transform their view. It was mesmerising. I found myself falling again for the practice simply by relating to someone else’s transformation through my friend and teacher. I was personally moved again.

Moving into the world

This made me notice something else. It’s such a turbulent time in the world at the moment. So much confusion, negativity and battling with others. Where can we even begin to make sense of it all? The answer, I think, is in each other. Those of us who have a practice are able to come together and to return to the simplicity of how we breathe, how we move and how we relate to ourselves. Perhaps it’s from here that we can then begin to see the world in all its beauty and, at the same time, in all its frailty. How the ripples of movement and openness in our practice become the ripples of how we see the world. When we practice we come back to the simplicity of this body, this breath. Then we can choose to act. We can choose how to move in this complex yet beautiful world.

At Stillpoint Yoga London we see the practice as a real way of moving toward a balance of strength and letting go, both in the physical body and also in life. We invite you to come and meet us each morning to breathe and move through dedicated yoga practice. And perhaps to find your own still point.

The post Have you found your still point? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.” – Elaine Scarry

Each morning at SYL people come in to practice yoga. All have their own reasons. We, as teachers, move through the room just seeing how we can help. A gentle comment here, a light encouragement there. Fully present and safe physical hands-on adjustments that allow a person’s physical body to connect with their breath and to let go toward a new sensation. Or perhaps support towards a new posture.

Our intention for others is always the same as our own teachers had for us. To be able to find some kind of balance in our practice and lives and recognise when we are practising in a way that is detrimental. To align ourselves toward the balance of subtle and gross, breath and body. In my last post I talked about the breath being the fulcrum of our practice and lives. We now want to go deeper. We want to see how our practice allows for a more balanced perspective.

Balancing challenge

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.” – Thomas Merton

This Ashtanga yoga practice is hard when you begin and it can take a while for that challenge to be a little more gently held. But that’s no bad thing. Being hard means bringing up all the ways you see yourself and meeting that. Perhaps it’s tight hamstrings, or sitting at a desk all day, or a troubled relationship. We can bring all these things to a yoga mat. In fact, all the things you think you are, and all the things you feel you are, can play themselves out on the mat itself. But if a yoga practice isn’t challenging us, can we call it an effective practice?

A practice that pushes our buttons helps to see what buttons we actually have. To see what buttons we have brings them out and allows for us to have a relationship with them, to work with them and perhaps to begin to let them go.

So our practice is about really noticing that it is hard and, at the same time, seeing the ways in which we can develop the opposite of hard. And I see the opposite of hard as the ability to take care of ourselves. We can practice effectively, and with great vigour and energy, but at the same time taking care and learning to practice with kindness and compassion to ourselves is such a valuable ability to nurture.

Balancing our practice

I see people using the practice to beat themselves up. That if something is a certain way or hasn’t been achieved then it somehow takes away from how they see themselves and how the practice is working for them. That they are somehow less because of their yoga practice.

Yet, I also see the same people have the ability to meet true balance in their practice. That place where they meet the development of the energy of their own body and breath with the will to stay focused, calm and attentive. So how can these two things be?

If we meet the practice regularly then we are allowing ourselves to meet the ebb and flow of our lives too. Some days are good, some days are bad. Some practices are good, some practices are bad. Perhaps focusing on cultivating the ability to have a good or bad practice takes away from just practice… pure practice. Not naming our practice as anything gives us the opportunity to meet the practice in an open way and to just be with what is required for that moment, at that time.

“My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The pina and the colada.” – Ellen DeGeneres

So our practice and lives can mirror each other. I invite you to see if you can cultivate the awareness of the breath and body together to be the way we meet our world, because the practice wants to be exactly that. One where we are able to progress, not only in the potential our yoga practice has for this physical body, but also in the development of the compassionate awareness of it. Bringing that into our daily lives is where we begin to transform the way we act and move in the world.

Noticing when we are not balanced

I like to use the practice to really notice when I am out of balance and the practice of Ashtanga yoga really shows that up.

In Ashtanga yoga we are balancing the achievement of a posture/vinyasa with the actual body and breath that is opening into that asana. We have all the sensations feeding back and telling us how it feels, and then we have the mind that tells us if we are doing it right or wrong based on those sensations. We are cultivating the ability to be able to balance the body and breath while keeping the awareness on these different areas.

The Ashtanga yoga practice challenges us beautifully to stay present, to be here and to return if we lose our focus. We are cultivating balance by consistently seeing that we are off balance and recognising this. Yoga is then the tool to get back on track.

Balance in our lives

Like Ashtanga yoga, life can be hard. But that’s no bad thing. That’s why we need a practice. To be able to traverse the many things that life throws our way and to meet them with some kind of awareness and choice.

Like life, you want to hold your practice in your hand so lightly. Like it’s the most precious thing. Because it is. And to continue to meet it like this means you meet yourself in the same way.

At SYL we cultivate a balanced environment that allows for everyone to be part of an inspired practice group. This cultivates trust and the ability to relax and let go. Come and join us either in our daily classes or on one of our beginners courses.

The post The delicate balance of yoga and life appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

A regular yoga practice offers us many things: strength; flexibility; a deeper sense of who we are; but also things that are true to us as individuals, that can shape our own lives and how we see our personal worlds.

You see, we are all beautifully unique and each of us has the ability to transform our perspective of the world we live in. But, together as human beings we also share the same ways that we perceive the world and each other. Our senses. Our ability to communicate. Our bodies. Breath.

Smile, breathe and go slowly – Thích Nhất Hạnh

We begin with breathing

More often than not, when we first begin the path of yoga, the last thing we remember is the breath. We forget it’s there. With so much else going on when we are learning to practice we can miss the thing that is the most important.

Yet being aware of the presence of the breath is the actual reason TO practice. It is each breath that ties us to this living present moment, therefore it is focusing your awareness on this breath that actually ties the mind to this present moment too.

Remembering as well that the breath’s very presence is the reason why we are here in the first place. The reason we are alive. When we were born into this world what was the first thing we did? We breathed in.

Try this 90 second breathing practice right now:

This short breath awareness practice demonstrates that we can return our attention to the present moment by allowing ourselves to notice the breath that is here right now. All yoga and mindfulness practices are pointing our attention in this very direction.

When the breath control is correct, mind control is possible > – Sri K Pattabhi Jois

When you breathe you move

One aspect of a yoga practice is the merging of the physical with the ever more subtle. The body with the breath. The breath, the mind. The ability to continually engage and align with the awareness of both breath and body at the same time is one of the goals of Ashtanga yoga. This concept is called vinyasa (breath/movement) and is what is developed through the method of Ashtanga yoga.

The thing is, there are so many other things going on when we practice that the thing we can most take for granted continues to get restricted and lost. Yet the biggest deal about yoga asana practice is the eventual ability to cultivate the breath as the focus point of our whole practice. It becomes the rhythm through which the experience of yoga unfolds. And a posture/movement deepens when the breath becomes the focal point.

Making the breath known

So, from those first heady beginnings when we are struggling to balance all the things we are supposed to remember and at the same time breathe; we slowly, over time, begin to soften our bodies, which means our breath begins to make itself known.

As we progress and the practice begins to form a regular pattern in our lives we begin to relax more into what we are doing rather than struggle to find breath. We don’t know this at the beginning, we just feel tight and think there’s so much to remember, but the long term payoff is our ability to breathe fully. We all do it though. From the beginner student, who is learning brand new ways of being challenged, to the advanced, who is opening up to deeper ways of being challenged. In my experience, what aligns the two is the experience of being able to use the breath to meet these challenges.

Free breathing

In our yoga practice we are looking to maintain a soft and steady posture and focus (in Patanjai’s yoga sutra this is explained as Sthira Sukham Asanam). The breath is at the centre of this awareness. If a yoga posture is steady, the breath is steady.

This means one of the goals of practice is the maintenance of a full inhalation and a full exhalation. This is what Guruji used to call ‘free breathing’. Free breathing: the ability to be free in your body and to notice a full breath. So we could say we are practising to find the space to breathe more.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am – Sylvia Plath

Following the path of the breath

So, Ashtanga vinyasa yoga becomes breath/movement yoga. Simply, when we breathe, we move. The breath, then, is laying out a path for our bodies to follow.

Whenever we lift or rise up in a posture we breathe in; and whenever we go downward or let go we breathe out. The inhale and the exhale pave the way for the body to respond. If we use this as the fulcrum of our yoga practice it becomes a much deeper process.

Take one breath at a time

Once the breath is full and deep, and the body is responding, we can then harness the breath to root our practice. The root of our practice is to unite our experience and become aware. We are able to use the energy of the breath to maintain and develop awareness.

In the Ashtanga vinyasa yoga method the practice is strung together on the rhythm of the breath. Sri K Pattabhi Jois likened this to a mala, which is translated in Sanskrit as garland, where “each breath/movement (vinyasa) is a bead to be counted and focused on” (Eddie Stern, Yoga Mala).

So we tie our mind to this breath by counting each breath. This is called the counted vinyasa method. This method keeps the mind, body and breath together and united.

Noticing when there is no breath

It’s also good to be aware of the different parts of the breath and this can really help us to give our practice a different focus. Not only is there an in-breath and an out-breath to notice, but if we really were to unpack breathing we would want to notice the points in between the breaths too. The spaces where the breath meets.

It is these points that it helps to be truly aware of. Is there tension here? Do I feel stuck? Am I forcing breath in and out? To notice the spaces between breaths is to get into an even more subtle awareness of your body and breath moving together. This helps so much with the transitions in our practice.

Remembering to breathe

So, if the breath is the fulcrum of our lives then we are able to use it as a factor that grounds us and transforms us. It is no coincidence that in many of the contemplative traditions around the planet you have the breath as the major focal point of transition from gross to subtle. A simple example is that most of us can probably remember a time when we’ve been in a vulnerable situation and someone told us to ‘take a deep breath’.

I feel our practice is teaching us to remember to breathe. With awareness, wisdom, clarity and skill. Just as in the middle of this busy city there is a place that offers quiet contemplation, support and refuge each day called Stillpoint Yoga London; know that in the middle of your busy life there is a place you can return to every moment that offers its own source of potential stillness. It flows a quiet wind through the veils of our lives and if we harness it, becomes the experience of how we move through our days.

So, if you’re ready to learn to take a deep breath in your own life then I invite you to join us. Either on one of our beginners courses if you’re new to yoga, or at our daily morning Mysore classes if you have experience of Ashtanga yoga.

The post When I breathe I move appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“I think self-discipline is something, it’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.” – Daniel Goldstein

Yoga classes these days come in so many varieties and there are so many different ways to practice yoga now that you can be overwhelmed by all the options that are on offer in the vast yoga skyline. The different methods of teaching and sharing yoga, though, are all offering you one thing: to see how yoga practice can transform the way you see yourself and your life. Here at SYL many people come looking for different benefits from developing a yoga practice and we personally feel that practising yoga is about engagement, empowerment and transformation. But in fact, when we ask beginners the reasons they want to begin a yoga practice, the most popular are to become stronger and more relaxed.

We support your yoga practice, from wherever you come from, by helping you learn the physical practice of yoga asana (postures) and breath. It is through meeting the body regularly in this way that you begin to slowly shift your perspective. We then help you to develop a self practice for yourself. We have personally seen over the years that this has been key in people sustaining and developing a new perspective in their lives.

“Self-discipline is not a restriction: it’s a path to freedom.” – Joseph Rain

At SYL we share, and develop with practitioners, the assisted self practice method of Ashtanga vinyasa yoga. We often get asked how the self practice method of Ashtanga yoga works. In fact, we even get told that perhaps there’s no point in coming to a class where you’re practising by yourself as you may as well do that at home. It’s cheaper too, right? I always respond and say “Well, great, if you can do that then we are not needed and that’s perfect.”

You see, we feel that when we teach we want people to get this so much that we eventually won’t be needed. That someone has developed the ability to confidently practice by themselves is a major success for us. Even if they don’t come to us anymore and they practice at home we see it as no loss, but the practitioner’s own gain. Of course we are there to continue to encourage and nurture but we don’t want people to feel bound by us. That’s the whole point. To be able to inspire people to be disciplined enough to practice on their own. People who take up a personal practice are doing something radical in their lives by committing themselves to a practice that can support them through different phases of their life.

“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.” – Lao Tzu

So, here are a few things we’d like to share about this method of yoga and the benefits of developing a self practice.

A brief history

The self practice method of Ashtanga yoga stems from the teaching of Sri K Pattabhi Jois, also affectionately known as Guruji, who developed the practice in Mysore, India. The practice can also be referred to as ‘Mysore style’. It was always, and currently is, taught in this method as this was the basis of a deep teacher-student relationship where you had many people practising together, but a teacher able to help a person individually without having to stop a whole class.

As the Ashtanga yoga practice became more popular, it turned into a led class where everyone practised as a group at the same time, all being led together by the teacher through the series of postures. This changed the emphasis from individual to collective and, whilst no bad thing, as it greatly popularised the practice and is invigorating practising together in a large group, it lost the individual responsibility of the practitioner learning the practice for themselves. It also moved Ashtanga yoga toward a more ‘power yoga’ emphasis, losing the personal development that is learnt slowly over time, breath by breath, as an individual becomes stronger in their own time.

How it works

With the self practice method you are practising in a class environment with other people but, unlike other yoga classes where there is a teacher at the front showing everyone what to do, this class is different. The teacher or teachers are there in the room working with you individually in the class, whether you are learning the postures as a beginner or are more experienced and need assistance to deepen a pose. This means that within the class environment you get a one-to-one experience. There is also no particular timeframe you have to adhere to which means you can turn up to the class at any time, roll out your yoga mat and begin your practice, learning individually from whichever teacher is present, even if you are a complete beginner.

If you are a complete beginner and come to a self practice class the teacher will show you the breathing method, then help you with learning a sequence of postures. In the case of our self practice class it would mean you would learn the first sun salutation on the first day. Then you have your own practice. Once you are breathing and moving on your own, practising what we have showed you regularly, you then learn more as your body and strength grow.

If you already have a practice, or are perhaps familiar with the sequence but need encouragement and reminding, then we help you to remember and refine your practice by assisting, directing and adjusting you into postures, again helping you with developing the balance of strength and flexibility to achieve the opening of yoga asanas.

The sound of your own breath

Learning the self practice method is about choreographing the movement of the body with the flow of the breath quietly and on your own. So, when you are practising on your own the only thing you hear is the soft flow of your own breath. Also, when you’re practising in a Mysore self practice room, it is quiet. Generally, the only sounds are the quiet voice of encouragement by a teacher and the sound of everyone’s breath. When cultivating your own breath and movement you are contributing to the sound of the room too.

Becoming patient

And here’s the thing. Because the practice is about you learning, it takes time to cultivate. In fact it never really stops cultivating. There is never an end. When we practice yoga we are uncovering every part of our experience – physical, mental, emotional – at any one moment. So we are dealing with remembering the sequence, the breaths, the alignment, and so on. This is why the traditional Mysore self practice method is a 6-day-a-week practice. It becomes part of your life that you return to each day to cultivate. If we can’t fit in 6 days then that’s okay, but being able to return to a regular practice as often as possible helps us to shift many areas of our lives.

Relationship

When you practice on your own there really is nothing else getting in the way. Just you, your body and your breath. So you could say you are developing a relationship with yourself. How you process and develop your practice is how you open up to this relationship over time.

But also, this is where we come in. This is where we see the magic of developing a self practice really happen. Because we hold the space for all of this to happen, we share the method so you can take the method and play it out for yourself, in your own life. We are not imprinting anything on you. We are meeting you and saying, “Try this physical practice and see how it goes,” and we are being with you as whatever comes up for you comes up. We do this because this is how it has been done for all of us by our own teachers.

Fostering independence

Our whole purpose as yoga teachers is to somehow stoke the fire in you that allows you to run with the practice for yourself. This is where the ‘assisted’ part comes in. We are there as a support as things come up while this learning is taking place, i.e. helping you to remember the sequence and names of postures, where to breathe, encouraging a deepening into your practice, etc. But ultimately we are helping you to become responsible for practising by yourself. We are then there to help you deepen this focus while all the time continuing to support you safely through your practice.

Developing a self practice takes participation, commitment, learning and growth. But, by their development alone, these same things are being nurtured consistently in your life and will become the framework from which you begin to meet the world away from the mat. Which, ultimately, is what we believe we are really practising for.

The post Developing a personal yoga self practice appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

‘Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.’ – Dalai Lama

In the UK at the moment the very fabric of our society is shifting literally hour by hour. Since the Leave vote came through as the democratic winner of the EU referendum on 24th June 2016, our country has been plunged into a crisis that many of us have never known. Our government is rudderless, split between a prime minister who took us to this precipice then subsequently resigned, and a new incoming prime minister who has no plan of where we are going. The opposition party (Labour) is splitting itself in two with major questions and doubts of whether its own leader has the nous to hold the Conservative government to task for their actions.

The EU now wants rid of us as quickly as possible and, chillingly, with each day the division in the country widens. Bigotry, hatred and racism are increasing by the hour all over the UK as the slow realisation of the slogan “Taking Our Country Back” that the Leave campaign adopted sinks in.

Times of uncertainty

I personally have felt incredibly vulnerable over the past few days, not really knowing what to do. It seems so much bigger than me. The whole country is changing right in front of me as I begin to contemplate something myself and no-one I know recognises.

This is a totally new paradigm to me and to many of my friends and family. A feeling of uncertainty and turmoil that seems to encapsulate the whole of the UK. It encompasses the fabric of the country I was born in and changes everything I thought I knew about society and my place in our integrated, connected world. With all this ongoing restlessness and instability I was noticing how perhaps I could get a very tiny sense of what it might be like to have to deal with the ongoing real threat that hangs over the people living in Syria. The war that is making those families want to leave their own country right now, as I write. A comparison it is not, but a very sense of complete unease about where I find myself here in this country it is, and being able to sit with compassion and understanding for those whose lives are truly in jeopardy is sobering.

There have been so many discussions with family and friends over the past few days but one particular communication stood out. I had a message from a colleague – a fellow yoga teacher – over the weekend. They wrote that:

“As yoga teachers we should accept, tolerate and work together at this time. That people should look up to us and we should set an example. That what happened was a democracy and the ability for people to exercise their vote.”

This really got me thinking. Now we find ourselves in this position, what do we need to do? And what does it mean to practice yoga in a time of such turbulence? How is my practice helping me see the world as it changes, one that is turning into something that I don’t recognise from only just last week? Is this how it is now going to be? Is this the new normal? If so, how do I now meet it? How do I act…?

As a response to the Paris attacks in November 2016, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying:

“We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place. We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that this century will be different from the previous one. It is in everybody’s interest. So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments.”

The Dalai Lama’s statement, I believe, is not about accepting, remaining tolerant or hoping that the current state of events that are unfolding will go away. This is about creating a human solution, or if not a solution then a way of being together as a community as we shift through this momentous time. The division in our society has come out into the open, we are beginning to see it. When we can see it, we can begin to work with it. Which means we can begin to work with each other.

Do you have a practice?

If so, how is your practice helping you at this time? If anything, I believe we need a personal practice so much at the moment. Whether it is yoga, meditation or some other embodied practice, it helps to ground us and be more awake to all the changes as they unfold in our lives. There is so much information/opinion coming our way at the moment and families and communities are split over this massive decision. I feel now, more than ever, that individually we need to cultivate the ability to pause and respond to situations rather than react. To be able to be open to each other.

This referendum decision has brought into light what was perhaps dark in our country. How can we now confront this? Perhaps when we practice we are not just practising for our own transformation. Perhaps we are practising so we can hope to change and perceive a different world. One where we can begin to work with our own discrimination and look to soften and let that go.

In the Bhagavad Gita (2/50) Krishna tells Arjuna that skill in action is Yoga. I think what Krishna is alluding to is that he means that your life is always action, that action is an inevitable part of human nature. If we accept we act, if we hate we act, if we love we act, if we do nothing we act… What we need to develop is the skill to be able to move through our lives with action that benefits the greater good, especially now. Skill begins with understanding how you are viewing the world, right now, and being with it so that you begin to recognise and shift patterns that don’t serve you.

Why I voted Remain

Personally, at the moment I am struggling to accept the outcome of this referendum. I voted Remain because I saw that working together as a continent was inclusive, that we could work collectively for the greater good and ultimately peace. My own 82-year-old father is devastated at this decision. Growing up through and after the second world war he saw why the EU was formed: to create peace in Europe. I know that the EU isn’t at all perfect but working within it could change it in the long term so that all could benefit and peace could continue…

Both sides of the referendum campaign were less than perfect in their rhetoric, but the Leave campaign, I felt, was bordering on hatred. Because of this we now find ourselves in a wilderness, with people sniping at each other and hostility growing. When you have far right parties like the French National Front, English Defence League and Britain First lauding your win, I believe something has gone drastically wrong. Plus, can the incredibly negative spin of both the Remain and Leave campaigns, and the media, now be a narrative on how not to lead people into decision making? This may take time to realise, but it must be pointed to and learned from…

Now, after the referendum, this is where we find ourselves.

As I look at the changing landscape that is playing out in this country, I have started to get the inkling of,

“Okay, if not this, what then is possible? What is possible if we are more open with each other?” 

It’s only an inkling, but it’s there. Now at SYL I encourage our community to be open to all people and to all views so that we can meet with each other in an open and honest way. To come together in the spirit of kindness, irrespective of our personal views.

Practising compassion

So at this time, it seems to me that in order to counteract the chaos and helplessness that some of us are feeling, it would help to be compassionate to each other, to listen to each other, to be open to one another. To want the world to be more beautiful, more vibrant than ever before. To have a personal practice to return to, because by practising it helps me engage with acting to make the world this more beautiful place I know it can be, and therefore not turning away from the challenge ahead. Because to turn away is to hide, to accept, to allow negativity to rise. This life is still incredibly beautiful, mysterious and wondrous and in the middle of it all I am a vulnerable, radiant, human being.

And perhaps too, allowing ourselves to be incredibly tender at this time, but always remembering to return to the ebb and flow of the breath. All our choices, all our actions, how we then move in the world, will stem from that place…

The post Is this the new normal? appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

“I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap” – Ani Difranco

I truly love this work. I genuinely feel a deep sense of gratitude whenever I hear the squeak of the door each morning, meaning that someone else has come in to share a piece of themselves with us at SYL. I try to catch everyone before they start here. A wink, a smile, a gentle ‘good morning’ or a shared quiet laugh in the recognition that we find ourselves here again, another morning, on this gentle path to nowhere. Together.

As an Ashtanga yoga Mysore self practice shala, we support seasoned and experienced practitioners, are consistently introducing new people to the Ashtanga yoga practice, and assisting those who have a yoga practice but who maybe don’t have the confidence yet to be able to stand in a room and know what to do. That is what we do here at SYL. We support. We nurture. We encourage.

Meeting vulnerability

When you walk into a self practice yoga room for the first time it can bring up a lot of personal stuff that relates to how you feel you are seen. To stand in a room full of people and not know what to do can feel incredibly vulnerable. It’s from this place where we meet you as teachers. As teachers we are really just here to share. We have created as safe and neutral a space as possible from which to be able to share our love of a yoga practice, one that we have found to have had a great impact in our own lives. Sharing of ourselves is to help people nurture a way of looking and appreciating their own lives, perhaps in a similar way to how we have nurtured our own.

So the person who is standing there unable to move because of vulnerability is given support and a way to move through the breathing and physical practice of Ashtanga yoga. They are held and supported over the first few days as they get used to remembering the practice for themselves and then, as this new way of integration of body and mind takes hold, they are nurtured into looking after themselves in a way that supports their own development.

Those of us who have a long term practice all began in that room at some other time and in some other place. We began vulnerable, but with support we moved through that initial vulnerability to find something deeper. Vulnerability still occurs but yoga practice nurtures a way to be able to meet it with more depth and wisdom.

So why do we continue practising?

Yoga practice can easily become its own narrative concerned with clinging to our ideas about ourselves. What begins to move the conditions is that how I cling to practice allows me to see how I cling in life. Behind yoga practice lies the lessening or the falling away of a story and narrative that we have about ourselves.

As teachers we are so interested in how this aspect of a yoga practice unfolds. How a practice moves through someone, we feel, is perhaps a more delicate offering than how a practice can look. In Ashtanga yoga we can become overly concerned with form and its edges, precision and performance. Development of a mindful practice works to reinforce new directions so existing patterns can begin to be released. This shift in awareness then can be the cornerstone of our daily lives.

Our community

Our yoga community develops from the relationships we have with each other. By people coming and sharing their lives, they contribute to the community by just being here. Every single person who comes to practice supports and makes the community whole. In the yoga room everyone is breathing for everyone else. There is no dogma, just support for each other.

Stillpoint Yoga London is a space where people can actually find space. What I mean is space not only where people can come and practice but where people are allowed to seek it in their own lives and the lives of others. Stillpoint is an idea born from the minds of two people (myself and Ozge Karabiyik). The idea that through sharing, continuity and consistency we create a feeling, a sense and now a community of people coming to practice together. A space where both teachers and practitioners overlap.

Many people have said to me, particularly after they have just finished practising, that there is such a lovely energy in the SYL Mysore room. I say to each one not to forget that they are a personal part of the ongoing process, development and lineage of a simple yet life changing practice that not only benefits them but the world.

The post Supporting your practice appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

At Stillpoint Yoga London we take great care with the teachers we invite to share yoga with our practitioners. When we organise workshops and events we see these as an extension of our own daily teaching. We feel that those we invite to lead them need to represent the spirit and values we hold at SYL, and that yoga is a practice of transformation and awakening.

When we first met Kia Naddermier we knew instantly we had found a kindred spirit and a teacher of incredible depth and wisdom. We knew she would fit right in at SYL. We first heard of her through Le Yoga Shop magazine, which she runs with her husband Magnus. Like us, Kia facilitates a daily Ashtanga yoga self practice shala in Paris, which has become very popular. She is also a highly trained teacher of pranayama. In the past few years Kia has become a great friend to SYL, so we wanted to get to know her a little better and find out how she has come to the place she’s at now. We hope you enjoy the interview with her.

Hey Kia, what was your life like before you practised yoga and what led you to take on the practice of yoga?

Honestly, I can hardly remember as I have been practising for most of my adult life! But I remember very clearly my first encounter with the practice. It was in the mid-nineties, I was in my early twenties fresh out of photography school and had been sent off to London to report on the budding ‘alternative scene’ there. My then boyfriend had just returned from Mysore and directed me to John (Scott), who was teaching at City Yoga, a small yoga studio in east London. I had absolutely no idea what Ashtanga yoga was or who the teacher we were meeting was for that matter.

I hope you don´t mind me quoting from my article with John, published in my journal Le Yoga Journal Paris:

“Through the lens of my camera, I have my very first introduction to the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. I witness something that is beyond words and perhaps even beyond what my camera is able to capture. … The steadiness and grace, the energy and yet complete stillness of the practice moves me deeply. When the shoot is over and I reluctantly put my Pentax down, John invites me to join his class that same evening. … My very first Ashtanga Yoga class – it changed me and my whole life. For me Ashtanga Yoga was a direct experience, awakening in me some kind of deep recognition. Directly after that first class, I took up a daily yoga practice and haven´t stopped since…”

The pictures later became the beginning of a book about yoga that was published in 2000.

Would you share with us how Ashtanga yoga evolved in your life and the teachers who have influenced you the most?

Since that first class, the practice has been the anchor of my daily life. It took me a while until I found a teacher back in Stockholm as Ashtanga hadn’t really reached that far north yet… Maria Boox was teaching in a small basement in Stockholm at the time, and I was over the moon when I finally found her! Later on she began inviting John to the Shala in Stockholm, and I also studied with him when I had periods of living & shooting in London. He was and still is a very important influence, teacher and friend who continues to inspire me in many ways. Very early on Magnus, my husband, and I also started going regularly to Radha in Crete and have continued to do so for almost 20 years. Our children Uma & Devi both learned to take their first steps in Crete and are now practising with us in Radha´s shala when we are there! Radha was of course one of John´s first teachers, together with Derek, so it felt very coherent. I have since then studied with many senior teachers of the Ashtanga Yoga lineage, as well as spent time at KPJAYI in Mysore.

My teacher of pranayama and philosophy is Shri O.P Tiwariji. He has and is giving me more than words and I feel truly blessed to be guided by Tiwariji on my yoga path.

The calling to dedicate myself to sharing this practice came during the darkest time in my life when my sister got ill and finally passed away. This experience altered my life completely. Many things that I had thought so important, the fashion business, my career… all seemed so small. So, when I was asked to teach Mysore it was not really a choice, it was the only thing that made sense.

How did you balance the practice of motherhood, running a business and being a practitioner?

I wish I could say that there is always harmony in my life and that I have a magic formula to make it all flow perfectly… But there is no way around it, my workload is heavy and requires a large amount of discipline, planning, work and dedication. What I do have, though, is my daily practice which is my sacred space. I find it a constant source of clarity and replenishment. One that helps me choose what is important over what is urgent (most of the time!) And all the things you mention: being a mother, photography, my yoga shala, practising, are all magical in their own way. I consider it a privilege to be able to spend my days doing what I love.

But I think it´s important to remember that Patanjali never speaks of practice alone, but always in combination with non-attachment. Non-attachment also in regards to the practice itself is key for a healthy relationship with the practice. If not, the yoga practice will simply become yet another way to gratify or punish oneself, enhancing existing conditionings and patterns. Some days letting it go will actually be prioritising what is important over what seems urgent.

In your workshops you emphasise Ashtanga yoga and pranayama practice being intrinsically linked and (as you said above) you are trained to teach pranayama by Shri O.P Tiwari, one of the few remaining masters of pranayama. Could you explain how you see the coming together of these two practices (Ashtanga yoga and pranayama)?

I consider pranayama the most central part of my yoga practice. The physical asana practice leads up to it, and the inner more subtle aspects like concentration and meditation are natural results of it. The beauty of Patanjali´s 8 limbs is that they teach us to integrate all aspects of yoga. They are all interrelated and can be practised simultaneously, but they also map out a logical progression in which each limb prepares the practitioner for the next. I believe Guruji named his practice Ashtanga Yoga to remind us of the practice as a whole, that it is part of a larger context.

The method of pranayama I have been taught by Tiwariji does not have a particular “style” or name. The practices are taught and practised simply according to the classical scriptures. Tiwariji always says: Nothing is me, nothing is mine. I completely resonate with the clarity and authenticity of his teachings and am truly humbled to be his student. Pranayama practices are (also in accordance with the scriptures) to be introduced very gently and gradually, tailored to the individual. This is how I practice and share it.

Like us at SYL in London you have run a long term daily Mysore programme in central Paris. How have you found the growth of this for you as a teacher and a practitioner?

Many of our students are yoga teachers themselves and I also run an apprentice program, so there is naturally a constant flow of sharing and exploration in the room. To teach yoga is a never-ending learning process. Every student experience and journey is unique and as their teacher I´m invited to share it with them. This is an infinite source of inspiration and possibility to evolve. I see it truly as a privilege.

There is a very strong sense of growth and community in the Shala, people are really connecting and supporting each other. A special kind of linking happens in Mysore classes as people who have been practising for many years practice side-by-side with others who are perhaps complete beginners, or someone who is pregnant, or another who is coming back after an accident or injury. Compassion is cultivated in the room for whatever life might have thrown your way. So, although it is an individual practice and journey, there is a possibility to tap into the energy and strength of the group. Guruji used to say that the postures are like beads strung together on the thread of breath. I like to think of the yoga practitioners in the Shala as beads strung together on the thread of breath…

If it’s okay I’d like to ask you something quite tender that I think has incredible value for seeing how a community can come together through trauma. Your shala in Paris was very close to the terrorist attacks that befell the city in November 2015. Would you share how that affected you personally, the Mysore Yoga Paris community and how you as a yoga community moved through that harrowing time?

These events happened literally on our doorstep and we are all still very much in the aftermath, experiencing the effects on many levels. Personally I still find it very difficult to put words on it. The Monday after the attacks we decided to open the Shala for a meditation on peace and Ahimsa. We put out a simple invitation to join either in person or to “tune in” from wherever you are. The support for the situation in Paris from the Ashtanga community worldwide was astonishing. We had messages pouring in to Mysore Yoga Paris from shalas on all continents – from Europe to the US, Australia, Africa, South America, Russia… All gathering their communities to sit with us at the very same hour. It was such a dark moment in Paris but we felt truly held by our community and the unifying message of yoga.

Has it changed the way your community practices together?

Yes it definitely has. It´s difficult to put my finger on it exactly, but the sense of community has deepened even more as we have unrolled our mats through thick and thin together. An enhanced gentleness between practitioners has evolved. I think we all have woken up to recognise how immensely fortunate we are that our life situation is such that we can begin our days practising yoga. There is a silent agreement not to take any of it for granted.

Kia, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything you’d like to leave us with?

I am so grateful to you Scott & Louise for inviting us so generously into your beautiful community at Stillpoint. Can’t wait to see you, share and explore more of this together very soon..!

Kia is a highly valued member of our international teaching faculty. Come and see her at one of our workshops that we organise throughout the year at Stillpoint Yoga London, or sign up to hear when she is next with us.

The post Deepening your practice – a teacher’s perspective appeared first on Stillpoint Yoga.

By Scott Johnson

July 2017 Update: Hey, Scott here. As a response to the tragic passing of Michael Stone on 16th July 2017 I wanted to share a memory of one of the times he spent with us here at SYL. In 2014 I organised a viewing of the documentary Reactor, a film collaboration between Michael and filmmaker Ian Mackenzie, at a local Bermondsey cinema. Michael attended and afterwards talked about the film and held a Q&A regarding the film’s ideas and content. It was a lovely lovely evening. Below is a blog post I wrote about the event.

Michael will be sorely missed here at SYL. His spirit and teaching shone….

On Monday 17th Feb 2014 we hosted the first UK public screening of a short film called Reactor, a documentary made by the Canadian film maker Ian Mackenzie on the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan 2012. We had over 40 people come and join Michael Stone, Louise and myself for the evening. We rented a local independent cinema in Bermondsey called Shortwave so as to make it feel like a real premiere. The venue was lovely and we pretty much filled up all the seats in there.

Why did SYL host the first UK public screening of Reactor?

Stillpoint Yoga London hosted Reactor primarily because it features Michael Stone, a Canadian yoga and buddhist teacher, author and activist, who had come to SYL to run some classes the previous year in 2013. Michael was in the country at the time working and we asked him if he could extend his stay and be a guest at the event. He kindly agreed and it was such a pleasure to have him talk about the film and answer questions afterwards.

In the film, Michael takes a personal pilgrimage to Japan and while there he connects in with the country amid the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown that happened due to the tsunami. He brings his vast experience as a yoga practitioner and meditator to ask questions of how culture can move forward in the face of this manmade catastrophe. To realise that we are hitting critical points on so many levels as a planet and that we need to rediscover the meaning of connection to be able to move forward and live as a wider responsive society.

What is the film about?

The film is really about stories. About how we as a culture have grown to this point where we are living our lives out of consumerism, out of materialism and out of seeing ourselves as individual identities and cultural identities, a kind of ‘us without them’. This film asks us to see how we frame our perspectives, our viewpoints and to take a sideways look at how we have done things in the past and how we are doing things now, to see if there are other ways to evolve. There is an incredible ability and necessity to adapt as a race and the question that tragedies like this ask is: what are the possible alternatives that can be opened up so that we learn from mistakes rather than continue making them?

The nuclear issue is one that began, some would say, in Hiroshima and it’s an interesting part of the film when Michael visits there to learn from the past. What does that tragedy teach us about this one? Why do we continue to make the same mistakes and what can the future hold if we make different decisions?

Michael Stone, as a buddhist practitioner & teacher, has a wonderful way of framing the conversation into a contemplative narrative. As if the ideas and practices of contemplative traditions such as yoga and buddhism can be widened into a cultural ideology and framework of seeing how we relate to the world and how we can grow as a culture. He sees the world as intimacy, as everything being dependant on and part of everything else. This little film really takes the spirit of activism, of the need to be shaken and woken up to what we are doing to ourselves, and opens it up to seeing that maybe what is needed is a cultural connected coming together of humanity to begin to ask bigger questions of how we evolve, including the ecology/environment and not as a separate entity to it.

Reacting to the awakening

The name of the film ‘Reactor’ also has a double meaning. As well as being about the nuclear reactors it also is about ourselves becoming reactors. Reactors to what is going on in our worlds, about becoming awake and reacting to that awakening. It seems that that’s what this world needs more of.

What we were left with was that Michael didn’t have any answers but had a deeper commitment to understanding how practice can wake us up to what is going on and to keep asking the important questions of how we as a culture can change.

Michael gave a talk plus a Q&A at the end of the screening. One of the loveliest insights was that he and Ian had been arguing about how the film would turn out. Michael wanted activism, Ian wanted stories. The stories won, but is there an activist account still to be made? Who knows. Perhaps we should watch this space…

Ian Mackenzie has made a wonderful little film and I urge you to see it. You can watch the film here:

REACTOR (2013) from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

Michael Stone’s work can be found here.

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