by Kara-Leah Grant This article was written in February 2014 for Wanderlust NZ & Australia that year. I've re-published it as Amy is appearing at Wanderlust Sunshine Coast October 2015 and it was a fabulous interview. When I first heard that Amy Ippoliti was teaching at Wanderlust NZ and Australia, and saw photos of her, I made the assumption that she was one of the new-breed of yoga teachers - young, hip and cool but not necessarily with any depth of understanding or decade-long … [Read more...]
Search Results for: yoga teacher training
Judith Hanson Lasater on What It Really Means to Live Your Yoga {audio}
by Kara-Leah Grant Meet Judith Hanson Lasater. A yoga teacher since 1971, and the co-founder of Yoga Journal, Judith is a physical therapist, and holds a PhD in East West psychology. She's also written eight books and recently released a second edition of her popular book Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life. (The first edition was released in 1999.) That was a great excuses for me to hit up Rodmell Press (her publishers) about interviewing Judith, and I was very … [Read more...]
Donna Farhi on How to Find True Alignment in Your Yoga Practice
By Donna Farhi, Yoga teacher and author When I first began formal Yoga Teaching Training, yoga postures were taught as a series of check-lists, with a point-by-point focus on each and every body part. While this Simon-Says approach of monkey see, monkey do led to a pretty successful replication of a picture, it seemed to bypass the internal process of feeling one’s own body experience and learning how to find one’s alignment from that felt experience. As the years went on I began to feel … [Read more...]
Is Yoga Really as Dangerous as Downhill Skiing? High ACC Levies Hit NZ Yoga Teachers
By Laura Brookes If ACC’s got it right, all New Zealand yoga teachers should be on immediate hazard alert. They currently face the same risk of injury in their workplace as downhill ski instructors. Yoga instructors are charged $1.37 for every $100 earned in ACC levies, a higher rate than prostitutes ($0.40), firefighters ($0.92) and professional netball players ($1.31). ACC groups yoga instruction into the classification unit for Sports and physical recreation instruction, meaning they … [Read more...]
Restorative Yoga: Exploring Supported Child’s Pose In-depth
By Neal Ghoshal, Sacred Moves A little while ago I wrote an article on the eight essential principles of Restorative Yoga. Since then I've been continuing to delve deep into this beautiful practice. Deep rest is always calling! I'm happy to be sharing some more … and one of the most profoundly restful of the Restorative postures is Supported Child's Pose (Salamba Balasana). This is a posture which many find deliciously comforting and relaxing, perhaps because it tunes us into a time when we … [Read more...]
Donna Farhi on Why Your Yoga Teacher is Not Your Friend
Editor's Note: Since this article was published, several accounts of sexual harassment and assault have been made public by Mark Whitwell's female students. We do not in any way condone Mark's behaviour. You can read more about the accounts here. Donna Farhi, author and yoga teacher, as interviewed by Kara-Leah Grant Donna Farhi is a world renowned yoga teacher who has been practicing yoga for thirty nine years, and teaching it since 1982. She lives here in New Zealand but teaches intensives … [Read more...]
How to use Feldenkrais Technique to Free up Your Yoga {video}
by Kara-Leah Grant I first came across Feldenkrais in a yoga teacher taught by a friend in Wellington - Oli Wiles. He was smitten with the technique and skilfully wove it through his yoga teaching to great benefit. Now that I've been practicing yoga for almost two decades, I've also become very interested in how the body opens up, or doesn't open up. From my own experience I can see that it's not a simple equation of doing x, y, or z posture enough times and achieving your optimum range of … [Read more...]
Teenage Kicks! The Impact Of Yoga On Teenagers
By guest author Charlotta Martinus, TeenYoga I was 37 when I started yoga and to be frank, I thought it was all pretty weird! And so did most people. A lot has changed since then. There has been a 25% year on year increase in the UK in people involved in yoga, one way or another in the last ten years. So, clearly, perceptions have changed! When I started thinking about offering yoga in schools, it was fun and easily accepted at primary school, as little kids are so open to new experiences … [Read more...]
How Many Years of Yoga Practice Does it Take to Get Flexible?
by Kara-Leah Grant This is an impossible question to answer - at least, to answer definitively, but I'm still going to give it a damn good crack. And with good reason. Despite the fact that yoga has nothing to do whatsoever with flexibility - that flexibility is a side benefit of one's yoga practice and no measure of the depth or strength of one's yoga practice - yoga and flexibility are intimately intertwined in the modern idea of yoga. There's a good reason for this. We are predominantly a … [Read more...]
On the Dilution of the Genuine Transmission of Yoga Part 2
by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat I've been contemplating the many reactions I received to this article over the past week or so, On the Dilution of the Transmission of Yoga. One person unsubscribed from the website (or at least - one person told me they had because of this article, more people may have!) saying that I had made some good points but she found the article judgemental and unyogic. Other people rejoiced that someone was speaking such things out loud. It does feel … [Read more...]