My Yoga became a way in which I could experience life and my yoga developed with my experience of life:  exactly what it’s supposed to be, individual, vast and rich.

Yoga has become something for me where I’m always finding new places to go in myself and with others, as a teacher.  It has become the path that always leads me to answering the question: “who am I?”  But “my yoga” only became my yoga when my husband died in 2003.  When I had to fall back on the support of everything yoga is and can be.  And when I needed it yoga was there for me, learning anew and deeply to be totally in the moment, feeling the feelings and, at times, simply breathing. 

When I started training in Yorkshire, in the north of England, I was lucky enough to be able to attend class every day of the week – Iyengar or Hatha Yoga and a weekly meditation class with my teacher Sam Singh.  Growing up in Bradford, West Yorkshire was like growing up in India really, what with the Asian population and all the curry-houses and sari emporiums.  And in those Iyengar classes – a tough discipline for the young and fit - there would be 20 or 30 people of all ages and abilities, always at least a third of the class made up of old people who would come in with hold-alls full of pillows and blankets and blocks, just so that they could get into the posture.  From this I learned the gentle, passive and supported postures of yoga.  My own study gave me my love of yoga as therapy.

It is the way that I wake up daily with a sense of wonder and at night return to my experience of the source, just as we’re supposed to in Zen.  And in Zen I found an affinity with the energy work, breathing and meditation (and the mad stories!).  Loving the lightness and relaxed effortless of Zen, I use it in my teaching whenever I can.