Attending group yoga classes is one of the most common and popular ways to interact with yoga today and so it’s not surprising that many of us (even those who have attended classes for years) have yet to experience yoga outside of this particular setting.

Every season we are offered new and novel classes to choose from – each of which reinforces the idea that yoga is primarily a kind of physical exercise or sport, rather than being understood as a self-care system that includes exercise as one part of a much larger whole.

Yoga is intended to support you and your changing needs over a lifetime and isn’t just another flavour of exercise to flirt with before moving on to the newest and most popular fitness trend of the day.

A personalised yoga that is always adapted to suit you (rather than you to it) may not be something you’ve considered but makes a great deal of sense when you wish to engage with yoga at a deeper level and make yoga practice a partner supporting your long-term self-care and lifestyle goals.

A personalised approach also helps us move more effectively beyond the general health and healing benefits of yoga practice and towards self-transformation and self-realisation.

Viewing yoga from this larger perspective will make a world of difference in how you approach and relate to yoga – both at the beginning and as you progress over time – determining the types of practices in which you engage and choosing from whom you wish to learn them.

 To Learn More about Styles of Yoga

 Styles of Yoga – How Many are There and Which is the Best?

Our modern lifestyles present us with a constant stream of choices (interruptions are what I would call them), all of them jostling for a piece (if not all) of our attention.

It’s something we must deal with many times a day, every day.

Now while some of these decisions are important, most of them really aren’t.

Nonetheless, this near relentless barrage of choice can consume a great deal of our attention, time and energy.

A trip down the condiment aisle at the local supermarket will remind you of this when you see 65 types of mayonnaise on display. Surely one of them has my name on it?

We can easily spend 1/2 an hour there, coming to a decision (that we believe will save us time and the hassle of making it ourselves).

These days, I prefer to make a batch of my own. It’s fun, not hard at all, takes about 15 mins and the result is much tastier and healthier. I then tweak it to suit the meal and my mood at the time.

 Try this Recipe for Yourself 

 Rolling your own – Home-made Mayonnaise

(Including you – just as you are right now!)

I am particularly passionate about introducing beginners to yoga. To be there and lend support to students as they take those first small steps is an opportunity and responsibility I take very seriously. To hear people say how great they feel compared to only an hour or so before hand – always brings a smile to my face.

To be able to plant these little seeds that later (sometimes years later) can bring about powerful personal transformation is something I feel deeply grateful to be able to offer to others.

A personal example of this was being introduced to a simple, yet powerful, mindfulness meditation as a teenager. This experience had a profound impact on me and I have continued to use the practice and variations of it to this day.

There are times in life when we realise we have been holding on to a situation or habits that no longer serve us and that we are ready for change.

It’s then that we start to recall the many hints and nudges we have heard and received along the way and, just like pieces of a puzzle, they all start to connect and fit together.

Ideas we may have previously resisted, or brushed aside as irrelevant, begin to take on new meanings and we can see how we can use them to help ourselves. I think it’s within this attitude of welcoming change and being willing to change our perception, that we encourage our own personal moments of realisation.

It makes the hairs on my arms stand up and gives me a shiver down my spine when I think about this.

My appreciation and gratitude for that early meditative experience is now greater than ever because I understand, first hand, just how powerful a catalyst for change these timeless teachings can really be. Sharing mindfulness practices with others now, brings it full circle and is an opportunity for me to pay it forward.

 To Learn more about Yoga

Please enjoy these  Getting Started Posts designed especially to help point New Students on the Path of Yoga in the Right Direction.

If I am discussing yoga – I would say I’ve had many teachers over the years, starting with that taste of meditation as a teenager – in a high school drama class of all places!

In my view, the desire to learn and to make a habit of Self-learning are more significant than any individual or formal training you may have had – regardless of the discipline and so, to that end, I devote time every day to reading and learning.

I’m a bit of a workshop junkie because I love to receive new information from different angles. I believe it’s important for everyone, and especially so for those who teach, to have their current ideas and methods challenged. This allows us to keep evolving our approaches and become more effective at whatever we do.

Formally, I’ve completed an advanced diploma of yoga teacher training with the Yoga Institute, in Sydney Australia (Dr Michael De Manincor) and followed this with the Svastha Yoga of Krishnamacharya: Therapy Program (Dr Ganesh Mohan) which combines the most effective skills-based aspects of traditional Yoga and Ayurveda with Modern Medicine.

I strongly believe that to move forward in life, we must continue to learn. Not just for the sake of knowledge, or novelty, but to understand more about ourselves and each other. I know that this makes life better for us individually and, in turn, those around us.

I don’t teach any particular ‘style’ of yoga.

So-called Styles of yoga are a new phenomenon that moves us further away from the original intentions of Yoga by focusing almost entirely on how to move – rather than presenting the exercise component of yoga as a single part of a multi-part system.

 To Learn More about Styles of Yoga

 Styles of Yoga – How Many are there and Which is the Best?

I teach yoga according to the principle of the ‘viniyoga of Yoga’ which traces its origins to the ninth century Yogi Näthamuni and is among the oldest traditions of Yoga in the World.

Essentially, that yoga is most effective when it is adapted to suit the individual.

The viniyoga of Yoga can be described as the intelligent and systematic application of yoga tools and techniques according to the unique needs and circumstances of the individual.

 To Learn More about Viniyoga

 Viniyoga – Adapt the Yoga, Not the Individual!

Teach what is inside you, not as it applies to you, to yourself, but as it applies to the other.

T.K.V. Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice

 To Learn More about this Lineage

 A Tribute to Sri T. Krishnamacharya

 A Tribute to T.K.V. Desikachar

Yoga has radically shifted my perspective on life and helped me change many long-standing unhealthy behaviors and habits. The result has been an enormous transformation of my old way of life and me as a person – physically in terms of health and fitness, as I have described – and equally important, my mental and spiritual approach towards life is now more balanced and sustainable.

Learning about and practicing Yoga has changed my perspective on life and my overall worldview.

Yoga has also inspired me to live life more fully and more authentically. Rather than ruminate on what might go wrong if I try something new, I do it and find out what can go right!

You know, it’s always a single and often simple, action that begins the process of change in our lives. For me, this was deciding that I had suffered enough and was ready to get started on making some long overdue changes.

Understand that we can’t control everything in our lives nor make everything perfect. Because getting caught up in the fear of what might go wrong is self-defeating and can be paralysing.

Alternatively – Acting from a place of trust and without fear is Empowering.

Living this truth can make the difference between a life constrained by a fear of death and one that focuses on the practice of joyful living.

In practical terms – this attitude towards life results in better health and well-being because it encourages us to ruminate less and be more confident in our choices and actions.

Embracing this teaching played a huge role in my recovery from serious illness and is one of the many powerful lessons that yoga has helped me to learn and put into practice.

Raising a Daughter and being a Husband along with everything those roles entail has been an enormously challenging and rewarding undertaking and has kept me very, very busy.

Changing many of my bad habits to get well after serious illness took a great deal of time and effort, neither of which I thought I had available to me at the time.

Learning not to push myself so hard all the time is an ongoing challenge for me that my daily, personal yoga practice supports me with.

I had a pretty tough childhood and contended with a great deal of abuse. In hindsight and looking on the bright side, I believe those experiences taught me many valuable lessons and provided me unique insights that I am able to draw on now in the service of others. When live gives you lemons make lemonade as the saying goes!

Hands down and by far – The Journey of Life is the biggest challenge (and joy) that we all face and experience together.

Well, now that you’re here. How long have you got?!

Seriously, that question is almost as loaded as asking a Yogi ‘How are you feeling today?’ #YogaHumour

Putting on my Narrator’s voice. Well you see, it all started when Len was a young boy…

There was a Jacaranda tree in our family garden that I loved to climb up whenever I had the chance. It was good exercise and I would swing on it and hang upside down and do all sort of ridiculous things as boys tend to do.

When I had tired myself out, I would sit up there looking over the fence and out into the road and watch the world go by.

Wondering where everyone was going and what they might be doing and letting my imagination take me to new and exciting places. It was a wonderful stage of life that I now remember very fondly.

I think that from a young age I found myself attracted to almost anything physically or mentally challenging and wanted to understand things at a deeper level. I’m extremely curious by nature. Perhaps too much so, as it can lead you off the garden path and scatter your attention.

I’ve tried and enjoyed so many sports and hobbies over the years it is hard to recall them all. Biking, skateboarding, swimming, running, making models, bonsai, breaking and then trying to fix things (got me into plenty of trouble as a teenager but also led to my future career in IT). What else?

Drawing, sculpting, hiking, skiing, astronomy and photography. Tech and gadgets are useful but not without danger. I enjoy cooking and eating and listening to my favourite music.

What can I say? I embrace life and never feel bored!

I love to read and write and share my ideas. This takes up a fair bit of my time these days.

A common theme for me is that I relish a good challenge and solving tricky problems. I think to truly understand something you have to get your hands dirty and actually do it.

This sounds completely obvious when you say it out loud, but isn’t something we tend to verbalise when we are stuck inside our heads and engaged with all the swirling thoughts.

A direct part of working towards the freedom that is described by yoga comes from this disentanglement with the mind and then being able to recognise situations more clearly.

Every stage of life presents the opportunity to learn something new and interesting. Without a doubt, learning is the greatest of my passions.

Regardless of the ‘thing’ I am doing – being absorbed in the moment, in the experience, is a great joy to me.

Now although I know, deep down, that none of us can be truly good at everything, I believe very strongly that putting in some effort, with a willingness to learn, can take you a long way.

It’s not only the novelty factor of having new experiences that attracts me, but also about being able to see the connections between different experiences and join the dots. This can be very rewarding.

I think we should try to apply this general attitude towards those things we feel we don’t like, think we can’t do, or don’t want to do.

I’ve often found that my initial aversion to something new was no more than a lack of understanding, or appreciation, of the subject and that by taking the time to really dig into something you can uncover many sources of inspiration that go hand in hand with the challenge.

Yoga is just like that. Every practice is an opportunity to learn something new and unexpected about yourself and is a constant source of inspiration that keeps me coming back.

Because the goal of yoga is to integrate mind and body, the process and journey allow us to explore and learn about both simultaneously. It does this in a practical, sensible and clear way so you never feel lost.

For me, Yoga brings everything together tangibly and sensibly and helps me to integrate all of my life experiences into a more cohesive and meaningful whole.

It’s a fantastically rich combination and an amazingly good fit for anybody seeking answers or meaning or just wanting to improve general health and well being.