Some words from the founder of triyoga…
You may have noticed that the yoga teacher Richard Rosen is coming to triyoga Soho to host a weekend of workshops from the 25th – 27th September. It is the first time that he will be teaching in the UK and I am really pleased and in fact honoured that he is coming to triyoga.
It has taken us a long time to get him here and my conversations with him have been to say the least, enjoyable. If you can imagine it, he’s an American with an English dry sense of humour. He has a humility and honesty that we love to see in the real teachers in these times when we are looking for authenticity (and the ongoing desire to learn) in our teachers, rather than how many Instagram followers they have.
His yoga background is interesting for me as he has experienced life both as a teacher and the co-founder of a yoga studio. He trained for several years in the early 1980s at the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco and in 1987 he co-founded with Rodney Yee the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California. He is a contributing editor at Yoga Journal magazine, and President of the board of the Yoga Dana Foundation which supports Northern California teachers bring yoga to underserved communities.
When I was working out what to say in this email that could get across why we invited Richard, I came across this piece he composed for Yoga Journal where he talks about B.K.S. Iyengar:
One of my hobbies is collecting yoga instruction manuals published between the 1920s and 1966, the year of Mr Iyengar’s Light on Yoga. From them I’ve made a kind of “timeline” for several poses, including Trikonasana and Urdhva Dhanurasana. The dozen or so “pre-Iyengar” poses look, shall we say, disorganized, on par with our stiffest, most beginning-est beginners.
Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there are Iyengar’s poses. There’s no obvious progression, as if it’s the culmination of a long evolution. It’s rather a complete revolution in the presentation of the pose: the perfect integration of its parts, the harmony of its lines, the mastery of its expression. You can’t help thinking, “This isn’t an asana, it’s a piece of art.”
The two most important things he taught us with his work are that yoga-true yoga-doesn’t simply change us, it transforms us. Radically. And thus it helps each one of us express the unique beauty inherent in our being.
Isn’t that depth so inspiring, so moving? I’m sure many of you may know that Richard is the author of three books on Pranayama, books on yoga for 50+ as well as a fascinating book called ‘The Original Yoga’ which is part history, part philosophy, part yoga instruction manual – this book clears up some of the confusion and misconceptions about the development of yoga, both traditional and modern.
You may find his newsletters particularly inspiring here’s a link https://us9.campaign-archive1.com/?u=889fd1c655267195f50bc6712&id=cb1aa83176
His workshops are based upon the The Secret Life of Hatha Yoga and you can find out all about them by clicking here.
