After spending five years
traveling and working my way around the world in my early twenties
(see Susan Griffith's book Work your way around the world) I
returned to the United Kingdom and studied Philosophy. After a few
years as a Philosophy of Arts teaching assistant at Kent University
I taught at a preparatory School before moving to Japan to teach
English and work as a teacher trainer for five years. After taking
up the Saxophone in Japan i returned to England to study as a
Woodwind Instrument Repairer.
My
'Yoga story' is outlined in Kiri Miller's book, Playing Along
published next month (Feb 2012) by OUP.
'Grimmly
is an ashtanga (and later Vinyasa krama) student without a
teacher--an impossible contradiction to many practitioners, but one
that is getting more possible all the time. He lives in the United
Kingdom and works as a repairer of woodwind instruments. In early
2007, Grimmly's flat was burgled and seven saxophones were stolen.
This incident made him so angry, and then so irritated with his own
anger, that he decided to take up some form of meditation. In the
course of reading about meditation practices, he learned that "a
lot of meditators were also doing yoga," so he looked for a
yoga book at the library and found Tara Fraser's Total Astanga
(Fraser 2006). As an overweight 43-year-old man, he was a bit
embarrassed even bringing the book up to the circulation desk. On
his blog, he wrote, "Going to a yoga class wasn't something I
even considered. A guy here, outside London, might think about going
to a gym to get in shape but not a Yoga class, probably not even an
aerobic class".
Grimmly
began learning the sequence of asana from the book, practicing every
morning before work, and soon began to order instructional DVDs and
search for YouTube videos to help him develop his practice. He
started his yoga blog (Ashtanga Vinyasa krama at Home) in the summer
of 2008, after about a year and a half of practicing at home alone
six days a week. His posts often invoke a growing community of
hidden "home ashtangis" like himself.
As
Grimmly developed his home practice, some of his choices posed
challenges to ashtanga orthodoxy. For instance, when Grimmly blogged
about his decision to begin learning the second series of asana, one
commenter told him that he should not be learning any intermediate
asana before he could stand up from a backbend: "Then and only
then you start to add intermediate to your existing primary. Your
teacher would give you each new asana as he saw your progress. . . .
Traditionally in India, yoga has been learned from teacher to
student, not from a book or video. It's really not right to decide
to give yourself postures".
After
a year and a half of home practice, Grimmly finally decided to try
attending an ashtanga class at a shala. He went two Sundays in a row
and was "blown away" by the physical adjustments he
received from the teachers there. But a week later, he explained
that he doubted he'd go back: "All the time it's just been me
on my mat, alone in a room early each morning, my practice...Somehow
now, after visiting the Shala, it feels a little like I'm practicing
for someone else...I feel more distant from my practice, less
involved" (Grimmly 2008b). It's clear from other posts that
Grimmly developed his practice using books, famous teachers' DVDs,
YouTube videos, other students' blogs, and any other media resources
he could find. He often writes about insights gleaned from these
sources. Nevertheless, the "live" teaching at the shala
somehow alienated him from his practice. While he benefited from the
physical adjustments he received, he was willing to forego them in
order to maintain a sense of agency and responsibility for his own
development: practicing for himself instead of a teacher.
Grimmly
and his fellow cybershala practitioners are creating new
transmission modalities for ashtanga yoga, from reflective writing
to side-by-side slideshows that might reveal hidden traces of
corporeal knowledge".
from
Playing Along, Kiri Miller (Oxford University press 2012)
In
June 09 I came across Srivatsa Ramaswami's 'Complete book of Vinyasa
Yoga' and spent the next year working out how best to combine
Vinyasa Krama with my Ashtanga practice. I attended Ramaswami's 200
hour Vinyasa Krama Teacher Training course at LMU, Los Angeles
July/Aug 2010. I now practice Ashtanga in the evenings and have an
integrated Vinyasa Krama practice, asana (based on subroutines),
Pranayama and Mediation in the morning. Last year I made home videos
of each of Ramaswami's Subroutines and produced practice sheets.
Over the last three months I revisited each subroutine, one each
morning, writing up practice notes to accompany the subroutines in
the evening. These subroutine practice sheets and practice notes
form the core of my book, Vinyasa Yoga at Home Practice Book
