Tag Archives: Ashtanga Cairo

So, Your Teacher Is Going to India

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If you are practicing in a traditional ashtanga yoga program, you will inevitably get an announcement that your teacher will be leaving for India to study with his/her teacher for one or two months. It may seem incomprehensible at first. Who takes this amount of time to study yoga? Why do they have to go all the way to India? “What about my practice?,” some students might say. While others may whisper that they too will take a little break.

These regular trips to Mysore, India is a chance for any student (and, in many cases, teachers) to deepen their practice at the source of ashtanga yoga. I have been practicing with my teacher, Sharath Jois, since 2010. This trip will be be my 8th trip (or 9th, I’m not really sure at this point). Over this period I have spent over a year and a half living and practicing in a small suburb in Mysore. And I am looking forward to “going home”– it is my yoga home, where practice takes on a very different quality because I am in the presence of my teacher. There, I will focus on my practice and recharge so that I can continue to do what I love to do, share this rich and transformative practice.

My last trip to Mysore, India was in the summer of 2018. The program was less than a year old, and it was understood, we would take the time off and reconvene after my return. This is one way of managing a mysore trip–everything is put into pause while the teacher goes to study and students either self-practice or don’t practice at all, and the program might loose students and steam in the process.

We are so lucky that we have a chance to do things differently now because the program has evolved and grown. After my last led class tomorrow, I will leave the program to my assistants, Yasmine Seoud, Marwa Saleh and Marwa Osman, three dedicated practitioners who have trained with me, assisted me in the room for over a year, studied the classical yoga text with me and with whom I have had countless conversations about teaching; they have been privy to my ethos and rationale as a teacher, why I choose to do the things that I do for each and every student. They are not me, but I have every confidence that they will take all that abundant knowledge of yoga and distill it into their authentic teaching style. They each teach yoga already and have already covered for me while I was sick or when I have had family emergencies, and have done great holding the space.

So, we enter a new phase in our program, one that I hope will allow the program to grow and prosper beyond the limits of my own small personhood. I will be honest, it is a lonely path being a mysore teacher, to dedicate all your mornings (and, thus, evenings, too) day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, but it has been a pleasure to create a space where people can feel safe to explore their bodies and to stretch beyond what we think possible. Since 2017, I have poured my life and soul into this program. If you love practicing with me, if you love the yoga community we have built here, if you get something from the experience of coming to our classes, I urge you to continue to come to class, keep your practice juicy, keep your subscriptions going, your participation keeps our program alive.

Starting next week, Monday, December 4, Marwa Osman, Yasmine Seoud and Marwa Saleh (not pictured here) will be holding the space through January 2024. See you at Nūn Center. Monday to Thursdays 7:30-10:30am, Fridays 8:30-10:30am. Want to sample the program? We offer 1 week and 1 month INTRODUCTION packages.

Catching Wind, Empowering Practice

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So many times I have found myself blown in certain directions. Mostly, though not exclusively, with incredible positive outcomes. Even gale force-like winds and maelstroms, which might have moored me into isolation or thrown me into some catastrophic disaster, would eventually abate and I would land wherever with the softness of a feather. I consider myself blessed to have had such good luck to be propelled so. I also know, that in many ways, I called for it, that I invited the elements myself to move me. Time and time again, I’ve taken myself to some peak, opened my arms in surrender, and like wings unfurled, I would get picked up and thus be transported.

I wondered, however, what would it be like if I participated more in this act of flight? The last year in particular has been about recognizing the difference between flowing with things and flying myself.

It’s been an amazing process, coming to a deeper understanding that all this raw energy can be transformed and directed. That I am not prey or play thing to the forces I perceived to be much greater than myself, but, instead, an active player, instigator, herder of energy.

There is so much in this; the world at large is packed with potential energy, raw, unharnessed. In the microcosm of us, we are likewise full of unrealized vitality and force. When we learn to access this, when we learn to use it skillfully, to move it in certain directions, something huge shifts. We are empowered.

This naturally happens when we practice. There’s this wealth of untapped energy in our bones, our connective tissues, our muscles, our breath, our thoughts and hearts. Our practice helps us soften the gross layers, physical and subtle, emotional and mental, that keep us from connecting with our own physical/metaphysical body.

When we practice with consistency over a long period of time, we start tapping into these energies, which then become apparent in the practice itself. We extract energy from the practice and it fuels us. Our bodies become efficient, so does our breath, we develop an economy of thought and effort and before we know it, we are no longer consuming energy but creating it, so ample that it overflows and drips into our lives causing all sorts of creative bounty /mayhem.

This is my tenth year of yoga practice. It’s not a very long time–I continue to feel like a babe in the woods–but it’s not a short time either. Whatever length it is, it is long enough to observe the effects of practice, how it’s changed, how it’s changed me, how my life has changed because of it.

These days in Cairo’s Nūn Center, there are a number of beginners and some students returning to practice after a substantial break. And naturally the struggles that come with starting an ashtanga practice begin to appear: the body gets tired, the mind wavers, the internal debate on whether to go to class starts when the alarm rings in the morning.

I remember my teacher saying that if you never leave your practice, it will never leave you. I still have those days where doing my own practice is like going to battle with myself. What he said, though, it’s true, and it gets me on my mat, it gets me through the first sticky sun salutation, and, eventually, the practice helps me catch wind.

Mysore Classes here at Nūn continue. Sunday to Thursday, 7:30-10am. This week, we are adding Ashtanga Basic classes Monday and Wednesday at 7pm. These classes can be used as an introduction to the morning Mysore program. Drop ins and all levels are welcome!