Blended In-Person & Zoom Yoga Class.
Scaravelli Yoga taught in a small group class of students at my home yoga studio.
I will connect to the class and broadcast live on Zoom to my online students. I am mixing the offering with those who can’t be there in person. We will all benefit from being connected and practising yoga together.
My approach to yoga is to nurture awareness of yourself in movement and stillness. Regardless of your yoga practice, embodied cognition is intuitive and accessible. Erling is a 500-hour dip 2 IYN-certified, Scaravelli-inspired yoga instructor.
Yoga is not just about stretching
My take on a yoga practice is that it should support our normal human functional range of movement. Yoga should not impede our evolutionary ability to move well and with ease. We need to learn how to listen to our bodies through feeling our felt sensations via our nervous systems. If we can do that, we have the chance to undo deeply ingrained habitual patterns that no end of stretching, pushing, and pushing will undo.
Yoga for life
We want to practice and re-habituate movements that complement our everyday lives. These are the simple and often overlooked tasks like getting down and up from the floor without assistance, bending forward to pick things up, and reaching above our heads. Yoga can help you notice yourself and thus create a better life to live into our old age.
In my beginner’s yoga classes, there is no pressure to perform, to achieve significant stretches. I encourage students to feel what they are doing. The feeling of movement, of how we notice ourselves is very advanced yoga. You don’t need to be flexible to be a yogi, beginner or advanced.
Scaravelli inspired yoga
The power of yoga to benefit the practitioner seems to arise- at least in part from nothing more complicated than the release of physiological and psychological tension and the quieting of the mind.
William J. Broad
William J Broad concluded this in his excellent book The Science of Yoga (Washington Post Review). I completely agree with his findings; yoga should release tension, and my Scaravelli inspired yoga approach to teaching beginners yoga or advanced has the central aim.
Scaravelli yoga
Scaravelli Yoga should feel very natural and intuitive. Human movement is natural, and our yoga practice should support it. Sometimes, in modern postural Yoga, the complete opposite happens. Erling’s approach to teaching encourages you to embody your practice fully. We are noticing what you feel as you move in and out of postures and in stillness.
Our neurological map is revealed because we focus on how we feel, the sensations in all our movements. Therefore, how well we move in yoga postures or asana depends on it.
Vanda Scaravelli
Vanda Scaravelli (1908 – 1999) is known for her contribution to yoga in the West.
As a young girl, Vanda met the philosopher Jiddhu Krishnamurti, who became a family friend. He would stay at their home in Florence each year. Another family friend, Krishnamurti and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin invited Tirumalai Krishnamacharya to come to Scaravelli’s home in Gstaad, Switzerland to teach them yoga. Krishnamacharya sent two of his students, B. K. S. Iyengar and T. K. V. Desikachar, to teach them. In this way, she took up the practice of yoga in her 50s. When they left Europe, she no longer had a teacher and had to develop her practice. As this progressed, she developed a focus on breath, gravity and the spine.
My approach to yoga teaching is to encourage students to develop an awareness of their unique body maps. Afterwards, they work to establish intuitive movements, which feel like freedom.
We want to use muscles efficiently and not overwork them. When we can do this, there is less tension, and when there is less tension, you find more ease in movement; therefore, your spine can move more freely. Freedom has always been the goal of Yoga.
Summer 2022: 6 Week Course Dates
- 3rd June to 8th July
More is to be finalised soon.
Event Timeslots (1)
Friday Yoga
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In-person & online combined yoga class for any practitioner wanting a deepening understanding of a personal yoga practice.