Teacher Details

I have been practicing ‘asana’ yoga for 6 years, I began my yoga journey as an Iyengar practitioner but since moving to Newcastle upon Tyne late 2009 took up astanga yoga- for lack of Iyengar teachers at the time, but now because it has become my preferred practice.

I had an immense affinity towards yoga when I first discovered it (thanks to my first teacher Lynn Farquar in Stirling, Scotland), but Yoga became most prominent in my life when it was absent. In the time after finishing University and moving to Newcastle life became ‘too busy’, my lifestyle at University was conducive towards practicing yoga every day and I didn’t realise the importance of practice until I unwittingly stopped. Unhappy with being influenced by everyday mundaneness I started to practice yoga again and what was a tacit understanding before, that with yoga comes mental clarity and physical wellbeing, became very explicit. I knew I wanted to make yoga a bigger part of my life and make it more accessible to others, and thus I wanted to teach.

I completed Brain Coopers 200-hour teacher training course in summer 2010 and have been teaching since. My preferred form of yoga and consequently my preferred way of teaching is emphasis on vinyasa as my belief is that the breath plays an integral part towards what makes yoga so beneficial. My full time occupation is as an MA student, however. Using my time as a student well I will explore the community aspects of yoga in a formal sense i.e. ‘how does yoga sustain itself, what does it mean to be a community of yoga?’. This will guide my dissertation topic and I hope that it’ll add to our understanding of yoga in the west.
My personal aspirations are akin to most practitioners: to be able to have free time to practice and to learn with inspiring teachers and hopefully keep raising the standards to yoga in the West.