I teach a Basic yoga class which is beginner-friendly, with lots of explanation and alignment cues so people can safely learn and practice the basic yoga poses.    I teach ujjayi breathing and encourage people to use it throughout the class and we practice pranayama before shavasana at the end of the class. The style of the class tends to be more Hatha-based but can involve non-yoga physical movements such as rib isolations and brain teasers to encourage growth of new neural pathways.   

I teach an Exploratory yoga class for which one needs at least a little prior experience of yoga, not necessarily with me, and a mind open to new experience. Primarily the warm-up tends to be a strong Asthanga style Suryanamaska A and B warm-up followed perhaps by a vinyasa style flow, agni sequences, perhaps camel variations, shoulderstand and plough variations. What is offered varies class to class. Progressions of the poses tend to be offered so people can practise within their physical capacity.  Expect some chanting, some pranayama, some Sanskrit and at the end, again depending on the energy of the group, there will be a longer period (can be up to 30 minutes) of stillness either with formal yoga nidra, body scan, chanting, vibrations with the singing bowl, some music or, most profound of all, silence.   This is the traditional “full fat” version, not “yoga lite”.

I also teach a very gentle yoga class called the Watercourse Way.   My longtime teacher, Ilonka, before she moved exclusively to teaching aerial yoga, taught ground based yoga which was gentle, using a lot of props and modifications to accommodate the inevitable limitations of western people’s bodies and always emphasised the way that water works with gravity, always flows around obstacles, is soft and yielding and yet can wear away stone.  I now teach a similar class, where the sitting is done in chairs rather than on the ground and plenty of props are used to enable people, who may have physical limitations, fears or long-term holding patterns, to recover lost motion and explore the range of possibility in their bodies rather than stay in an ever declining range of motion. The dark vise of old age where the body gradually seizes up is not inevitable.