One Teacher

 I have read many teachers comment, including Guruji, that a student should have 1 teacher because having multiple causes confusion. I have multiple.  I am not sure what planet some people reside in but the one I am hanging out in is constantly changing. So finding a teacher that clicks with me and lives nearby and stays put is not in the cards for me but I actually love having more than one teacher, I think it works for me and certainly have never clung to the ‘but I thought it was always that way’ mentality, you throw that out quickly when you start Iyengar yoga or your head will implode.

  I had the fortune of having Karin O’Bannon teaching nearby, I thought she was the teacher for me, Karin soon became very ill and passed away. Cheree Winston was my teacher, she taught me more about my imbalances and how my body dealt with those in asana than anyone, she moved to some town in England I had never heard of, being a geography wiz I have only heard of one town in England but I know it wasn’t that one. Then there was Lori, her teaching was brilliant and her practice and her heart are so beautiful, one day in class she stood up screamed ‘I quit’ stomped across the room and slammed the door, oh wait I believe that was me on hearing she had quit, I knew one of us behaved badly, on second thought she may have just quietly stopped.

 Currently I attend classes with David Slack and Tatyana Wagner. They are both wonderful teachers. David to me is some kind of Gomukhasana master, I don’t know why but I find the way he teaches that asana is really wonderful, no this does not mean I am now able to do the pose, on one side you would be hard pressed to recognize it but it’s not because of the way it is taught, I was a student at a teacher with this on their list and the whole time they were teaching I was thinking they should get David to show them how to teach this. Of course it’s not the one pose, in every class I think what a great way to think about that.

 Tatyana was an interpreter, she has a gift…language. In her classes she is weaving the teachings of Karin O’Bannon, Arunji and Patrcia Walden. She also chooses a sutra and weaves that into her teaching. She chants the sutra multiple times, then she breaks it down and we chant it, then she chants it some more than she shares the English translation, then during the class she brings it back in. The only word I can think to describe her classes is beautiful, she has a lovely voice and a true gift. Last week she chose atha yoganusasanam, she chanted it multiple times, broke the words down as we chanted with her then she repeated it Now Yoga Begins…she read from Guruji’s commentary ‘the disciplines of integration are here expounded through experience, and are given to humanity for the exploration and recognition of that hidden part of man which is beyond the awareness of the senses’ then yoga began. She would demonstrate a pose then we would go to our mat in tadasana and she would chant and say Now Yoga Begins or while in the pose she would say a correction and then repeat this sutra, I cannot even describe how powerful this was, I was getting chills, it was just one of the most powerfully stunning practices. In Savasana she again chanted and reread the words from Gurji’s commentary.

 So as the teachers stand in line to repeat ‘you should choose one teacher’ I see no plans for Arunji to move from Bangalore to Highland Village, TX in the near future. I continue to be grateful for all the wonderful teachers who have touched my life, more than one at a time