Johann's Yoga Story

Photography by Hendre Retief, Koeelbay 2002.

I started teaching as a professional, trained and certified teacher in 1995, the year after acquiring my teacher’s diploma from the Ananda Kutir Yoga Centre in Rondebosch East, Cape Town, the year before.

Before that I was so keen to share what have learned by myself and from attending other teachers classes that I was already teaching two classes per week. I always knew that there was an area in the vast discipline of yoga, to somehow find and teach my own interpretation it. This is the story of that search, a search that can never stop, as ones practice of yoga will always change and grow through life.

While backpacking throughout 1990, travelling from Western Ireland to the Russian border East of the Black Sea I had this little pocket guide edition of the classic yoga asanas in my bag. It had good, clear photographs, and some basic instructions plus the health benefit of each posture. I bought it a few months before in London, in a second hand Charring Cross store, while looking for some 'island reading' for later. It was probably filed under the "Esoteric", or "Philosophy" sections, I doubt if I would have browsed under the Health section at that stage of my life. I don’t recall having ever heard or thought of yoga before, but somehow the of what I read about the philosophy of yoga, and the beautiful, gymnastic poses, taken in the sunshine on som ebeach-looking location, resonated with me.

Anyway, I got the little book (Russel Atkinson's Corgi mini-book) and having seen the Greek isles of Mykanos and Santorini, I still had about a month to while away before meeting my sister in Athens. So I sailed further south to Crete, and having no real money I found yet another desolate, out-of-season tourist beach to call home. I slept in a ruined building overlooking the sea, free (cold beach) showers, an outdoor cafe, a mosque and cheap village shops nearby. With miles and miles of island to explore, the mild Mediterranean climate, and nothing to do but walking and lazing about, it was the perfect place to scrutinize my yoga book. Sleeping outside I would naturally wake at sunrise, meditate and perform for an hour or so what I could make of the descriptions of the exercises.

Since then the wonder of yoga has continued to inspire me to stretch, breathe and meditate or reflect every day, even if only for a few minutes, every day of my life. I learned to understand the Zen philosophy of "living in the present", and to constantly engage in a process to find meaning and a "greater truth" of life by "lving it" - the only way to do it.

Life led me to Stellenbosch, my love of music got me a management job offer at the Musica retail company, where I started work in January 1991. In this lovely Boland town I lived like a kind of modern day hippy with a day job, cycling to work, going for walks in the mountain with the dogs before or after shop hours, and slowly making my way towards a holistic consciousness. I continued practicing my version of yoga, and opening myself to the few spiritual ideas that came to the fairly conservative Afrikaans town via the far more trendy and "new age" Cape Town.

Somewhere during 1993 the girlfriend I had at the time opened me up to aromatherapy, the Alexander technique, music therapy and other alternative therapies. She also suggested we go to the local teacher, Merwede Van Der Merwe's, yoga class. My first class contained nothing that I was not already familiar with, but "being guided" by someone else through the familiar routines held a special pleasure, but it was the final relaxation that took me by surpirse. Merwede used a simple guided meditative "corpse pose" technique that somehow completely blew me away. It was much like tripping on LSD, something I was much interested in, read about and experimented with a two or three times some years earlier. It was a complete transcendental experience, I felt as if was falling upwards through the roof and into the stars, and through the galaxies beyond. I confirmed my submission that the "universal mind' and "breaking through to the other side" that I searched for in books, in drugs, in music, and many other avenues, that thing that I instinctively recognised in the pages of the yoga book I bought, could be achieved in states of pure consciousness, and that yoga was one of these avenues towards such self-realization.

I left the class on a calm high. A huge shift of consciousness, using only the body, mind and breath in powerful harmony, took place deep inside of me, through my own effort, with no drugs, philosophy, indoctrination, guilt trips or degrees. I found the freedom I was looking for.

After a few further classes, learning a lot about yoga and my body, about healing and, inadvertently, about the "health industry", a whole new dimension to my life suddenly opened up. A new learning curve, introduced through a relationship that only lasted a few months, took me through major changes. As with all learning curves it was, and still is, an unending one. Although it took me a good year or two to manage the implementation of a more integrated and successful yoga lifestyle I managed to rapidly improve my health study of yoga. I worked thorough the initial discomfort of the physical changes to my spine and some muscle groups (and my mind!), and was amazed at the results: less frequent bouts of depression, anxiety, no more back ache, and gone the arthritis that was caused by poor energy circulation caused by a disease announced incurable by doctors. (I have Reynold’s syndrome, a narrowing of the blood vessels in some parts).

Although it seems like an easy process of years ago it was hard work, and in retrospect I realise the value in accepting responsibility for ones own health, and that it does probably require more discipline and effort than most people are prepared to make. I also realised that is a choice one has to make when ready, and that when the choice is made, that there will be people and systems in support. I knew that, somehow, I had to be part of such a system. I became more and more interested in many fields of health care, and although I am unqualified in other fields, I have acquired a fair understanding of other healing principals. Learning through self-study, practical experience, from friends and the occasional workshop is to me still the best form of health practice - gaining any kind of wisdom involves active participation in life.

I attended classes with the other teacher in town, the very experienced Pauline Todd, who taught the style of yoga that I still like most and practice to this day, a soft, therapeutic form known as Integral or Sivananda Yoga. I started my own yoga class, and took on a few pupils with the conviction that I was a natural teacher. I thought it went pretty okay, but then realised somewhere down the line that I probably needed to attain some sort of qualification.

I stopped teaching during the year of 1995 I studied the Sivananda style of yoga at Ananda Kutir Yoga Centre in Rondebosch, Cape Town. Their comprehensive, fully fledged 200 hour teachers syllabus included meditation, asana practice, philosophy and physiology from people who really understands yoga. The many words of wisdom of my teachers there, Swami Parvati and Yogesh, still has a profound influence on my understanding of yoga. I started teaching again during 1996 and has never been without a regular class since then. I then spent another two and a half years doing the advanced health care study at Ananda Kutir, but I dropped out of the final (third) year. The weekends became just too short for me, and with all the demands of working retail hours, teaching after work,and my involvement in the music and entertainment field became too demanding.

I learned a lot though, the course in yoga therapy deepened my understanding of health, yoga and teaching tremendously. Another period of intense growth followed, I practising self-therapy, becoming the rage of the time (a Reiki Master), learned some Tai Chi, lived life, made music and struggled to integrate all the learning and changes into an "ordinary" lifestyle.

Teaching at rather unsatisfying venues, two or four time a week became a bit of a drag. With yoga being very much an esoteric an eccentric practice in Stellenbosch there seemed no way to go ahead. Very little money was to be made from a minute pool of interested students, but despite this I teamed up with Terry Nel, the another new teacher in town, in a drive to take yoga out of the dark and into the lives of our small and conservative community. We found an almost affordable room next to a liquor store in an unfashionable street, did it up into a studio and stayed open for six months. We both went back to teaching a class or two per week from home, or some or other temporary venue.

I spent more time following my musical avenues, always looking for ways to cut down the number of hours at my day job. Naturally this lead to more rock and roll outings and back to more private practice and application to in own lifestyle. I founded my own record company, with longer but more flexible hours, and rented a lovely venue to teach yoga from. Things went relatively well, but I still did not manage to make yoga more than an after hours occupation. The schools and gymnasiums of the town rejected my application for work with them, and I decided to concentrate on my music "day job".

The ever growing international awareness of yoga finally entered the minds of the locals. A surprise phone call from the University gymnasium middle of 2000 led to regular classes there - the public suddenly started to demand classes. The Health and Racquet Club followed suit. Two years after asking them for the chance to teach there they came back to me courtesy of the marketplace and its change of consciousness. Whether it was the effect of the Madonna’s and Sting’s of the world, a real paradigm shift or a magazine trend, I don’t know, but a change it was. During the past three months I have had more students in my classes than in 10 years of private classes put together!

Hopefully I will, one day, find the perfect studio for more personal classes - we do need an ashram situation as well in this town. "Real" or advanced yoga teaching certainly need much more quiet than the gyms can provide, but the exposure for yoga in such venues is immense. I have already started to develop a teaching technique that "works for all" without losing the essence of the spirit of yoga. This challenge of adapting yoga, for oneself and for the public, will never end - it is the way of the world.

All my teaching and learning, although it seems like a "forever process" to me, has, in fact, only taken me through a few years experience. There is much to learn, and it is all coming back to me in a different reflections and guises of the universal teachings of yogic spirituality, also proving to me that, "when the teacher is ready, he will find the student, and when the student is ready he will find the teacher" is one of its many truths. And it proves that life itself is always our best teacher – whether one names our path through it yoga, or God, or spirit, whatever.

A position of such insight seems to be a good place for me to undertake the rest of the journey of my life from.

Stellenbosch, 21 January, 2001.

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