Foreword

It is possible for any person of any age or physical condition to learn a fair amount of yoga from a book. When there are no classes or teachers available this may be the only way, although a real yoga teacher represents the best form of instruction.

A written guide may serve as reference and add insight and meaning to ones practice, but cannot replace a a real teacher. Group classes, workshops and personal instruction will always be a necessity, not a luxury. There is something very special about human energy exchange - we cannot master any system completely in isolation from other people. Yet even group classes are also not an ideal medium to impart the philosophical depth of yoga, and much of the important theory on yoga cannot be explored in an ordinary class context.

Learning yoga is an ongoing experience – writing these notes expanded my knowledge just as much as every class that I teach teaches me something new. Yet all of my practice is still built on that very first postures I saw photographs of. My first glimpse of the yoga system comes from just a few weeks of reading when I started out with my pocket teacher, just like the first of meditation was inspired by reading an account of its benefits. It is difficult to really understand how yoga functions without reading at least a little about the broader subject. The intellectual, or philosophical aspect of yoga, and its spiritual principles does form an important part of its vast and rich treasure of wisdom, and should not be neglected. This is probably the greatest value of self study, other than the discipline required to practice regularly and consistently

I learned most of my basic yoga from a small pocket book teacher. I did in fact even start teaching my first class solely on the strength of self study. Special thanks then goes to my first yoga teacher, Russell Atkinson, author of the Yoga Pocket Teacher, Corgi mini-books, published 1967 (seemingly unavailable). (Johann - biography). Remember the old adage: when the student is ready the teacher will appear – in whatever guise is necessary at the time. When the time is ready we learn what we need to learn. You may meet your teacher in an old bookshop, on a friends shelf, at the local gym or while surfing the net.

As with any book foreword, I want to acknowledge and thank many. Apart from all the students where any teacher learns how to not do things from there is my teachers Parvati and Yogesh at the Ananda Kutir Ashrama in Cape Town where I learned the style of yoga that I developed my ideas on, and also my first yoga teachers, Pauline Todd and Merwede Van Der Merwe.

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