Donna Farhi on Teaching + Practicing Yoga
On today’s show with Donna Farhi I confirm that Advanced Yoga is… drum roll please…. Being completely who you Are.
Every now and then we have a true modern guru on the Yogahealer show. (The rest of us i like to call “good hacks”, and I lovingly place myself in the latter category.) On today’s show we are blessed with the presence of Donna Farhi – who tends not to make it onto the www much.
Donna has strong words of advice for the modern yoga student and yoga teacher. If you want her advice, you should listen. Donna Farhi is a Yoga teacher who has been practicing for 40 years and teaching since 1982. Donna is the author of four contemporary classics: The Breathing Book, Yoga Mind, Body, & Spirit, Bringing Yoga to Life and Teaching Yoga.
I hope Donna becomes a regular on the show. She has recently co-authored a book on getting to the root of back pain. She’ll be back on the show on that topic soon.
Note from Donna Farhi to Yogahealer Tribe:
Each year I do a round-the-world teaching tour, so even though I live in New Zealand, I feel I have my finger on the pulse of issues percolating within the Yoga community. What I have been witnessing over the last decade is a growing chasm between yoga as a status seeking competitive from of physical elitism, and a veritable ground swell of both newbie and established practitioners seeking a return to Yoga as a practical, relevant, and accessible tool for self-care and self transformation.
People used to come to yoga to heal acute and chronic injuries and to sooth mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering. Increasingly, I work with people who have incurred their injuries THROUGH yoga, and feel enormous mental and emotional conflict within their practice because they sense the gap between what they intuitively know is right for themselves, and what the commercial yoga culture tells them they should be doing.
Increasingly I think people come to my intensives because I offer a Safe House for them to restore a loving relationship with themselves. Sadly, many share at the end of these intensives that they can’t go back to their teachers because to go back means to return to an atmosphere of coercion. Let’s open up a discussion about how teachers can support a shift back to self sovereignty for their students.
I rap with Donna Farhi about Being a Better Yoga teacher
- How does Donna measure progress on the path of her students
- How does Donna measure progress on the path of her yoga teachers
- What we can do to guide our local + community yoga culture
- How Donna creates a SAFE HOUSE for her students and teachers
What you’ll get out of tuning in:
- How teachers can support a shift back to self sovereignty for their students
- Why you get injured in Yoga
- Healing vs. Upleveling in Yoga
- What is un-yogic about commercial yoga culture
- How she demonstrates a cooperative vs. antagonistic relationship with the body
- Making agreements as a yoga teacher
- The Power of the phrase… “May I…?”
- Advanced Yoga: Being completely who You Are
Links:
BIO:
Donna Farhi has been practicing Yoga for forty years and teaching since 1982. She is one of the most sought-after guest teachers in the world leading intensives and teacher training programs internationally. Donna is the author of four contemporary classics: The Breathing Book, Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit: A Return to Wholeness and Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living. Her fourth book Teaching Yoga: Exploring the Teacher-Student Relationship is a curricular text for teaching trainings worldwide. She has been profiled in four separate publications on exceptional contemporary teachers of our time, including Yogini: The Power of Women in Yoga. Her fifth book, co-authored with Leila Stuart, Pathways to a Centered Body: Gentle Yoga Therapy for Core Stability, Healing Back Pain and Moving with Ease, will be released in May, 2017. American born, Donna now resides in Christchurch, New Zealand on a 30-acre farm with her partner and her horses Santosha and Pavana.
