An Intelligent Approach

This website is here for three main purposes, firstly to clarify my approach to yoga via articles I have written, interviews I have done and the research I lean on to support my perspective. Secondly to have a taster session to see if it suits you, and thirdly to provide information about the classes and courses I am running should you wish to join me on some of them; if you do I look forward to seeing you either online or in person.

yoga key themes
Yoga is a broad church with a long and rich history

Intelligent Yoga: Key Themes

Themes that I think are worthy of debate are the following:

  1. Yoga as a modern practice. Most serious students of yoga will know by now that there is a big disconnect between the type of yoga that is practiced in the majority of Gyms and yoga studios today, compared to the type of yoga described in the texts revered by most yogis. There have been a raft of books in recent years pointing out this disconnect. If we take this as our starting point that current yoga is a modern practice, what from the past can we legitimately carry forward into the future and what needs to change? What differentiates modern yoga from exercise?
  2. Perhaps more contentiously we can look at the metaphysical  aspects of yoga  that include  the manipulation of prana through channels called nadis and centres of energy called chakras and replace them with more naturalistic perspectives about the the way the world is perceived and responded to, in this view there is no room for an energetic system that is separate from matter. However this shouldn’t mean that  yoga becomes reduced to a form of performance or exercise which in many cases it seems to be.
  3. Yoga can still stay close to its soteriological roots if our interest is how we reduce the suffering in people’s lives. This includes and investigation into how we get into trouble physically, emotionally and psychologically. Often we notice this has a lot to do with the habits beliefs and biases we bring to both our physical and social lives, our interest might now become more to do with firstly how we sense the world, what those sensations mean to us and then how we respond to the meaning we have made of them.

Intelligent Yoga: The Book

In writing the book Intelligent Yoga, I intended to open up some key themes that I feel should be debated in the yoga world. The themes are close to my heart, but I realize they are not everyone’s cup of tea. However over the last twenty years of travelling and teaching I think I sense a change in the wind and the time feels right to bring these discussions more overtly into the open.

The fully revised and rewritten edition of Intelligent Yoga is available from www.intelligent-yoga.co.uk.