Teacher profile: Zoe Reason

Iyengar teacher Zoe Reason was inspired to take up yoga by a beloved aunt. Here she speaks candidly about how her practice, and teaching, has become central to her happiness.

What led you along the yoga path?

My beloved aunt Hilary is a British Wheel of Yoga teacher and I'd always loved doing yoga when I went to stay with her.

She bought me Mira Mehta's book on Iyengar Yoga for my 30^th birthday and I practiced some of the easier poses at home, but I was moving around and I struggled to find a teacher that I liked.

Every May and September Hilary taught a group in Paxos and Corfu in Greece. In 1997, after several years of "being too busy", I finally succumbed and went with her.

And that was it. I fell in love. With Corfu, with yoga, with the world. I felt like I'd come home at last. I just needed the discipline and the structure of practicing twice a day.

When I got back to London I immediately found the woman who is still my teacher today - she taught two minutes down the road from where I lived. There is an old saying that goes "When the student is ready the teacher appears".

How long were you practising before you trained as a teacher?

Almost five years to the day after that first yoga holiday I started my Iyengar teacher training. The quickest you can qualify as an Iyengar teacher is two years - and I took three. The training was the hardest and most challenging thing I'd ever done in my life. And the best. By a million miles.

Which training course did you do and why?

And I'm slightly ashamed to say that I chose Iyengar because that was what I knew. I've never really explored any other discipline. It's a method that works for me. Perhaps other methods might be equally fantastic.

But I feel that I still have so much to learn from the Iyengar family that however diligent I am I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of what they have to offer.

What type of yoga do you teach and what drew you to this style?

I'm committed to teaching Iyengar yoga. I've spent a fair amount of time in India studying with senior Iyengar teachers there - and there is a different quality to their teaching compared to how Iyengar tends to be taught in the UK.

I hope that I reflect a broader, more encompassing, philosophical style of yoga. Sometimes Iyengar yoga in the UK can be very dry - technical, precise, focused exclusively on the body.

I hope that all my students would appreciate that yoga is a spiritual discipline in which the body is the route not the destination. It's what Prashant Iyengar calls the technology of transformation!

So I hope my teaching is rooted and grounded in the practical and the material but focused on the spiritual and the transcendent.

How do you fit your own practice around your teaching?

I'm extraordinarily fortunate not to have another "day job". I prefer to practice asanas in the mornings and pranayama in the evenings. But despite my best intentions I tend not to do an evening practice on nights that I teach.

My practice is like the friend that is always there waiting for me. It loves me no matter how pants I may be!

Practising is the most important thing in my life. It's what sustains the rest of it. I'm not sufficiently evolved to be able to say all my life is practice - at this stage if I don't make space to practise then everything else starts to become a little less straightforward.

But I'm optimistic that I'm young and just a beginner on the path. I look at my beloved aunt and see her digging her garden and making her pots and I can see that she does those things with the same spirit that I bring to my mat (or that my mat brings to me?).

Finding time in my teaching schedule to attend another teacher's class is more difficult. It means I tend to go to rather a lot of different teachers rather irregularly, which whilst very interesting, can lead me to experimenting in too many directions at once.

My solution is that I take at least a month off every year and go out to the Chanchanis in India. Where I get to do four hours of classes and three or four hours practice every day. And I come back very content with the world!

What do you enjoy about teaching?

I love seeing how each individual student has a unique set of solutions to the challenges posed by, say, standing straight in Tadasana.

I love seeing how people's bodies change. And more importantly, how people's relationships with their bodies changes. I love watching students in Savasana. And seeing that they are not the same people who walked into class 90 minutes earlier.

I feel absurdly grateful to yoga for the changes it has wrought in me and my circumstances. And I feel absurdly privileged to be able to pass that on.

What makes a good yoga teacher?

I think clarity is important. I like understanding what's required!

I also think a good teacher sees what the next step is for a particular student or a particular class.

I like knowing that a teacher is only revealing the tip of what she or he knows (like the iceberg). I want to feel that there's an ocean of knowledge supporting whatever is currently under observation.

One of my teachers in India, Swati Chanchani, says that the reason BKS Iyengar has had such a deep and far reaching influence is that when people meet him they intuit that he's been somewhere that not many people have been. That he inhabits a truly profound set of experiences.

And all the books don't quite communicate this but it's tangible and evident in his presence. And that people who have studied with him extensively convey some of that quality to their students. But it's diluted. And it becomes more diluted as one gets further from the source.

What makes him a really great teacher is not just that he can break a sequence down and articulate what I need to do. What truly distinguishes him is that we understand the point of doing the sequence.

To you, what are the most important elements of yoga - and what are the challenging elements?

For me the most important elements in yoga are the relationships between a whole set of contradictions: the doing and the done, extension and breadth, movement and stability.

It's in focusing on the interplay between the variables that I find the most release. I start to sense the space between. That's my access point to the greater reality. At least it is today. But it changes.

And it's in the challenges that there is the most reward. For example, I've had a series of problems with my shoulder. Finding physical solutions that allow me to sustain inversions (for example) has been endlessly interesting.

It made me really look at the structure of the joint and why certain supports help and others don't - so the nuts and bolts anatomy I've learned as a result of the injury has been great.

But it's also taught me more about working sensitively - with honesty and integrity - than I would ever have imagined, or (sadly) than I would have been able to learn in a pain-free way. Which isn't just about the shoulder. But even more importantly, it's been the big teacher of the lesson on attachment. Or rather, as it dislocates, on non-attachment.

Do you think we in 'the West' give enough time and attention to meditation?

Rajiv Chanchani says that in the West we misunderstand what meditation is so I'm nervous about answering this question! I think perhaps we look to meditation as a "fix" for stress and anxiety. And that actually what we mean by meditation may in fact be closer to relaxation.

I think the problem in the West is that we see the world from such a materialist perspective. Our understanding of a greater reality is pretty non existent. Our lack of interest in meditation may be a reflection of that.

How is yoga perceived in the UK now? Do you think it will continue to grow in popularity?

I'm unsure. I'm sometimes really shocked at how yoga is grouped in with pilates, or taught in gyms as a way of stretching, to prepare for or compensate for all the other stuff that happens in gyms (which doesn't have anything to do with yoga).

I saw a headline last weekend saying "Is circus the new yoga?". It feels like it misses the point. So, when popularity for yoga grows is it really yoga that's becoming popular?

Is it feasible to earn a reasonable salary as a yoga teacher in the UK?

It depends what you mean by reasonable. I think yoga teaches one to focus on different things in life which may mean that one's material needs become less.

I covered a class yesterday that, after I'd paid for the room hire and my travel expenses, earned me 20p. But I met some very nice people. Overall, I just about make ends meet.

Traditionally in India, yoga sadhakas (students, apprentices) would take care of their teacher's material needs. So they'd find food and shelter for the teacher. Leaving the teacher free to focus on the greater reality, which the teacher might share with the sadhakas. Or not.

The whole concept of a class, and class fees is pretty radical and modern! And I think there is a problem (especially here in the West) with the expectations that accompany the process of paying for something.

You hand over the fee and you have an expectation that the teacher will teach you something in exchange for that fee. The teacher is providing a service. The service may be to show you how to lift the inner ankle or it may be to initiate you to the mysteries of the universe. And you pay your money and you hope you're going to get what you paid for. But yoga isn't like that!

As a teacher, all I can do is offer my experience and my solutions to my physical and existential dilemmas. I hope very much indeed that that's useful for my students.

But in January when they all sign up and I look at my bulging classes I know that there is a huge raft of expectations all jostling with one another.

One wants to lose weight, one wants to stretch their tight cycling hamstrings out, another wants to relax. This one is giving up alcohol and doesn't know what to do in the evenings if the pub isn't an option. And there's no way I can provide the "service" that the class fee implies.

The thing I try and bear in mind is that Mr Iyengar says that a teacher needs to give more than they get.

What advice do you have for someone currently training, or considering it as a future career?

Go for it. It won't be what you expect and you can't prepare for it. But that's a good thing.

www.reasonyoga.co.uk