25 Mar Telluride Yoga Center: Intensive with Nancy Stechert, 3/29 – 3/31
Popular Senior Iyengar Instructor Nancy Stechert of Hotchkiss Yoga Tree, a regular at the Telluride Yoga Festival, returns to Telluride to teach an Iyengar Yoga Workshop this weekend, Friday, March 29 – Sunday, March 31, at the Telluride Yoga Center.
Having practiced with Nancy as often as possible, I promise she is one top tier instructor not to miss. Iyengar yoga is one of only three approaches to practice in the West – the other two are Viniyoga and Ashtanga – which came out of the home of T. Krishnamacharya, the five-foot, two-inch Brahmin born more than one hundred years ago in a small South Indian village. The yoga teacher, ayuervedic healer and scholar is largely credited with bringing yoga to the West.
Go here for the weekend schedule, which includes classes that address neck and shoulder challenges, plus low back, inversions and injuries.
Senior Iyengar yoga instructor Nancy Stechert.
The Telluride Yoga Center website sums up:
“Profound, intelligent and transformative, Iyengar Yoga is a complete approach to life that provides practical tools to create and maintain bodily health and vitality, mental clarity, emotional serenity, and spiritual well-being. Developed by yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar during his more than 75 years of teaching, Iyengar Yoga is grounded in the ancient Indian tradition and philosophy of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.”
A little more light on Iyengar.
As the story goes, in 1951 the famous violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin was sitting in his osteopath’s office waiting for his appointment when a small book on yoga caught his attention. He was, according to online sources, already suffering from a variety of the muscular and skeletal aches and pains that have ruined the career of many a budding young string player. Since Menuhin knew nothing about yoga, curious, he opened the book, was immediately fascinated by the contents and wanted to know more.
As well as being one of the greatest violinists of all time, Menuhin was known to be an enormously generous man with global and humanitarian interests. In 1952, Menuhin was invited to India by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first Prime Minister, to give such a series of concerts. He met Nehru for the first time after one of the concerts and mentioned the book about yoga. Nehru immediately dared Menuhin to stand on his head. Much to everyone’s surprise, he did. Nehru then displayed his headstand. The light-hearted incident between these two icons made the headlines all over India. Yoga teachers from every quarter contacted the violin wunderkind to offer guidance. Menuhin took lessons from a number of them, but was not impressed – until he met BKS Iyengar.
Their first five-minute session stretched into three-and-a-half hours. And when Menuhin mentioned he was almost constantly fatigued, never really able to relax, and unable to sleep, in less than one minute, Iyengar allegedly had him snoring gently away for the first time in days. The two men formed a close friendship which lasted until Menuhin’s death 47 years later in 1999.
In his foreword to Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga,” often described as the “Bible of Modern Yoga,” Menuhin said this:
“Yoga, as practiced by Mr. Iyengar… is a technique ideally suited to prevent physical and mental illness and to protect the body generally, developing an inevitable sense of self-reliance and assurance.”
Yoga as practiced by senior Iyengar instructor Nancy Stechert – who first went to India to study with BKS Iyengar in 1983 – is all about aligning body, breath, and awareness to gain greater insights towards health and healing, inside and out.
In other words, what Iyengar taught Menuhin and countless other devoted students like Stechert, who then went on to help others help themselves.
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