Yoga Reviews
Catherine’s daily yoga practice and teaching focuses on deepening physical awareness and alignment to reveal and release the natural freedom of the body, particularly the spine.
Read some of the yoga reviews which has been kindly left by those who have attended her weekly online yoga classes:
About Catherine
Catherine Annis is a member of the yoga teacher training faculty at triyoga, London's leading yoga studio where she also sits on the teacher advisory committee. She is well known for her imaginative and practical approach to yoga. In 2017 she created the Intelligent Yoga Teacher Training Course (iytt), an 18 month, anatomically focused teacher training course with world-leading teachers Peter Blackaby and Gary Carter.
Originally a professional dancer, she discovered yoga as a teenager, and has been practicing since the mid 1970s. Having studied various styles of yoga including Sivananda, Iyengar, Astanga and various forms of Hatha yoga, she eventually gravitated to the teachings of Vanda Scaravelli.
I never had the privilege of meeting Vanda Scaravelli, but have worked with many of her key students. My first Scaravelli inspired yoga class was taught by Alex Grey (who was a student of Diane Long – herself a long term student of Vanda).
At that time, I’d been practicing since the mid 1970s, and attended Sivananda, Iyengar, Astanga – all kinds of classes, experiencing as much as possible. Alex was teaching elbow dog, and it was a revelation. I wanted to push right into it, to really “do” the pose, but she held me right back and stopped me – and it felt completely different. In the beginning, I found this frustrating, because it felt as though I couldn’t “complete” the pose.
On one level the sensations were much more subtle and delicate – the complete antithesis to the familiar feelings of working hard and “having a good stretch”. But after a while I discovered that Alex was making me integrate. Rather than hanging out on my flexibility, she was making me work from the centre, from deeply inside, engaging my whole self in that simple movement. That was my first experience of Vanda’s approach, and it hooked me and kept bringing me back to discover more.
Shortly afterwards, friends and other teachers urged me to work with John Stirk. He became my teacher and mentor for the next 12 years. John’s insights into Vanda Scaravelli’s life and work, and his own inspired approach to yoga and living, have profoundly enriched my practice and teaching.
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