“There are yoga teachers out there trying to attract followers, publicity and in order to do that, there is this reaching for more and more visually impressive skills. “In this age of Instagram and social media, people are looking for quick, shortcuts to fame, fortune and publicity,” he says. The massive emphasis on promotion through social media also doesn’t help - “It’s not about knowledge.” He continues: “It doesn’t matter if the posture isn’t fantastic, provided the picture is nice.”Ĭristian Brezeanu, a multi-medal-winning Olympic gymnast who competed for Romania and South Africa and is based in Dubai at Fly High Fitness DXB, agrees that social media has been a powerful force – and not always for good.
It takes decades to even get a hint of what it is but people are trying to do this with just a brief amount of experience.”
“It’s an insult to real yoga teachers to give them a certificate and say, ‘Here you go, you can teach along with everyone else.’ We’ve got to know what yoga is. “You can’t learn to teach in 200 hours, you can’t even learn yoga in 200 hours,” he says. One of the biggest flaws in the system are the plethora of too-short teacher trainings that enable the newest of practitioners to be qualified in a sacred art. How can a teacher have a one-on-one relationship in a class of 50-plus?” “The teacher-student relationship was lost years ago,” he says. The packed classes of today are a world away from the way Borg-Olivier learned, during a time when teacher-student relationships were sacred and maintained for years. If you practice in a way that causes pain, injury and stress, you’ve missed the point of yoga completely.” “There are so many people teaching nonsense yoga,” says Borg-Olivier. And Iyengar, with his obsessive attention to alignment, and Jois, who encouraged practicing all of yoga’s eight limbs, would likely not approve. Much of the yoga being taught now, what Borg-Olivier calls “the aerobics of the 2000s,” is having a negative impact on the musculoskeletal system. “People do want fitness and long-term health, but what’s being taught now is short-term gains with long-term potential damage to the nervous, reproductive and immune systems.” “We’ve swung from one way to the other,” he explains. His spinal flow, inspired by Asian martial arts and his background as a physiotherapist, is designed to be a pain-free way for people to move while gaining all the benefits of the yogic tradition. I knew at the time that asana was a small part of it but I thought I could at least attract people.”īorg-Olivier is partner in Yoga Synergy, a yoga school in Sydney that has been running since 1984. “I wanted to show people it could be a bit exciting, but in retrospective it went a bit out of control. “In the ’70s and ’80s, people perceived yoga to be boring, as meditation,” he says. He also believes that modern yoga has lost its way, becoming separated from both its essence and original philosophy. He has studied under some of the yoga greats, including Ashtanga Vinyasa creator Pattabhi Jois and BKS Iyengar. Yoga may be a starting place into contortion due to increased flexibility but contortion itself or any intense stretching/flexibility program can also be a starting point into the art!Īustralian Simon Borg-Olivier, who will visit Lifestyle Yoga Dubai from March 27 to April 1, is a decades-long practitioner and lifelong student. Yoga and contortion are two completely different things that are independent of one another. While yoga began as an ancient art to prepare the body for meditation, these days many people associate the practice with extreme flexibility and the perfect handstand.
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