Yoga is an ancient art and practice which refines and cultures who we are. Yoga is a broad subject open to many different interpretations but essentially the method is the same and once learnt can be applied to any activity.

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At Four Winds Yoga in Ponsonby we teach Iyengar Yoga to all levels, we train teachers to a certified Iyengar yoga standard and provide a specialised service in pregnancy yoga.

You will experience the benefits of yoga on all levels; body, mind and spirit by learning and practicing the postures in a supportive, systematic way. .

It can be daunting starting yoga at any age especially if you are stiff, unfit and experiencing pain in the body. BKS Iyengar developed yoga equipment to help all those that wanted to study this art called Yoga. As his daughter Geeta Iyengar says "Yoga is for everyone. Nobody is excluded from it. Whether they are men, women or children, elderly or aged people, diseased or disabled, the path of yoga is open to everyone."

Yoga is meant to give us a way to discover or rediscover ourselves. It teaches us how to find the great margin of maximum capacity that we have inside us so that we are able to expose ourselves to ourselves and find out what we really are. When I say that you have to adapt according to your capacity, I mean that you have to find out the potentiality, or potential energy, that you all have inside and how to bring it to the surface in order to utilise it properly. Yoga exposes our inner hidden potentialities. In fact ther is nothing in yoga which disctates who has to do what. Yoga is universal in this sense. It is inappropriate to say, 'Do and do not do'. We do not say that this is not to be done or that is to be done. To make such differentiation there has to be some cause. Patanjali says that we have to find out what stage we are at and what our level is. We need to know what our energy is, what our potency is, what we can do and so on. As we proceed further, we have to see that we achieve every step gradually.

In other words, there is no barrier, there is no restriction, no demarcation as such. The words Patanjali uses like potentialities or capabilites, are certainly very meaningful, since not everyone has the same energy levels, not everyone can put in the same amount of effort. The power to grasp is not the same in everyone. The practitioner has to understand subjectively the potentialities he or she has and try to expose them to the yogic path rather than exploit them.

GEETA IYENGAR April 2008