About The Yoga Workshop – Yoga in Lilyfield

You can look at yoga as a workshop you take yourself to for regular maintenance and enhancement, the way we do with our cars and bikes. Similar perhaps to going to the hairdresser or barber. Something we just really need to do. It makes us feel renewed.  So it is with yoga. It’s the enhancements that are the most fun – and the best part is that you do almost all of it yourself.  You need a good teacher but the rest is up to you. Its such an amazing feeling to do something so good for you.

You get yourself onto your mat and the next thing you know you’re off.  You can start a class feeling one way, and come out the other side feeling another. All you have to do is do your best to follow the teacher’s instructions and to tune into your body and mind and look at what’s happening there. That’s all! The rest happens as a result of your effort and intention! How amazing is that? Once you get the hang of it you can do it by yourself. Its best to have a teacher, forever really, but in between you can develop your own practice.

Yoga is amazing. It really does do its work on us.  All we have to do is get ourselves onto the mat and go with it.

You don’t have to be fit, flexible, bendy, slim or strong.  It’s not about any of that.  And the way I teach yoga – everyone can do it.  We’ll use props where needed to help you get into the poses to your capability with safety. So if you’re looking for yoga in Balmain, Rozelle, or Lilyfield, come and join us!

See you at The Yoga Workshop.

Akhila Hughes

Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher

Akhila Hughes

I am a certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher and I’ve been hooked on yoga from my first class in the early 90’s. From my first class I could feel the benefits and it just got better as I learned more.  I mean, who knew adults were allowed to do handstands!?

I became more and more interested with each class and I’ve been practicing Iyengar Yoga ever since. I’m now a certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher.

I have been a student of Senior Iyengar Yoga teacher Peter Thomson and Sue Ellen Kohler for 22 years. I am passionate about passing on my every-growing understanding, much of which comes from teaching, and my deep love of yoga.

Iyengar Yoga Teachers are required to attend classes with a Senior Iyengar Teacher for at least 3 years before commencing teacher training. A further 500 hours of face to face study is required before undergoing a rigorous assessment process to be certified at the minimum teaching level. Once certified Iyengar Yoga teachers remain committed to their practice, ongoing training and professional development and are continually assessed in order to maintain or further their certification.

Sue-ellen Kohler

Sue-ellen Kohler has been teaching Iyengar yoga for 30 years. She moved to Sydney in 1985 as a young professional dancer from Melbourne to join Russell Dumas’s company ‘Dance Exchange’ and then later with performance group ‘The Sydney Front’. She was performing at Expo ’88, when a fall from stilts crushed a vertebrae in her spine. This accident became an important catalyst for her yoga development, helping her to understand yoga’s capacity to heal on a holistic level. She began teacher training with Martyn Jackson at the Australian School of Yoga in Bondi Junction, and started teaching there from 1989. She was one of the first teachers in Sydney to introduce ‘stretch’ classes to gyms as a form of extending yoga practice beyond the boundaries of yoga-specific school sites. As a student of Peter Thomson she began teaching at the Glebe Yoga School in 1993 and then continued when the school moved to East Sydney as Sydney Yoga Space. When that closed in 2007, she opened her own yoga studio n Enmore – Black Lotus Studios and has since moved the studio to Marrickville. Sue-ellen became a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher in 1995.

Peter Thomson

Peter Thomson has been practicing yoga since 1979 and has been a student of the Iyengar family since 1981. He travels regularly to Pune to study at the Iyengar Institute.Peter founded or co-founded a number of significant schools in Sydney (The Yoga Space, The Sydney Yoga Centre, Mosman Yoga Room) and in 1988 founded the Glebe Yoga School. In 2002, Peter founded the Sydney Yoga Space.Peter is one of Australia’s most senior and most experienced teachers and practitioners. From September 2007, his teaching has focused on intensive courses for yoga students and teachers in regional centres around Australasia and Asia and on intensive practice-based retreats typically in Bali. Peter’s particular interest in the practice and teaching of yoga is the depth of perception, inquiry and understanding that sustained practice can develop and in making that understanding accessible to students so they can claim it as their own.Peter is currently teaching a range of workshops and classes throughout Australasia. Peter trains a dedicated group of advanced students globally.