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Angela
and Victor's Yoga :) |
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| Through their yoga, Angela and Victor are extraordinary guides to the world of the inner body. Through movement and yoga they dive deep and unbury many 'energies' of life, including its light and playful sides, as well as some shadowy ones, to come to a kind of inner body flow. Their explorations can help you come in contact with your inner body, exploring many aspects of life as energy through movement. For the people who enjoy their courses, this exploration of the inner body can be profound and healing. What's the inner body? How to experience it? Let's explore. | Coming: | ||||||||||
| Opening/Home | |||||||||||
| Greetings | |||||||||||
| Grounding/Rooting | |||||||||||
| In general, their yoga is sattvic - loosely meaning illuminating, calming, and easing - and, in my experience, moves toward a kind of grace. Angela and Victor's exploration of energy, and their use of language and, particularly, imagery from nature in relation to the body, are unique, subtle and liberating, as well. Their work is insightful, deep and pleasurably opening. If, when practicing, you come upon emotions like aggression, anger, loneliness, frustration, or other 'negative' ones, it's not the yoga they teach. Be present. Try to relax a little, explore what comes up, visit with a friend, laugh and start again with releasing and moving exploratorily. | |||||||||||
| Movements/Positions | |||||||||||
| Breathing | |||||||||||
| Shadow Side | |||||||||||
| Your experiences in their courses may be very different from anything conveyed here on the web or through other media or texts. Their humor, interactiveness and the social, aural and visual experiences they shape in their courses make the learning unique. (The remarkable and unique-to-the-individual physical adjustments/changes in movement and in poses, which they share in class, are difficult to convey through this media, and thus a serious deficit here). They teach a kind of spontaneous movement welling up from insight, from their own unique and often sublime views. Finding your own unique ways with yoga and movement is part of what they teach. | |||||||||||
| Feminine/Masculine | |||||||||||
| Creativity | |||||||||||
| Untraining | |||||||||||
| Sound | |||||||||||
| From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, they studied with B.K.S. Iyengar and others, but have since created their own approach. While both worked for many years with Iyengar, Victor, in particular, worked very closely with him, and makes fascinating, personal, physical adjustments. With remarkable vision and language, Angela explores fluidity, using, for example, water or wind as metaphor for the inner body, to open so many ways of coming in touch with it. Similarly, she also explores ways to come in touch with one's own inner teacher. Angela and a group of women interested in her teaching have met almost every year, for many years, in a women-only retreat at Harbin Hot Springs. The opportunity there to explore Angela's far-reaching interest in the feminine, without men, has made for some flourishing gatherings. In their courses, they explore an amazingly wide variety of movements, energies, meanings, and ideas - what comes up - including exploring creativity itself, in relation to yoga. | |||||||||||
| Meditation | |||||||||||
| In exploring their 'play' through this web site, deemphasize these texts, photos and videos, to some degree. Through the 'physical' body, Angela & Victor explore movement and energy in their teachings: some asana (yoga position)-related movement, many subtle, breath-related movements, and - using imagery from the natural world, wonderful metaphors and language - welcome, mindful, inner releases and energetic flows; dead and inanimate things don't move, so they don't seek to hold poses rigidly, inside or outside. For them yoga isn't "the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind" (Patañjali) but rather coming in touch with, and exploring your inner body and teacher with awareness and movement, and finding a kind of flow, which might include, however, a profound and welcome easing of the mind. And while one of them teaches, the other is often exploring things in his or her own body, resting and/or listening, and modeling this as well. Their deep questioning of authority and tradition opens horizons. How to find your own freedom and creative exploration with yoga is what they teach. | |||||||||||
| Yoga Philosophy | |||||||||||
| A & V Media Index | |||||||||||
| A & V Bibliography | |||||||||||
| From my perspective, they offer a kind of development in yoga, and certainly their own view of it. From this perspective, they teach a profound, imaginative and beneficial releasing, easing and 'energy-related' opening of the bodymind. By energy, they mean your own experiences, thoughts, feelings, motivations, subtle leanings, and imaginings, among other things, which guide people, - experienced in your own bodymind. Please don't systemize this, - they don't, and they encourage people not to, as well; it's probably impossible. In their view, yoga as a kind of core life experience isn't systemizable; doing so kills the life of it. Instead, experience and play with this inner movement and awareness. Bring impressions, observations and meanings from the world around you into your bodymind, and explore them in your inner body, sometimes in poses, learning from them. Yoga becomes an ongoing, artistic discovery. In their courses, this is often done with friends, and with Angela & Victor as guides. Yoga with them can sometimes be as enjoyable as going to the beach with friends, or to a very fun party, and lead to so much. In my experience their approach is very social, supportive and loving. It can also lead to cathartic, emotional releases. In many of the following texts, photos and videos, A & V teach a specific movement / action, and/or awareness. They encourage people taking their classes to move when they want. The movements and positions depicted here offer ways to explore the freeing up of energy. This can often lead to experiences of personal freedom, bringing you alive. | |||||||||||
| So what's new or different with their yoga? New principles, new concepts, new awarenesses? Compared with what? Angela & Victor offer an imaginative approach to exploring inwardly with your awareness through movement, energy-work and a far-reaching knowledge of the body (including its musculo-skeletal-physiological-neural, etc., 'mechanics' informed by asana) in positions and movement, as well as ways to experience the inner body as delightfully and fascinatingly interconnected, through relatively unstructured classes. Their stories help you experience this. In so doing, they have shaped and discovered their own unique, unfolding approaches. They question the idea of needing a teacher at all to explore one's own inner body, yet they are skillful guides, often by intuiting and understanding where individuals in their classes are 'coming from' and what they want - often through movement - and then opening ways to realize this, - seemingly quite mysteriously. They also create a space for you to listen to your own intuition, and act on this. | |||||||||||
| Teaching together, they offer two distinct perspectives, which they weave together into a conversation and a (usually:) shared vision of the inner body/teacher. They are partners in so many ways, unusual in the world of yoga, and its long traditions, long conceiving of their teaching together as a yoga marriage. And while also long skeptical of the institution of marriage, they are marrying in the autumn of 2008 in Eftalou, Lesvos, Greece. | |||||||||||
| In some ways, Angela & Victor teach ways for you to find your own freeing, creative and happy way, partly through yoga, but especially through coming in touch with your inner body. They're innovative. They might explore, for example, what bliss is, in class, - how one might experience this. They aren't interested in starting something called Angela & Victor Yoga. They're bohemian, free-spirited, iconoclastic, alternative, maverick, independent and creative. Beginning, perhaps in part, as hippie yogis in the 1960s, they draw from counterculture, to teach a kind of underground yoga, with very unique skills. As yogis, teachers and artists, they create anew and shape a kind of free-spiritedness through yoga. If their language, vision, images, approaches to movement, as well as their energy-exploration, work for you to facilitate release, integration, creative exploration, and help to heal your wounds, as well as allow you to experience new vistas on being, - enjoy! | |||||||||||
| I first took a course with them in 1984. I see this web site as an opportunity to share my experience of, to translate and find the right language for, the way they teach subtle awarenesses leading to inward releases, through engaging yoga, - so that you might experience it. And in the context of yoga exploration and practice, to relate how you might bring your awareness pleasurably inwardly while practicing to find new, beneficial approaches to life, on your own, at home or with friends. | |||||||||||
| Angela & Victor often teach in beautiful places. They've recently built their 'Eftalou Yoga Hall,' in Eftalou near Molivos, on the island of Lesvos, in Greece. After their classes, people in their courses often go to natural hot springs and the ocean to bathe or share a meal with friends. It's not a yoga you're probably familiar with yet. They explore a kind of interconnectedness, as many yoga practitioners do, but Angela and Victor's teachings and style are unique, and through them you may soar. Angela and Victor's yoga is fun and respects your experience, so keep your common sense as you explore what they teach. And while I have selected certain themes which they often re-visit in their teaching, their yoga can lead in many to-be-created directions. Moving from the inside, they eschew/avoid the limitations of tradition, religion, authority, etc., to seek and find the freedom of the inner body/teacher, thus teaching ways to continue to move out of/ away from 'boxes,' (including any boxes/themes/ideas shaped by a web site about their teaching). Angela & Victor thus would encourage people to keep exploring, to stay out of the boxes that people continue to make, and to find your own freedom. Perhaps this web site can be a helpful starting place for this. | |||||||||||
| I'd like to dedicate this web site to Victor & Angela and people touched by their yoga. | |||||||||||
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Scott
MacLeod |
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Angela & Victor's
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1998 - 2012 - Scott MacLeod's Arts
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