– it could change your life

Kirsty Nugent - Newsletter Editor: Tell me a bit about the Evolve festival?

Miranda Burne - Director Evolve Festival: Evolve brings together the yoga community for a weekend and offers participants a huge variety of yoga classes from different traditions. If you regularly practice one particular style of yoga, Evolve gives you the opportunity to try something different.  There are also pranayama and meditation sessions you can attend as well as dance, chanting and lots of interesting discussions and presentations. So you don't have to do asana all day long!

Kirsty Nugent: I’ve heard you’ve included a new program at the next festival being held in Melbourne where yoga is free for beginners.

Miranda Burne: Yes, it’s called B-Free. Evolve recognises that we attract hundreds of regular yoga practitioners to our festivals, which is a wonderful thing, however we are also keen to share and promote yoga to as many people as possible as there are so many benefits to be gained from practicing yoga and living a more natural life.
B-Free was developed to help expose a wider audience to the benefits of yoga and encourage our friends and loved ones who might not think it’s a practice for them to join us at the festival.

Interview with Matt Singmin, Creator of the Phoenix Weekend & DJ for the Future Sound of Yoga

By Kirsty Nugent

BYC: So tell us about the Phoenix Weekend...

Matt: The Phoenix Weekend is a 2-day experience incorporating yoga, music, meditation and rave. This is the second year that we're running it and we're continuing the 2 key themes of the first year: learning and letting go. Learning in the sense that it's a chance to access world-class yoga teachers running sessions on topics you wouldn't get in their standard classes... and letting go in the sense that on Saturday night people will have chance to get dressed up, dance and let their hair down...

By Sarah Berry

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it.  Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain.  ~ Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

Written by Lila Kirtana

Lila, Called by the song of her heart

If you’ve joined Byron Yoga Centre on Retreat or for a Training course in recent years, you will have enjoyed a Kirtan, or group call-and-response chanting evening , led by the nightingale tones of Lila Kirtana. This is Lila’s story…

There is absolutely no reason why I should have come to yoga.  I come from a middle-class, conservative Christian background. I took my first yoga class in a remote country ski town in Canada simply because there wasn’t much else to do there in the summer.

Written by Christine Lines

Ana Davis, one of the senior teachers at the Byron Yoga Centre and specialist in pre and postnatal yoga, was born of hippy parents in the early 70’s. Joining her mother at Satyananda yoga classes as a child, she had an early introduction to a gentle, classical style of yoga, (which she jokingly referred to ‘as boring back then’), despite this, the more gentle approach became the path she was to follow later in life. 
 


Reading the life story recently of the great yogi master Krishnamacharya, I learnt that he dreamt of the great saint Vedanta Desikacarya when expecting his fourth child, a second son. It was the basis for the name choice of the yogi known to the world today as TKV Desikachar. This prompted me to say to Ana once, ‘Perhaps your mother had an intuition of your life path when she named you Ananda?’ The translation from Sanskrit is ‘bliss’. In her beautifully modest way she just laughed!

Written by Kara Goodsell

Once upon a time, there was a wee lass living with her family under the grey skies of Northern England. Her name was Gitam and while the other children were playing with dolls, Gitam was playing in her garden. Gitam loved this place more than anything and each day would sink her hands into the soil, pour love onto the plants and watch her garden grow. 

When she grew up, she married a man who loved his food as much as he loved to travel. He carried Gitam on an overland journey in a Magic Bus through France and across Turkey, weaving through Iran and Afghanistan, meandering across India to Nepal before landing in Melbourne, Australia on a blistering Christmas Day in 1970.
Along the way, Gitam collected memories on her taste buds and secret recipes from foreign books, which she’s now collated and shares in this book. “My philosophy of food is that it should be nourishing, freshly prepared and aesthetically pleasing,” explains Gitam.  “ It’s a form of nurture and a way of demonstrating my love to others. The preparation of food and spectrums of colour in a dish is a way of expressing my creativity.” 

“Be in this world as if you are a traveller, a passer by…for this is not home.”
- the Prophet Mohammed

Byron Yoga Centre's Retreats Manager, Christine Lines, has enjoyed travelling throughout her life. “My family had a holiday home on the coast throughout my childhood,” she explains, “and time away seemed to balance the demands of the business and community on my parents. The holidays created my first experience of travel and retreat as an instinctive choice.”

Christine has developed a career and lifestyle around her adventures. “My father once called me a gypsy and it inspired me to understand the deeper meaning behind why I travel.” Her spiritual path has been interwoven with her travels, the inner and the outer journey, and she speaks of her fascination for the different countries of the world, the varying landscapes, ways of life and systems of belief.

Written by Pete Jackson
If someone told you there’s a new drug on the market promising a path to a life free of 
pain and suffering, how would you react? Would your logical and suspicious side 
immediately start asking questions as to how such a claim could be made?  You'd probably want to know, ‘how does it work’, or ‘how much does it cost?’ Perhaps you’d merely question how any serious science could offer such a grand remedy, or wonder about the potential side effects of what must surely be a strong drug indeed!   
 


Written by Kara Goodsell

During the course of an interview, the Dalai Lama was once asked if he ever felt lonely. He answered no and said that he realises he is no different to anybody else on the planet, experiencing the same spectrum of emotions as others, and this understanding gives him the comfort he needs in knowing he is not alone.
 

Written by Kara Goodsell
Yogic philosophy speaks of a person’s dharma, or purpose in life. Some are born to be teachers, inspiring understanding and change in another’s life. Judy Krupp is one such teacher, whose diminutive frame is filled with passion and humility that lights the way for others.