So I started going to a yoga class in the university gym. I can't remember what style it was, but I loved it from the start. The teacher - I think her name was Judith - was impressive. Calm, soft, supple, and present. I remember her distinctly. For the next few years I went on-and-off to classes, until an extraordinary teacher took over the university gym classes called Julian Daizan Skinner, a Zen Buddhist monk and accomplished Zen teacher. His classes had a feeling unlike anything I'd experienced before. At some point he mentioned that he was starting a meditation group over in Earl's Court, west London, and I jumped at the chance. Śavāsana (corpse pose, generally yoga's relaxation pose) had always intrigued me and had been one of the main reasons why I kept on going back to yoga classes(!); I felt quite keen to explore the meditation aspect more.
Daizan's meditation classes were at the same time incredible and scary. This was before I'd started my psychotherapy, and looking at myself like he was asking me to was at the limit of (sometimes beyond) my comfort zone. But somehow I kept on going back. We did things like meditating sitting looking at ourselves in the mirror, doing Tai Chi, doing stupid things like walking like a bear or stalk, or sitting quietly watching the breath. It was about 6 months before I realised we were actually practising Buddhism - and I got a shock! I'm not religious... What if he's a crackpot? What if he one day asked us all to commit ritual suicide or something...?! What if he wanted lots of money? Will he ask us to believe something, have a faith?
The place we met on those Sundays was weird. It had been refurbished very nicely to be a women's gym, but the owners had run out of money before it could open, so now it was lived in/looked after by a few guys who smoked weed, didn't clean, and worked out on the old machines. A snake skin on the wall, a guy who made Berimbaus, stinky rubber mats, sanzen on a dirty carpet, and a stifling heat in the summertime are some of my lasting memories! Still, his practice drew me back and my Sunday afternoons became filled with yoga and zen meditation.
In 2010 we had to leave this "gym" since they wanted to renovate again. After a brief stint at the Chinese Community Centre in Bloomsbury, in May 2011 Daizan founded the ZenYoga centre in Camberwell, or the Yugagyo Dojo in Zen language (see picture), and moved all his Zen practice there.
In 2007, Daizan started running yoga teacher training courses, and I knew some people who went on the first one. It hadn't even once entered my consciousness that I would want to train as a yoga teacher, but those that I knew that went on the first course raved about it so much that I must've started thinking about it seriously. At this point I was practising yoga regularly, with Daizan and teachers like Raphan Kebe, Jonathan Monks, and Norman Blair, and I decided to sign up to Daizan's second Zenways teacher training course - just to learn about yoga in more depth, not really to become a teacher... On the first day of the course we did a CBT (cognative behaviour therapy) exercise to confirm that we absolutely wanted to become yoga teachers! Ha! Well, I wasn't so sure, but by the end of the 2-week, 200hr retreat/course I was convinced. We had to teach five classes after the end of the retreat course in order to become fully certified, and after those I have never looked back.
I think the teacher training retreat was one of the biggest milestone events of my life. To spend two weeks in such close company with a group of people wanting to become yoga teachers was special beyond words - I had never laughed so much, been so open, so shiny(!) as I was by the end of that course. In the world of yoga I started meeting people of the like I had not met in any other part of my life previously.
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