Yoga & Relaxation
YOGA CLASSES IN THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS
Small Hatha Yoga and Relaxation Classes
and Private Tuition with Marjolein Gamble.
Our Classes
The Studio
Yoga and Relaxation offers small Yoga classes in a home studio environment with flow to a garden-setting, mornings and evenings, in Harfield Village in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town.
Marjolein has over 25 years of experience and has a yoga therapy training. The emphasis is on healing and the growing into an awareness of how to manage and enhance the functioning of one’s own body in the attainment of wellbeing. The use of skeletal alignment as taught in Synergy Yoga is one of her tools.
What to Expect
Classes include a thorough work-out and a wide variety of postures! A class starts with pranayama and/or kriyas (breathing and cleansing exercises): both vigorous and calming in order to start to shift energy. The initial warm up consists of joint release, targeted specialised movements, core work and fascia (connective tissue) opening and stretching. The main section of the class always includes forward-bends, back-bends, twists, balances, flows (vinyasa) as well as holding postures and inversions.
The class ends with a calming emphasis on relaxation, a letting go, resulting in an integration into a higher state of beingness and an allowing of what is!
What Yoga can do for you
Yoga is a method of enhancing our own unique movement potential: it is an opportunity to learn to move with grace. Our minds and bodies can function in a fragmented way. We fold over computers unaware of how our bodies slump. The mind takes over and our body awareness remains unconscious. The general focus of people is more externalised. Body awareness requires an inner orientation; it is an acquired skill involving a becoming aware of alignments or the lack there off, discomforts and sensations in the body (I have had new students who were shocked to discover how different the two sides of the body manifested in postures).
The key to the yoga process is, that it interiorises our attention, moving it from a predominantly outward orientation, inward. This brings with it a growing awareness of how the body moves and Yoga becomes a study in movement potential rather than a prescribed attainment of a perfect pose.
Through conscious movement we learn to move our bodies more efficiently and harmoniously over time. In this way we can change habitual patterns at a neuromuscular level and develop new patterns of movement that decrease physical stress and promote skeletal alignment, mechanical freedom and an increasing ease of movement.
Practising Yoga
Yoga practice creates inner, psychological space (experienced as openness or a positive sense of detachment) and a sense of well-being. Physically this translates into strength, equilibrium, joint mobility, suppleness and the ability to center the body, to align and create postural awareness.
Yoga is in the first instance “experiential”. For some Yoga is a dedicated path, for others a weekly space, where you can both challenge yourself and recharge, literally coming home to one-self.
Ultimately Yoga is the first step to Meditation. Yoga is the preparation for Meditation and as such it involves reflection: a being in the present moment with awareness, an integration of the “being” dimension (awareness) with the “doing” of the Yoga movements (asanas). This allows for a growing into and refining of the postures over time. However this is not the end but a means to a greater sense of Self, a growing inner awareness and dimension often termed self-realization.
There is an extensive background literature on Yoga which has endured for many centuries and its spiritual-psychological dimension is particularly appealing to modern man. In the classes my focus is on the experiential aspect and not on the many scriptures. Anybody who wants to explore the depth of background will be guided to the relevant literature, CD’s and Magazines to enrich their understanding. It is a lifetime study!
BRINGING MIND AND BODY TOGETHER
Yoga, in its widest sense, is the experience of fundamental unity, a sense of union with the divine or unity with our inner (true) nature. The main objective of Yoga is to bring body and mind together, integrating them into a state of “oneness” or union, bringing about an enhanced state of awareness. This involves being attentive to the breath, energies and other sensations of the body as well as fluctuations of the mind. (Mind here includes emotions and feelings as well as thoughts and perceptions).
By learning to accept and observe (or witness) these fluctuations of mind and body, when we engage the body in a wide variety of postures (asanas), we grow into the body and take hold of it with greater control and ability. This increases with practice as we move through the different sequences and postures, and over time we gain physical strength and flexibility as well as learning the art of “witnessing”.
Give me a call or email me to enquire about space, fees
or any other details or to arrange a trial class.
Phone
(021) 671 4068
Follow Us
marjogamble@gmail.com
Address
18 Mathew Road, Claremont
(Harfield Village), Cape Town