Practising with Peter Sanson in Barcelona

If you're an attentive reader of our blog you'll know we spent a few days in Barcelona this week practising with one of our favourite teachers, Peter Sanson.We've practised with him a good few times before, both in Dublin and Portugal and we never grow tired of the experience. Peter has a very simple approach to ashtanga yoga and has a very important message for his students, which he repeats again and again. He has a superb ability to distill the practice down into its essential nature and has a very powerful way of transmitting this to us all.I'll attempt to share with you a little of what he spoke about in his talk on Saturday afternoon.

• Ashtanga yoga is a very simple practice. Most teachers these days over-complicate the whole thing in an effort to make themselves look good. They teach too many asanas too quickly to their students so that the students think they're great teachers.
• If you want to see what yoga is NOT about then go onto youtube (or other social media sites) to see all of these yoga teachers performing and talking about yoga asanas. This is the exact opposite of what yoga is about.
• The yoga asanas are all to do with internal action and moving the energy through the body. What the postures look like from the outside is irrelevant.
• There is absolutely no performance aspect to yoga practice.
• Peter is not in the slightest bit interested in what asanas you can do. He is only interested in finding where you are blocked; where the energy is not flowing, and working with that.
• Every student is totally unique and has a unique set of physical, mental, and emotional circumstances, and a different history through their lives. We should not try to emulate any other students or teachers, only try to work with our own set of circumstances to try to understand where we are coming up against blockages.
• Everybody is always thinking about the next posture. The most common question that Peter is asked is, "What's next?". His reply is, "How about bringing your full attention to the posture that you're doing right now!"

The passion that Peter has while explaining his approach always leaves us feeling inspired. To try and transmit these ideas to you without you sitting in front of him is hard and maybe even pointless but I thought I'd try anyway.For Suzanne and I the experience was somewhat bittersweet insofar as we always have a fantastic time practising with Peter. But it always comes to an end too soon and we return home to practise alone again. We are enthused and inspired in our practice and teaching after having contact with such a great teacher but practising without a teacher for such a long time is hard.It's our sincere hope that we can help Peter to come back to Dublin next year and we'll be travelling to see him somewhere else in Europe too. I encourage anyone who has the chance to go and experience his teaching if possible.See you all at the shala x