About Yoga of Dragons

Bongo & Sam

Like your favourite dragon, we love to move, explore our body and mind, connect with others, feel the fire, and have fun!

We love teaching together. As a team, well sometimes it’s a good cop, bad cop scenario – at least one of us usually feels like training hard, and it’s not always predictable who! We like putting the puzzle pieces together in a systematic way, journeying through the practicalities of which limbs go where, falling about on the floor (and doing it safely and falling well), to flowing transitions via some “ah ha!” moments and practice, practice, practice. It’s a privilege to facilitate good times and share our learning.

In the acroyoga classes we teach we see life long friendships beginning and strengthening, we see profound trust developing, and we see students feeling safe and supported enough to let go and play! We firmly believe that it’s the joy of the practice, the creativity of play and the friends you make along the way that’s most important about acroyoga, not hitting that next move or big trick: but progress is also fun, and powerful. Training and then discovering you can do what you once thought impossible breeds a sense of purpose and meaning. In our classes we ride that progress – coaxing that energy and focusing it towards upping the quality of connection you can find with yourself and others.

 

Sam

I have always been into moving, dancing, playing, but this energy never really found a ‘home’, wrong bone structure [read stiff as a board], for ballet (but I did like jumping), not really into team sports (but I could run pretty quick), likes making pretty patterns in martial arts, but not particularly getting thrown around or throwing punches. As a youngster you would NOT find me on the monkey bars or climbing frame more than a foot or two off the floor – I was full of fear and did not trust my body to hold me up or my nerves to hold out. In fact, if you force me up a tree or something high, I can’t guarantee I won’t freeze and shout I’m stuck, even now (but I can do the monkey bars, yay!).

I started yoga keen to help out a friend doing teacher training and a little bit curious as to what the fuss was about and whether I had yet developed enough patience to sit it out. Her teaching grew and yoga grew on me: exploring these odd positions felt both familiar and strange from other ways of movement I had tried before, I kind of liked it, I carried on. A few years down the line said friend had been on a different kind of yoga workshop, and off took the four of us, amidst some screaming, a lot of laughter and general chaos. We took our time, we spent many an afternoon wondering how the hell to recreate that impossible looking youtube video. I was not a duck taking to water, but with time, comes trust in yourself, trust in community, movement of comfort zones, different relationships with fear. I’ve developed specialities in one-armed and one-legged acro – with injury (usually from silly things like falling down the stairs or spending too much time typing) comes creativity and enhanced body-listening skills. I love to share the trust and confidence acroyoga has given me, seeing that transformation from “what the hell?” to “look at me, I’m doing it!” never gets old! For now, acroyoga feels like a movement home, not a private, quiet sort of home, but a fun-filled community festival kind of home – come on in and join the party!

Bongo

I’ve got a really broad idea of what yoga practice is. I feel like I have been doing it from teenage years, when I first started riding trials bikes and playing with my fears through embodied practices. People wouldn’t recognise it as yoga, but the body-mind games were afoot! I have practiced, taught and written on martial arts and parkour (my PhD was about playful skill acquisition and the way it shapes peoples reality!). These practices all feed into my yoga today.

I fell completely in love with acroyoga from the first.

Our yoga-teacher-friend, Regina went on a weekend course and soon had us doing acroyoga in her small living room. A lot of laughing, some sweating, a broken chandelier later, and I was hooked.

I was, and am, more and more enchanted by the mystery of acroyoga. Each connection made in acroyoga has qualities found only by being there. For me this new feeling of play in yoga can delight, teach and astound. Connecting with another, playing on that level, is a mutual choosing; it chooses you as you choose it. Words don’t do it justice but it is totally badass!

I love to practice and so I wont stop. I’ve been doing it most of my life and it feels like this yoga ride’s just starting. I can’t but keep pushing, refining, twisting in new directions, grasping at inspiration from elsewhere, pulling in fortunate mistakes, sharing, consciously re-inventing, and admiring the possibility horizon as it surely unfurls. There is no developed, only developing. No set and defined yoga pathway, only history and each other to guide, a mapless voyage to make… Together.