Study YOGA

 

FREE Online Summit

APRIL 29 – MAY 03, 2024

Receive profound teachings from the yogic wisdom traditions that thrust you into digestible depths, result in personal revelations, and are anchored in authenticity.

TRANSCRIPT

JOSH PRYOR – CEO & PRESIDENT OF YOGA AUSTRALIA

Amy:

Welcome to the Study Yoga Online Summit. If you are seeking beyond the sea of superficial yoga, flooding your feed, yearning for insightful conversations and community, or are a sincere seeker devoted to the depths of studentship, then the Study Yoga Masterclass series is the nectar that you need as CEO of Yoga Australia. Josh Pryor leads the organization to ensure that yoga teachers in Australia follow the highest standards of education in the world. Yoga Australia is the national peak body for yoga professionals and provides continuing education, networking, practical support and advocacy. And Yoga Australia works to ensure access to legitimate and credible yoga for all Australians. Josh is also a senior yoga teacher specializing in the traditional Mysore style class where students with different practices share the same encouraging space altogether at the same time. Josh has studied with various scholars and teachers around the world and is also the author of The Spirit of the Matter, which includes a new translation of the classic eighth-century text Yoga Taravali. It’s so great to have you on the summit, Josh. Thanks for being with me and welcome.

Josh:

Thanks Amy. Lovely to be here.

Amy:

So as we reflect on the evolution and expansion of yoga globally, it is undeniable that, for the most part, yoga is practiced or perceived as primarily a physical tool for general health and wellness due to the emphasis on postural yoga mostly. We have seen postural yoga spread beyond yoga studios and into gyms, corporate settings, and the like. And as with various fitness trends, what are your thoughts on the cycles of yoga and particularly the popularity of postural yoga coming to a potential peak?

Josh:

Thanks Amy. Great points, and this is a really wonderful conversation to be having at this point in the infiltration of yoga through the West, the Western world. You need to remember that yoga hasn’t actually been in the West for that long. It’s still decades. Maybe it’s more than 50, 50 years. You can trace back to Swami Viva Kaunda coming to talk in the USA back in 1901 or something like that. But we’re still a young culture. We’re still learning yoga in a really broad sense, and it pays for us to remember that the practice of yoga as it’s known in India is thousands of years old, and we’re talking about a hundred years or so. And if yoga is perceived right now as a predominantly physical practice, then okay, no problem. It is comprised of elaborate and comprehensive physical practices, yoga, and just like when we teach yoga to people, we want to meet people where they are right now and societally and culturally we can also do that. So evidently our culture is keen for physical health and the physical benefits and the physical practices of yoga. That’s what we can deduce from that.

We can also though look at just a few decades ago in Australia in particular, there was Swami Saraswati on television, popularizing some physical stretches, this sort of thing too. But for a long time in Australia, yoga was known as meditation, was known as some kind of calming mental practice where you sit. So even though right now it is perceived in a certain way, you need to let it roll in a sense, let it evolve as our culture does as well. And as we learn how to understand some of these concepts, how to translate Sanskrit better, having these amazing teachers all through the modern era coming to Australia or to the USA or perhaps even just being born as a Westerner and having interesting experiences and having different ways of explaining the concepts. And this is key to how yoga actually did survive and grow and evolve and deepen through its history in India is that it must have been reinterpreted and retransmitted using the language of the time and the needs for people who were around.

We see the proliferation of yoga in schools right now. I remember 10 years ago when I was newer to teaching yoga, I started teaching kids yoga here and there. I don’t have any kids, so I really enjoy teaching kids yoga. It’s my one exposure to little kids that I have in my life, so I can really control it well, and I used to ask the kids, does anyone know what yoga is? Does anyone do yoga in school? And 10 years ago it was pretty much zero, not really anyone, any of those little kids were doing it. And now when I teach a kid’s yoga class, it’s almost everyone and this is over 10 years. So there’s a great example of how that physical aspect is a wonderful hook, super useful for us. And if that’s what we need, that’s what is going to hook us in and give us some exposure and give us the opportunity to go deeper or into other areas of yoga, then absolutely fine.

Those who know of the depth of yoga as being far more elaborate and far less physical will often express consternation and distress about that predominantly physical focus. And I also had crises of conscience at various points too when I was teaching in gyms and hot yoga studios. To what extent am I part of this problem, part of this apparent diluting of yoga? But I’m happy to report that as the years rolled on I realized, no, no, no, this is fine. Someone, everyone’s got to start somewhere. And really what better way, what better place for us to start than with physical practices that help us sit on the floor, get up off the floor, help us be resilient in older age, help us fall over and then get back up again without having to call the ambulance. All this sort of thing, it’s quite serious. For me personally, my practice yoga has always been about fun.

I just want to have a great time. I want to try new tricks, this sort of thing. And even that could be interpreted as missing the point of yoga, but it got me into it and I never let it go. I never let that feeling exit my life after I got the hook in me. And as I got a little older, I still love the tricks, but I certainly became aware of how useful having a good strong regular years long yoga practice is when you’re a human operating in the world. Obviously many mental benefits, but I’d like to talk about a couple of physical ones as well. One of the most hilarious physical benefits I’ve ever experienced in recent years is falling off my pushbike. And so I ride pushbikes a fair bit to go down to the shops, this sort of thing. And I’ve been riding pushbikes since I was a kid obviously, and I used to fall off the pushbike every now and then.

And when I used to fall off the pushbike as a teenager or as a young adult, I used to hurt myself. I used to get some blood happening and feel a bit injured for a while, but since yoga, I’ve still fallen off my pushbike a couple of times, but it’s been so interesting how different it’s felt When I am about to go “head over to turkey” and fall on the road, time slows down and I do a effortless sort of barrel roll and I spread my weight and I land really gracefully. And then I just jump up again and see if anyone had seen that embarrassing spectacle. It’s amazing and none of it’s conscious, it all happens too quickly, but I can’t help but experience that time slowing down sensation like you get in meditation and my body, just that basic physical apparatus because I’ve spent so many years training it to fall over, well it knows how to fall over it knows how to fall off the push bike. It feels just like yoga, this sort of thing. I think about, and I think about my grandfather when he died when he was 96, but for the 20 years before then his weight was getting too high, his knees weren’t too great, and he lived a life that could have been far more enjoyable.

And I think about that a lot. I think about do I want to, how physically capable do I want to be when I’m stepping over 80 or 90 years old? And then apply that question to all of my students as well. I’ve come to realize that the ability to fall over, the ability to take weight on your hands and wrists, the ability to have incidents that don’t injure you so much is one of the most precious things I can possibly imagine for a person over a certain age. It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve got 10 million in your super or no super at all really.

Amy:

It’s adaptability, isn’t it?

Josh:

Pick up the grandkids and toss them around a little bit and have a good time and not be a prisoner in your home.

Amy:

Can I interject? It’s funny as you’ve said all this, I’m thinking of there’s an Instagram trend where people are posting reels of like you’re sitting on the floor and can you go from seated cross legs and stand up and then sit back down again, and it’s an indicator of how well you’re going to age. And I just think, oh, that’s really reflective of what we’re doing in a lot of postural yoga and even to the Hatha yogis, there was this sense of promoting longevity and you look at a lot of them and they live so long and they were so physically capable. And this physicality though, traditionally speaking, it’s not, I mean it’s definitely there now, but because of modern influence from the West, in India, the physicality in daily life is not quite as strong, but you see people squatting to cook and squatting to eat and we don’t have it in the west. And so perhaps that’s also why the postural yoga creates this physical adaptability and it’s so important for us because we just don’t have it woven through daily life.

Josh:

Absolutely, and you’re right, we have influenced India and Asian cultures to put on a bit too much weight and sit in chairs too much. But yeah, certainly that’s the lore around Asian cultures is that they know how to squat intrinsically.

Amy:

So how does this lead into your thoughts on have we hit our peak in terms of that postural yoga popularity, especially with the influence of Covid? What are your thoughts around that?

Josh:

Yeah, I think that we need to hit our peak and I think we’ve hit a commercial industry cycle peak. I think it probably happened in 2019 just before Covid. I think it needed to withdraw a little bit. It’s just commercially speaking, but the angle I look at this one from is yoga should be normalized. Yogic practices, asana practices should be normalized. Squatting in Asia is normalized, sitting on the floor, crosslegged is normalized and we really want that. The benefits are or obvious. And while the commercial apparatus around yoga, as in trends and brands, may go through cycles of bubbles and bursts and whatnot, I think that yoga itself is unstoppable. I think about the way that people talk about the planet earth and that humans are merely fleas on the coat of the planet earth. And if the planet earth needs to get rid of us, it will shake its back and get rid of us. I kind of think about yoga in the same sense, and it reminds me of something that Sharath Jois, the Ashtanga lineage holder, said in a conference 10 or so years ago, the same thing. Yoga has always existed. Humans are the temporary measure.

Amy:

Love that. And I like your discernment too about, you’re talking, when we talk about peak here, you’re talking about the commercialization, the industry of yoga and that popularity of drawing people in to the physical practice, but the actual essence and the teachings will remain timeless and they will come through and perhaps having hit peak yoga in that sense is going to be a great blessing because it’s going to mean that in some sense it’s stabilizing and that’s going to send the people that come to it in more so into exploring other facets of yoga. That’s at least my sense.

Josh:

Absolutely. It’s very easy for us to apply a standard commercial mindset onto things that occur in the yoga industry or the yoga profession. In fact, in yoga Australia, we try not to use the word industry. We try to call it the yoga profession because it’s not intrinsically in industry. It supercedes all modern economic ideas really. And so it’s easy for us to go, oh wow, actually there was a bubble. We can look at charts and attendance rates and this sort of thing, and we can see the usual signs of a bubble like you see in real estate, and we could fret a little bit more than we need to about that because in real estate, a bubble must be burst, it must be followed by a recession of some sort. But in yoga, I think it’s different. I think the benefits are so intrinsic and speak for themselves that it’ll never quite recede. You’ll just see a few sparks, sparks of people and brands sort of shining and dying out and then being replaced.

Amy:

It’s almost like there’s a stable undercurrent and things are just like waves in the ocean just popping up here and there. But there’s always that fundamental base. So, okay, this is really interesting and I really appreciate how you formulate and articulate your thoughts here. So much has happened in the past few years. Covid absolutely brought positive and negative changes to our lives and hence specifically to yoga as well. And in addition, over the previous couple of decades, there’s also been widespread commercialization of yoga paired with multiple scandals affecting many 20th century lineages. And given that Yoga Australia has existed since the late 1980s, and thereby must have witnessed a lot of these developments, has the core purpose of the membership organization changed and what is the relevance of a voluntary peak body at present time?

Josh:

The purpose of Yoga Australia has always been, the slogan of Yoga Australia has always been quality yoga for all Australians, and that phrasing is really important. All Australians, not just yoga teachers. So it is absolutely universal and that purpose remains. I think all of the stated intentions of Yoga Australia actually do remain relevant. There are strategies around protecting and strengthening yoga in the marketplace in the population and doing that by lifting educational standards, registering teachers, compelling them to do continuing education and providing support and networking opportunities, this sort of thing. As a core purpose, that to me makes a lot of intuitive sense and it’s the sort of thing that we’re all looking for in life in any profession or any endeavor is a bit of community and it’s opportunities to tap back to source wisdom, but also to keep on top of modern developments.

So trauma awareness is a thing that is expected of yoga teachers now and many, many professionals now, whereas five years ago, perhaps it was far less so. So a peak body like Yoga Australia can do a really good job helping people through that process and just keeping track of people. We don’t always do every single thing that we should do. No one wakes up and says, I’d love to reevaluate our WH&S policy at the studio. Can’t wait. But Yoga Australia will help you along there. We’ll give you friendly pokes in that direction as well as providing access to incredible teachers that possibly you’ve never heard of because they are incredible and they’re more interested in teaching sparsely than putting on Instagram profiles.

I think that the flip side of that is that the organization should always be a, not-for-profit or a registered charity, should have a really open and clear charter, and should refrain from too many political activities or just things that go outside the scope of that state of purpose. And it happens. The last few years in particular have really helped us focus on yoga. We’ll talk about broader healthcare things or political things, but not really. If there’s a compelling case that yoga teachers need to know about this, like say trauma awareness and mental health first aid and these kinds of things, then great. We’ve got an excellent CPD course on First Nations cultural awareness, this sort of thing as well. It’s really useful and applicable, but there’s sometimes a temptation to talk about everything and anything that comes up because everything can be connected to yoga in a sense. Yoga is life, yoga is breath. So it takes a fair bit of focus in the organization and I believe focus is one of those things that yoga’s all about as well.

Amy:

I appreciate that very much because I feel like at the moment everything’s getting politicized or everything is now activism, and I think that it’s nice to offer things that are genuinely immediately relevant but not get too involved in things. And just to be an organization that maintains a degree of neutrality, which again is another emotional neutrality, is very much about yoga. So I think that’s something that I think is really invaluable because it almost doesn’t, it’s not being discriminatory in a sense. I don’t know, that was just something that came to mind.

Josh:

Yeah, yeah. Look, the people who run an organization like Yoga Australia aren’t the members necessarily. They are members and they do represent the members, but anything that we do really needs to have the blessing of the membership, not just a portion of them. And if there is no unanimous blessing, then you could make the case that that’s not an area that we should be touching into. On the note around activism, this sort of thing, I talk about it in my book a little bit as well, like anger, anger and passion sometimes can become assuaged in yoga or can be made to be undesirable qualities, but I think that the desire and anger are desirable qualities. They’re good things to have. It’s simply energy. It’s simply knowing what it is that you want to do. You are an individual living in this unity scenario and if something angers you, then I think it’s worth going there. But it’s a personal thing. It’s a personal journey. I like being an activist, but I wouldn’t ask someone else to do it for me. If I really feel, if I’ve got a “bee in my bonnet” about something, I’ll go to the protest or I’ll write the article or the Facebook post, this sort of thing. Yeah. But I don’t… I want to be represented in yoga, but I’m keen to do my own representation politically.

Amy:

Yeah, well it’s all about balance as well, and I think it’s just about self-responsibility and not having expectations on anyone else but just wholly being self-responsible there. But yeah, so in terms of Yoga Australia, and I think there’s an international audience listening into the summit, and I think that much of what you say pertains to everybody globally, although of course you can only speak to Yoga Australia. So where do we stand today? What is the relevance? Obviously you’ve indicated how there’s timeless core purposes that have remained from the very beginning of Yoga Australia, which is wonderful that it’s been founded on that. But yeah, as times have changed, what’s the present, let’s say relevance of the peak body, especially for people out there that are not registered? I know I was not for many, many years. I was quite cynical to be honest. I was like, what’s the point? But now I am, and I’ve had a very positive experience being a Yoga Australia member. It’s been really fruitful and as it stands right now, I would recommend it. But yeah, in your perspective, what’s the relevance to us now?

Josh:

We go back to that trust issue. So what I was saying before about our purpose and charter, I think all these conversations need to start there, to start with, are you a not-for-profit? This is the fundamental ethics of whether I’m going to subscribe to an organization. Once that question’s been answered, then we move on to what you’re talking about now, what is the relevance and what can we get out of this situation? Look at cultural appropriation, look at the way, the documented way that Great Britain settled in India and drained India of so many resources and set the tone for a modern India that we’re seeing now. Think about the lineages that have come and gone in that time and in time before then. Think about the teachers who are still alive, but only just, and think about the teachers, the Indian greats who have died in the last hundred years.

This is the sort of angle that Yoga Australia comes from. We want to, as much as possible, highlight the roots, the traditional roots, the ancient roots of yoga as it was presented in India. We want to, in some way, make recompense for what has happened in India with that over-commercialization, with the saturation of modern-day yoga trainings. And there’s an opportunity right now to do so. There are great teachers still alive who are willing to come out of the woodwork and communicate with us. This is one of the key things I think a peak body can do to give back.

Amy:

One thing I’ve noticed as well is that, in terms of teacher trainings, let’s say obviously people can register their teacher training with Yoga Australia. One thing I distinctly have noticed, and I think this has come out of perhaps some degree of influence of Covid, is that now instead of going, okay, you need to meet this many hours in this subject and that many hours in this subject, now it’s more about outcomes. I do notice that Yoga Alliance in the US also have sort of pivoted toward this as well. I don’t know if you want to speak to that, but it’s more about what are the outcomes through this teacher training, let that be the most important thing. And then the teacher training is kind of designed through that lens, the outcomes are the most important, which I think is a pivotal reframe to ensure that we are producing yoga teachers of greater integrity, but yeah, more skilled, if that makes sense?

Josh:

Yeah. Look, you’ve highlighted one of the other key benefits or things that Yoga Australia can or any peak body for yoga in any country can do. And that is, verify that someone’s training is of a certain standard, so verify that those outcomes or competencies have actually been attained. The race to the bottom of pricing and online courses has happened. And so there are a lot of people around right now who might possess a certificate from someone who claims that they’ve completed a course and can now call themselves a yoga teacher. 15 years ago that was of great concern to Yoga Australia, and it’s just gotten worse. But in a way, it’s made our position stronger than ever in that a gym owner or a studio owner, especially one that’s not actually into yoga, really needs someone to verify the credentials of these yoga teachers. And that’s what we’ll do. We’ll help people submit assessment tasks, demonstrate their competencies in various ways, be they traditional or modern day and scientific so that they can earn an accreditation with us, and gym owners , studio owners, and students can reliably believe what they’re being told by a potential teacher.

Amy:

Super important. I’ll just add too, I remember more so years ago, I can’t speak to it now so much, and I’m talking through the Australian sort of lens here, but I do remember years ago, many people setting up teach trainings because obviously it’s a very profitable endeavor and it became very popular in that commercialization. But a lot of people would immediately go to Yoga Alliance because the Yoga Australia standards were much higher. It was just so easy to get registered with Yoga Alliance. And that’s one thing that I’ve always admired about Yoga Australia, and I always said to people, make sure it’s accredited by Yoga Australia because the standards are so much higher. I’m sure, and I can’t speak to the status of what Yoga Alliance is doing now, but yeah, look, I think even though things have continued to evolve here in Australia and with Yoga Australia, I do get that sense that there’s always been a much higher standard and that fundamental desire for upholding integrity and those initial values that were laid out in the very beginning,

Josh:

We see it coming out of India as well. I gave a presentation to some international students just yesterday, and they were asking that question, how does this accreditation apply overseas? And I was able to say to them, look, our Yoga Australia standards are actually higher than most other countries around the world. So if you have that badge, then it actually helps your international teaching, even though it has the word Australia in it. India under Modi has produced a very, very comprehensive curriculum of yoga teacher materials, and we have some plans around helping Australian yoga teachers actually meet those standards as well. In my view, if you can meet Yoga Australia’s standards and India’s standards, I can’t think of a higher level of attainment to reach there In an academic sense.

Amy:

Yeah, in a formal certification, let’s say. Oh, that’s so interesting. I didn’t know that. That’s really cool. So given that yoga has been woven through your life personally now for at least 15 years and in combination with your work with Yoga Australia, how do you envision the next 15 years of yoga will look like perhaps for you personally, but also globally?

Josh:

It’s only 15 years. It feels like so many lifetimes of yoga within that period. Like I was saying, one of the key things I learned was early on in the first few years was that I really liked the fun of yoga, and I still do, like I said before, but I realized that I can go for the fun of yoga with just slightly less sharpness. So I had these experiences where I would really get agitated in my practice about something that I couldn’t do and something that I was getting very close to, being able to, couldn’t quite pull it off. This is a metaphor for the rest of my life… quite agitated… And then eventually I would get it and I go, yes, finally I got it. And my teacher, bless him, would immediately come up to me and go, great, now do this one. I was like, oh, that was a short celebration, and I had to learn it a few times over a few years.

And finally one time I’d been struggling, I’d been sweating, annoying all the people around me, no doubt. And I finally got the thing again, and he went to give me another task and the penny dropped. I realized, hang on a minute, I don’t actually need to give myself so much angst and pain. I can just go after the thing that I want in a slightly more pleasant way, pleasant for everyone, myself and the people around me who are not going to be bombarded with my noises and sweat. And so that sort of thing just rolled out into the rest of my life. I realized I don’t have to push quite so hard, that it’s not that desire is bad and I should get rid of it. It’s that I have the capacity to regulate energy. And I’m a believer in the cliche that the microcosm is the macrocosm, and it’s stated in various ways in many yogic texts as well, is that the inner experience relates to your outer perception.

And that’s certainly born out in my life. When I’m more skillful in my energy, then the people around me seem to magically mirror that as well. So from my point of view, I have a bunch of students in my studio and they’re beautiful and they support me and I support them, and we all do a really, really great job in life being passionate, but with integrity and responsibility. So I’d like to see that keep on proliferating out into my experience as I travel around Australia more and more with this role, it’s been quite a privilege to hang out with so many senior yoga teachers. I live in Newcastle, which is the biggest non-capital city in Australia, but it’s still pretty small. And I used to be the junior and then I became moderate, and now I’m one of the more experienced teachers in this city. So working with Yoga Australia has been just lovely because I get to talk to people who have got tons more experience than me and can teach me and help me as a student again.

Amy:

Yeah, it’s interesting because this kind of also loops back to the start of our conversation and having hit peak yoga and so forth, and I’m so interested to know… I mean, at this time of recording, I’ve been teaching for about 13, almost 13 years now, but practicing for 18. And literally in that 18 year window, there’s been this rapid change. So much has happened in 18 years, but what was happening before that was just really slow and steady. And so I’m so interested to see in the next decade or two, given that I think you’re right that we have hit peak yoga in terms of its commercial and more physical sense. It’s going to be very fascinating to see how things unravel or continue to evolve from here over a similar duration in time,

Josh:

Back to grassroots and back to a moderate approach. It’s been happening for several years now that the hot Vinyasa studios started at some point to offer other classes, not only the group fitness style intensity classes, but mixtures of yin and yang classes, this sort of thing, not quite as hot, maybe just slightly heated, this sort of thing. We getting into a more moderate and accessible form and delivery of yoga. And then back to grassroots completely. There were yoga studios around here that had expanded before Covid, had actually increased in size and now they are smaller than they were before, and upstairs above a gym or this sort of thing. And in a way, it’s quaint and it’s back to those grassroots situations where people teach because they just want to teach and the people practice because they just want to practice.

Amy:

I think there’s definitely been a shift as well on how, and this might just be my lens, I don’t think echo chamber would be the right word here because it’s not a political thing or a negative thing, but I definitely think online there is a change as well. I remember when Instagram first was a thing and it was all about posting asana and all the tricky things, and that gained you an audience, now, and I think that still happens. There’s still a pocket of that, but there has been a major shift. And obviously that comes with the shift in the platform itself. But I do think, at least I know for me personally, that’s happened and the people that I expose myself to online represent something differently too. And I think that that’s a really interesting reflection of the landscape of yoga at present.

Josh:

The macrocosm is the microcosm and vice versa. So many times the things that happen around us in culture, the things that we particularly observe are metaphors for what’s happening within us. Look at the science of… neuroscience, look at neuroscience and how well we know that the habits accrue. So the more you feed a habit, the more easy it is to keep feeding that habit. And this is the science of addiction, this sort of thing. That’s how the algorithm works, that’s how Facebook works. It’s the same thing. They mirrored the algorithm on our neurology and then just as we see social advances are made, so too do we experience flexibility increasing in ourselves, we have more freedom as society has more freedom.

Amy:

Yeah, I love that perspective. It’s really interesting. But it’s also about just choice. Again, coming back to self responsibility, what are you choosing to be, or expose yourself to.

Josh:

Even a small note on social media. Look, my students at my studio are all about my age. They’re all in their forties and fifties, and more than half of them don’t have Facebook or Instagram. They just don’t. They’re professionals. Most of ’em have degrees, they’re working people. We have to remember that lots of people just choose not to go there.

Amy:

And again, maybe we’ve hit our peak too in terms of social media as well. I think a lot of people reevaluated during Covid, how am I spending my time? And we are looking at what’s happening in the US. I mean, I’m not on TikTok, I don’t care for TikTok, but that’s probably going to be banned. And it’s like, what if you built your whole life and your profile and everything on a platform and it can just be taken away at any time. So it’s really interesting. And again, talking about the continued evolution of yoga, it will be interesting to see how that is rippling out, not only in our physical realm of day-to-day life and studios and whatnot, but also how that’s going to come through online.

Josh:

It’ll be a nice process. We’ll come through the end of social media with a few lessons learned.

Amy:

One thing I think probably that has really come through for me, and I think partly it’s through having children, is that in my early days of teaching yoga, there was always this sense of rushing and hurrying and teaching as many classes as I could and getting as many people in my community and that kind of vibe. And then I realized I thought, if I am wholeheartedly in this for life, this is my dharma and what I’m doing, I want to be doing this when I’m 70. I’ve got so much time and there’s a real sense of ease around that. And I think it provides a beautiful foundation for just being able to pivot and evolve and grow and know that the yoga is just that continual thread that will always be ever-present, on a personal level and a professional level. I don’t know… we could go in so many directions.

Josh:

It is such a long-term game. You and I used to live in the same city. Now we don’t. Now we’re talking again and it’s only been one or two decades. Who knows what’ll happen in another few decades. Yeah,

Amy:

Maybe we’ll be having another conversation 15 years and we’ll see how we’re going. We’ll see how we’re going, see if we’ve walked our talk. But look, this has been such a wonderful conversation. We could keep going on I think for a long time in so many different directions. But for those listening, if you are tuning into the conversation and you are either a student or a teacher of yoga and you’re based in Australia, you can head to the Yoga Australia website at yogaaustralia.org.au/summit. You can register with Yoga Australia, if you’re not already, and receive your first year of membership for half price and also have your application fee waived entirely. So there is a code that you’ll need, and I’m going to pop that code, and there’s also the link to the page, on the summit webpage so you can access all of that information really easily.

And in addition, whether you are a Yoga Australia member or not, you can explore a wealth of courses available anytime at yogaaustralia.org.au/cpd-courses – Again, this will be on the summit webpage for you. And if you are a Yoga Australia member, and I say this personally, many of these courses and events are actually free or at an incredibly low cost to you. So it’s definitely worthwhile checking them out. And again, all this info is detailed and linked up for you right now on the summit webpage. You can go and check that out. And thank you so much for listening in. Don’t forget you can upgrade to gain lifetime access to all of these wisdom-fueled conversations. And thank you, Josh, for your dedication to serving not only your local community at the studio as you manage such a beautiful crew of people in Newcastle, but of course also the wider Australian yoga community as you push for greater standards and practices to ensure we uphold the essence of yoga with as much integrity as we possibly can. So thank you so much for sharing a slice of this as part of the summit.

Josh:

Thanks Amy, and thank you to you two for keeping the faith and doing what you can do in your local community and the broader community over these years. Good to see.

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So who is your summit host?

A beacon for those craving a connection to tradition and timeless wisdom, Amy Landry has cemented herself as a global yoga teacher, teacher trainer, mentor, mama, ayurvedic practitioner, podcast host, speaker, and eternal student.

Renowned for her sold-out retreats, Amy has contributed extensively to Australian Yoga Journal, Om Yoga & Lifestyle magazine, YOGA Magazine (UK), and Nature & Health magazine (AU).

She has presented at Wanderlust, Evolve, Byron Spirit Fest, and Ekam Yoga Festival. You can listen to her Living In Alignment podcast on all major platforms.

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