Morning Mysore

Starting to learn backbend with Kimberly

Three great things about morning mysore

1.The teaching: For most of my time at Yoga East, every time I showed up for morning mysore class I was rewarded with the attention of either Karen Rafferty or the founder-director of the studio, Kimberly Dahlmann.  It’s impossible to calculate the value of the steady stream of guidance, support and encouragement they provided.  When I was ready to try something new or more challenging, or when I needed to accept where I was and stop pushing for awhile, they pointed that out.  When I was hurting in body or spirit, they showed me how to work with the pain.  They taught me how to breathe and how to use breath in the practice.  All this was in addition to thousands of adjustments to bring greater alignment, openness or ease into the postures.  Thank you, Kimberly, Karen and all my morning mysore teachers!

2. The community: Morning mysore class is busy these days but there is a fairly small core of practitioners who have been coming to this class regularly over the years.  This group is an important community for me even though we don’t talk much or know much about each other’s lives outside of class.  The closeness I feel is in the unspoken support of being together day after day – just being present for the struggles and the triumphs as we each work to evolve our practices.  It’s definitely one of the things that keep me motivated to get up early for yoga.

3. The morning ritual: Since Ashtanga vinyasa yoga works the internal organs fairly intensively, it’s best to come to it with an empty stomach, bladder and bowels.  This has meant I couldn’t just roll out of bed and onto the mat for morning mysore.  I have always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person but most of my adult life have used the early morning hours for work.  Instead, for the past seven or eight years, on yoga mornings, I have taken time over my cup of tea for spiritual reading and reflection. Eventually, a daily meditation practice evolved out of this routine.  I doubt I ever would have gotten there without the pull of mysore class on weekday mornings.

Discovering Mysore-style Yoga

Photo courtesy of Yoga East

Margaret, my first yoga teacher only taught once a week at a gym with no other yoga classes. But she encouraged us to practice often.  So from the beginning I have done quite a bit of yoga by myself at home.  In Bringing Yoga to Life (one of my favorite books) Donna Farhi suggests this as a way to take greater ownership of your practice, and I think it has done that for me.  Another good thing about being alone is that I can do exactly as much of the practice as I have time and energy for on a particular day.  Margaret had a saying, “there’s no yoga police,” that effectively gave us permission for that.  One downside of practicing without a teacher is – not surprisingly – that it is hard to progress and easy to fall into bad habits.  It can also be a bit lonely. 

For the first couple of years after Margaret was diagnosed with cancer and stopped teaching, I didn’t want to think about finding another teacher.  Then we moved to Portsmouth and I started to look for a new studio.  After one false start at a place with an energetic vibe but, for me, way too much emphasis on the body-building aspects of yoga, I discovered the 6-AM

mysore-style class at Yoga East

.  This class is modeled on the primary teaching style of Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, India.  Each student does his or her practice individually, with the teacher there to provide guidance, coaching and physical adjustments to the postures.  I arrived at my first class one early summer morning with a load of grief over the loss of my teacher and a fairly half-baked, idiosyncratic, practice and found what still seems like, more than eight years later, the perfect home.