Hi, I’m Anna. Forever fascinated by life and human experience, I have a deep interest in how and why we are the way we are, in the body-mind system and beyond. I began analysing my own journey many years ago and found the tools of yoga and meditation invaluable. After years of regular practice, numerous workshops and talks, and a couple of yoga teacher trainings, I decided to broaden my personal
The Centre of Yoga Studies had our AGM recently, and we thought it would be nice to gather all this together and give our followers an end of year review. Events in 2021-2022 In the 2021-2022 academic year, we ran 15 lectures, book launches and special events, from Gudrun Buhnemann speaking on Mandalas as objects of meditation, to Laura von Ostrowski’s book launch for Text in Motion, as well as a successful
Event details: SOAS CYS summer course, 2022 This post written by: Lea Stiller We asked a student on our summer course to write a few reflections provoked by their time studying with us. When I first started studying Sanskrit, our teacher asked a question: “Who came here because of Yoga? And who came here because of Buddhism?” Around the same number of students raised their hands for each of these
Event details: “Enlivening the Goddess and Feeding the Dead” by Amy Allocco, 7th February, 2022. This post written by: Sabbi Lall Dr. Amy Allocco (Elon University, USA) studies contemporary Hindu ritual traditions and religious practices in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, India. She shared her latest research in a recent talk at the SOAS Center of Yoga Studies. The talk focused on Mayānakkoḷḷai, a festival devoted to the goddess Aṅkāḷaparamēcuvari that coincides
The Centre of Yoga Studies had our AGM recently, and with an audience feedback project earlier in the year, and a couple of big plans for 2022, we thought it would be nice to gather all this together and give our followers an end of year review. Events in 2020-2021 In the 2020-2021 academic year, we ran 25 lectures, book launches and special events, from Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad speaking on Yoga,
Erica Morton McGill I am a writer, yoga teacher and space holder, and lifelong student. For over ten years I worked with The Art of Yoga Project, a non-profit bringing yoga and meditation to incarcerated and at-risk teenage girls in the San Francisco Bay Area. I composed the organization’s guidebook on teaching trauma-informed yoga and crafted an extensive curriculum, designed to offer contemplative practices in prisons and schools. After years
Event details: SOAS CYS summer school, 2021 This post written by: Varun Aiyer We asked a couple of students on our summer school to write a few reflections provoked by their time studying with us. This is one of two pieces in response. The present times, to my mind, demand from practitioners, researchers, scholars, seekers of every field of work- study, if at all their inner persons exercise the will to
Event details: SOAS CYS summer school, 2021 This post written by: Richa Agarwal We asked a couple of students on our summer school to write a few reflections provoked by their time studying with us. This is one of two pieces in response. When you grow up as an Indian infused with a culture of rich classical Indian traditions like Yoga and Vedanta since childhood, the understanding that ‘Yoga is not just
As we slowly gather a library of recordings of our talks, we’re starting to tag our online content with hashtags that will help you orient yourselves what we have to offer. We’ve looked quite carefully at the results of our survey earlier this year and our aim is not to ‘accurately’ label content and events. Our aim is to help those who are into a particular kind of yoga-related research,
Event details: SOAS CYS Post-graduate student conference, 2021 Event recording: YouTube This post written by: Scott Lamps The opportunity to present a 15 minute talk or ‘paper’ at SOAS’s Post-Graduation Student Conference was my first such experience. I have presented and taught in many other disciplines, but the scholarly format and audience were new for me. I am a longtime practitioner of yoga. In the premodern texts of yoga, the concept of samādhi has
