Carla is the Scaravelli Yoga teacher that every Saturday at Jamyang runs a class.
She started practicing yoga over 20 years ago, when she was an angst-ridden teenager looking to feel more at peace in her body and mind.
“I still remember the enormity of the realisation that I was more than just my thoughts, and that there was a whole-body connected to my head that I could sense into! ” Since then, yoga has accompanied her and offered significant solace, particularly during more challenging experiences such as illness, bereavement and childbirth. She finds something deeply empowering in a practice that allows her “not only to notice what I am thinking and feeling, but also to realise I have choices in how I respond to those thoughts and feelings.”
Discover more in this interview!
What is Scaravelli Yoga?
Vanda Scaravelli studied with Iyengar, Krishnamurti and Desikachar before going on to develop her own approach to yoga, based on awakening the spine, tuning into the wave of the breath, and working with the body rather than against it. What I love about this style of yoga is that it’s all about noticing how it feels to be in our own unique bodies, so it’s a practice that’s available to everyone irrespective of previous yoga experience. Vanda Scaravelli also celebrated yoga as playful exploration: “To twist, stretch, and move around, is pleasant and enjoyable, a body holiday.”
What are the benefits?
Our bodies are made to move, and by practising regularly in this way we are able to release unnecessary tension and rediscover greater ease, suppleness, and strength. Taking the time to really notice what it feels like to inhabit our bodies, we become aware that this particular quality of attention transforms us not just physically, but also mentally, emotionally, and energetically. All the practices that we explore together on the mat – being rather than doing, aligning the mind with the body in the present moment, accessing a sense of connectedness, freedom, and balance – become powerful tools that we can draw upon in our daily lives.
What can people expect?
I like to think of our yoga practice space as an achievement-free zone, in which we are not preoccupied with getting into impressive complicated shapes, but simply exploring the interconnectedness between our mind, body, and breath. A gentle yet subtly demanding practice that guides us through an optimal range of functional movements, and in so doing cultivates curiosity and renewed understanding of what happens in our bodies as we move and breathe
