This week sees Byron Spirit Festival take the festival of the body to the streets of Mullumbimby.
Tahl Rinsky is co-owner and practitioner for Creature Yoga. For her, yoga involves a very individual approach that brings the community together as one.
Tall teaches Vinysa, a form of yoga that synchronises breath with movement or purposeful placement.
‘It’s a container to all forms of yoga,’ says Tahl. ‘It came out of Astanga and Iyengar. I am strongly rooted in Iyengar.’
Moving from student to teacher was a big part of the yoga journey for Tahl.
‘It takes time to develop your teacher personality – or whatever you want to call it! It’s your human personality, your other roles in life, your spiritual roles – and it blends together with the teacher. For me the process has been about coming into my own style of teaching. It’s about all the elements of myself. When you start teaching you have a teacher personality that you feel you have to wear, but for me it’s through the process and the posture and practice you start to realise yourself or to realise your own power all those things. For me a teacher is a mirror. My teacher Dina says this all the time: I am here to hold up the mirror. I understood that, but it took me many years to really embody it…’
Yoga isn’t just exercise, it is very often a place where people go to deep emotional places.
‘We live outside our body a lot. We are very disconnected from our bodies and becoming a bit worse in the digital age, as we connect through each other through devices.
Yoga is not just about stretching hamstrings and having loose open hips!’
‘People cry in yoga all the time. People who are new to yoga get surprised when they just want to cry! I think we are there to release and come into our selves and in that process you hold into stuff. In yoga when you feel like that you are just letting go of the crap. Our body holds secrets; there is stuff that is in there that you don’t know is there!’
At Spirit Festival, Tahl will be teaching two yoga classes, one focused on joy, and the other on forgiveness.
Byron Spirit Festival, Friday–Sunday.
To find out about the program or buy tickets go to www.spiritfestival.com.au.
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