Our Marketing yogi Camilla Bengtsson was in New York and met the senior ISHTA teacher Sarah Platt-Finger, who you can do yoga with here on Yogobe. Together with her husband Alan Finger she is teaches Ishta yoga around the world. Here she tells us about how she found yoga and how it has become a part of her life.
What is yoga for you?
Yoga for me is awareness. It's awareness of your body but it's also awareness of your mind and of the shadows of yourself that you don't often allow yourself to see. So it's just like all perceiving awareness.
When was your first meeting with yoga?
The first class I ever took was in college. I was studying eastern philosophy and there were some thai-chi and yoga in the course. That was the first time I ever learned anything about eastern philosophy. I had studied a lot of western philosophy but I was really fascinated of the idea of seeing things in a non-dualistic perspective. That was my first experience of yoga. That was probably in 1998.
How did your yoga journey continue?
I moved to Taiwan to study more Chinese and mantra and I just wanted to go somewhere very far and different and learn more about the culture and emerge myself in it. I was teaching English and then I started doing more yoga which in Taiwan was very different. There was not so much alignment and they integrated Thai-chi as well. I started to have a more regular practice and realized that I wanted to do more. That brought me back home to the States and I ended up finding Ishta yoga.
What do you love most about yoga?
What has been the most profound about yoga for me is feeling at home in my body. Feeling integrated with my body. Feeling nurtured, nourished. The ability to recharge myself. As a former gymnast and a dancer where you have a different relationship with your body in that way that you expect things of it but through yoga I have learned to live in it, inhabited it fully.
Yoga with Sarah Platt-Finger at Yogobe
Do a 60-minute video with Sarah for energy, strength and flexibility
This 30-minute video with Sarah works on your hips and hamstrings
Release tension in neck and shoulders with Sarah in this 20-minute video