Alia Swersky
Alia is taking a 6 month sabbatical; she plans to return to teaching at Lotus in March 2012. We wish Alia a wonderful sabbatical!
Alia’s love of yoga stems back to her childhood when she began studying yoga with her mother. A life-long study of movement and the body guides and inspires her teaching and practice. She began her formal study of yoga in NYC with some teachers who taught in tiny groups in their apartments; this same quality of intimacy is embedded in her class.
Students can expect to receive personal attention, to occasionally have the class shaped by their requests and curiosities, to be recognized, and to be invited to be part of a community. Along with practicing yoga, Alia has dedicated much of her life to studying, teaching and performing contemporary dance and dance improvisation. She has studied many movement and somatic modalities that are embedded in her teaching. Students might be asked to explore the “movement in stillness and the stillness in action” or other living dilemmas that have invigorated her teaching at the juncture of dance and life.
Though the speed may vary in Alia’s classes, students can expect she will attend to “how we travel from one set of sensations to another.” “I invite my students to notice how their attention shifts throughout class, from pose to pose and state to state. We may be moving in flow through vinyasa or attentively remaining in one pose for awhile, but my invitation is always to stay not with the pose but with the breath and experience in the present, treating ‘transitions’ essentially as the edge of any pose.”
Alia’s classes encourage you to compassionately open to the challenges and the joys of being in your body. Because emphasis is placed on developing strength and flexibility in combination with a dynamic graceful vinyasa flow, “my students can expect that I’m not a teacher who stops to talk between poses frequently, explaining and analyzing. No matter what level, I ask students to stay inside their experience; with my words and my hands, I invite students to fine tune the structural alignment of the body without disappearing into analysis. I will often allow for silence in class and speak to what is essential…to remind students that yoga is not just a body practice but an investigation of the intricate wisdom, fragility, and power of the body, mind connection”.
