It is not every day that one meets someone like Anne-Marie.   She immediately conjured up in my mind the image of the peaceful warrior who will fight to the end for her cause and yet be full of compassion.  Very charismatic, much focused, very passionate and with an incredibly vibrant energy that will leave you spinning.   For the near-two hours that we spent at her house, she had us spell-bound to our seats by the amazing account of her own spiritual journey. 

Yoga is Anne-Marie’s life; Anne-Marie breathes yoga, eats yoga, and sleeps yoga.  Yoga is at the heart of whatever she does and its fire is burning brightly inside her.  For her, yoga is in the flower that opens up in the tree, in the smile of the little Buddha who sits patiently by her front door, expecting nothing.  Yoga is in everything from cleaning the house to eating a meal. 

But this is now.  Things weren’t so clear in the early days.  Always looking for a meaning to her life, she entered the exciting world of the rock drummers, dedicated herself totally to her dance and worked with Maxine Tobias, opened a fashion shop in London with her own label, back-packed to Nepal, Sri Lanka and Europe, etc. to finally settle with her four children in Leicester teaching a form of yoga that is unique to her.

As an orthodox Iraqi, living in England far from those she loves in such troubled times, is not making life a peaceful one. Imagine how you would feel, she told us, to be the one who makes the dreaded phone call warning of an imminent bombing when all they know is that all is well?  How can you keep on raising your family as if nothing had happened when it really is happening?  … by doing yoga.

Yoga has given Anne-Marie the spiritual meaning she had been looking for all her life and the spiritual strength to carry on fighting for what she truly believes.   But it took her some trials and errors before finding the style of yoga that inspires her.  Her first exposure to yoga was in the 1970’s when Iyengar was over in London.  In the company of her mother, herself an avid follower of the Iyengar School of yoga, she attended his classes.    However, she was totally unprepared for his aggressive manner.  She agreed with the strictness, discipline and commitment that was required of them but where was the humanness and where was the sensitivity?  She realized that this style was lacking in the spiritual domain and that she was seeking something else… How can you separate mind body and breath?

It was in 1983, when she was working in London that  the turning point in her life materialized.  Inside her head, a voice told her “you must do yoga seriously”.  Not quite sure what it meant, she joined a Sivananda course and met her future husband in the person of the teacher.  She went on to doing her Sivananda teacher training in Kerela, South India in 1984 and became involved, working in their Canadian headquarters.  It was Swami Vishnu himself who gave her his mantra and who initiated her and she kept in close contact with him until his untimely death.  Her life had taken on a different dimension and she knew that she had found what she had been looking for so long.  As she told us “Swami Sivananda is in your life for ever”.

Back in London, her own style of yoga began to evolve.  She knew of Derek and Radha who had run the Sivananda centre in the Bahamas, they were exploring Astanga as were many others. Anne-Marie studied the work of Beryl Bender Birch, Bryan Kest and Baron Baptiste who had begun to break the boundaries of Astanga Yoga and bring it to the west like others such as David and Doug Swenson. She then became interested in Power Yoga as a more accessible form of yoga than Astanga Vinyasa.  This, of course, did not go down well in the purely Astanga community and the British Wheel of Yoga at the time did not make things easy for her either.
But Anne-Marie could never teach what does not feel entirely right for her.  As she said “ it is my honesty that gets me into trouble”.  She does not believe in pretending and will only teach what she feels to be right.

Despite the hard time everyone was giving her, Anne-Marie remained undaunted, knowing that her own yoga rang true to her, and was enabling her to be truly herself.   It is little surprising that as a dancer, she was looking for a fluid yoga practice incorporating all the elements she liked from the various styles she had come across.   The style she has now developed borrows from different traditions and includes what she calls a half Vinyasa which is half Sivananda and half Astanga. See her website for full details (www.sunpoweryoga.co.uk).   After a fairly rocky start, Anne-Marie has now finally received the recognition she deserves for the contribution she is making to the yoga world.  She is now the UK representative of the Yoga European Council with the possibility of becoming the Honorary Secretary for Great Britain worldwide.  Her yoga teacher training is fully accredited by the British Wheel of Yoga.

Anne-Marie derives tremendous joy from teaching yoga.  She told us that what she gets back from teaching is absolutely amazing and goes well beyond anything she might have imagined.