| The pale yellow walls framed with maroon red, the paintings of the peace dove and of the kundalini snake, and the thick black cotton mats striped with red spread out on the floor. The air was filled with a strong though peaceful, deep though soft energy.
But there was also something else tangible in the air.
Even before Saraswati had opened her heart to us, I could sense that her journey to this point had not been an easy one and that her road had been paved with many bumps. So somehow it did not come too much as a surprise when she related the events of her childhood that led her to yoga. Yoga is the reason Saraswati is here today, she owes everything to yoga. “Yoga saved my life” she told us. Yoga has empowered her and slowly healed her wounds allowing her to create a peaceful and harmonious world for herself and for those around her. Saraswati started practising Transcendental Meditation for peace of mind in her teen years, but due to depression she found meditation difficult. After a breakdown, or as some would say a “breakthrough”, she persuaded an elderly Indian gentleman who was a great yogi himself to train her in Hatha yoga.
After many years of daily practise and by then a mother and carer of needy children, some of her mother friends with depleted energy levels asked her to set up some yoga classes to teach them.
She had never intended to teach yoga. Indeed her Hatha master had before he died warned her against it. But as so many friends and friends of friends attended her classes she decided to embark upon a teachers training programme.
Since then she has gained several yoga teachers training certificates from recognized teachers training courses in the U.K. and abroad.
And now she herself is a trainer of teachers and the chairperson and education officer of the Comprehensive Yoga Fellowship, a teachers training organisation based in the north of England.
Saraswati began her teaching career in her spare bedroom at home and has had quite a few studios around the Sutton area since then. Now she has the lovely studio in Sutton that was once a rather uninteresting carpet shop. What makes her present studio so appealing is that it is tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the town centre; it is completely self-contained with a peaceful small front garden and one at the back too.
She would say that her yoga style is a mixture of everything she has so far learned and gained from personally. Her classes are mainly Hatha yoga, but she also practises and teaches Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Nada Yoga.
Mostly she loves running a retreat at Buckland Hall in the Brecon Beacons each summer where she feels she can truly embrace and teach all the many aspects of yoga.
Saraswati, along with teachers that she has personally trained, runs several classes a week at the Sutton Studio, from gentle to advanced. The studio also offers a meditation class early on Wednesday evening which is followed by a pregnancy class.
In her children class (for children aged from 2 - 9), Saraswati believes in developing the importance of a sattvic diet and offers fruit to the youngsters at the end of there posture practise.
She also runs workshops and yoga days at the Studio.
Her gentle yoga classes help many people suffering from mild to severe physical ailments to cope better. People suffering from cancer come to her classes as they benefit from the healing provided by the gentle adapted postures and the visualizations she gives them. Saraswati also works with Down syndrome adults, ME sufferers, rheumatoid arthritis sufferers and with people suffering from other disabilities.
Sometimes she runs chanting workshops where. Alan, her husband, a musician, accompanies her on the drums. She believes that chanting is a great healer.
It is beautiful to see someone who has known sadness to be so much involved in making a difference in their own community. Saraswati has managed to transform her own suffering into something beautiful and sustainable which helps her meet the needs of others who are also suffering. Her dedication to helping others is genuine and commendable. Having found peace and joy through yoga, she is now touching the lives of many, and helping to show them how they too can alleviate the burden they carry.
The most important thing to her is to teach others how to be Self reliant.
For many of us, yoga is what helps us to get up every morning and see the beauty everywhere; yoga is a constant reminder of how beautiful life can be.
Yoga, Saraswati says, shows us that the answers are always within. We simply need to learn how to tune in to the wisdom of our own being.
I would recommend anyone to look at Saraswati’s website () as it has been put together with lots of care and effort by one of Saraswati students and is very informative.
If all the yoga teachers were as sincere, as loving and compassionate in their teaching as Saraswati, the world would certainly be a better place.
"All that we are is the result of our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If we think in a negative way then that negativity will follow us, as sure as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. If we think in an harmonious way, happiness follows us as sure as our shadow, never leaving us"
The Dhammapada |
