Ashtanga Love Notes Series - Emma Isokivi, 'The Chai Sessions'
This episode is the second in my short podcast series, Ashtanga Love Notes. I feel Ashtanga has fallen a out of fashion and often gets a bad rep for being too difficult, too rigid, and well, just old fashioned. So I want to talk with friends who, like me, still practice and teach Ashtanga and still love it too. We'll talk about what we love, what keeps us coming back and what challenges and highlights its brought us along the way. Imagine these love notes handwritten and close to my heart. And so to my guest on this episode, Emma Isokivi.
Emma is a devoted Ashtanga practitioner and teacher and is the owner of Ashtanga Yoga Edinburgh. She'd already been practicing yoga for five years before finding Ashtanga in 2011 with Karen Brenneman in what was then Bristol Yoga in Edinburgh. And that's where I met Emma too. She was part of a group training with June's CYS Scotland Yoga Teacher Training, which was being partly hosted at Bristol.
I'd come back from three and a half months in Mysore, southern India, early in 2012 and joined June to help her with the training. Emma then assisted her teacher, Sarah Durney Hatcher at Meadowlark Yoga in Edinburgh for over six years before taking over managing and directing Meadowlark's Mysore programme herself when Sarah moved away in 2019. Emma is still practicing regularly with Sarah and also studies with Sharath Jois in Mysore, where she received his blessing to teach in 2017-18.
Meadowlark sadly closed its doors earlier this year. Not to be deterred, Emma has bought a former yoga centre with the aim of building a long term home for the dedicated and diverse Ashtanga community in Edinburgh. I was really excited when Emma not only agreed to join me on the podcast but came through to Glasgow so we could chat in-person.
I start by asking Emma about her Ashtanga story. She talks about the 'shopping phase' of her yoga practice, how her experience in a Sivananda ashram in India shaped what she was looking for and how she found her people. We talk about the old days and explore how her practice and teaching has changed over the years. We also share our thoughts about the notion that Ashtanga with its sequences is boring. How these days people have access to so much more information about all of it than we did when we started. And about being confronted with the things you don't think you can do.
When we talk about what keeps Emma coming back, she says…
"There's this moment that is just pure gold for me and it strikes me every single time when I step on the front of the mat. There's always something that illuminates and cuts through and gives me some hope."
This love note could have been a whole lot longer. It was so much fun to record and chatting in person with Emma brought me joy. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we clearly did.
Listen below or look for 'The Chai Sessions' on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music. You can also watch our chat on Youtube.
Emma is a passionate advocate for the Ashtanga practice supporting you in your everyday life. As she says, "yoga isn't supposed to make your life harder".
You'll find her and her team supporting a daily Mysore community at Ashtanga Yoga Edinburgh. So if you're in Edinburgh, be sure to seek her out.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. You can even follow, rate and review to help other people find these conversations too.
Until next time, thank you so much for listening.
Judi x
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‘The Chai Sessions’
Anyone who has been to Merchant City Yoga on a Sunday knows how much I love catching up with everyone over a cup of my freshly brewed spiced chai. These Sunday chai sessions really bring everyone together, a true celebration of friendship, community and connection.
I want to try and capture some of that magic and share it with you at home. So I've invited some familiar and new faces from our MCY family to chat with me over a cuppa. I'm affectionately calling them 'The Chai Sessions'.