Ashtanga Love Notes Series - Cathy Moran, 'The Chai Sessions'
This episode is the third in my short series, Ashtanga Love Notes. I feel Ashtanga has fallen a bit out of fashion and gets a bad rep for being too difficult, rigid, and well, old fashioned but we’ll talk about what we love, what keeps us coming back and what challenges and highlights it’s brought us along the way.
Imagine these love notes handwritten and close to my heart...
And so to my guest on this episode, friend and fellow Glasgow teacher, Cathy Moran.
I first met Cathy around 2006 when she was visiting Glasgow and was looking for an Ashtanga community. What she hadn’t realised was how really small that community was back then!
Cathy had been practicing yoga since 1999 before discovering the magic of a regular Ashtanga practice on a trip to Yoga Plus in Crete in 2002. Living in London at the time, Hamish Hendry at Ashtanga Yoga London became her regular teacher.
She moved here to Glasgow in 2007 and started to teach Ashtanga Yoga. Cathy made her first trip to Mysore, India in 2008 and has since returned regularly for extended periods of study and practice with her late teacher Sharath Jois. She received his level 2 authorisation in 2014.
Cathy is the owner of Ashtanga Yoga Glasgow which was born out of her desire to share the traditional Mysore method of Ashtanga Yoga. She established Glasgow’s first morning mysore self practice programme and continues to teach, share and pass this method on to others as it was taught to her.
I hadn’t seen Cathy for ages so was really excited when she agreed to join me in person for a chat!
We start by talking about how people are looking for different things from their yoga practice - some folk want to do some yoga now and then and others want to dive deep and learn everything about it.
She says, “I just take people as they come. If they show more of an interest, I'll say come to Mysore style class because you really get to spend time on stuff that you need to spend time on. You get to really understand yourself, what your shortcomings are and what your skillset is in terms of your physical ability. And you get to practise in a meditative way where the class is quiet.”
Cathy shares her journey into Ashtanga Yoga and how she got to a place in her physical practice where she was able to do things she never thought possible. She talks about how she’s no longer able to do some of those things now, and also has chosen to stop doing some of them although she still can, because she doesn’t feel the need to. As she says, things change and it’s about doing the thing that benefits your body rather than the end picture.
We talk about those early alarms for getting up to practise and teach, and how it doesn’t come naturally! About how having a discipline to follow builds something in you, and then having put in the hours you become more self sufficient and can make better informed decisions. And about how she’s had to learn to let go of the morning ritual of practice and simply practise when she can.
This love note was so much fun to record, and chatting with Cathy really took me back. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!
Listen below or look for 'The Chai Sessions' on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music. You can also watch our chat on Youtube.
I love that Cathy is still discovering new things in the practice after all these years! You’ll find her supporting her daily Mysore community at Ashtanga Yoga Glasgow so 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'.