Advanced postures   
  - how I came to Yoga

“Ever since I can remember, I have always been fascinated about anything that involves the human body - its movements, capabilities and limitations. I wanted to try everything, and I did - whatever I could and I was exposed to - from 13 years of classical ballet, to swimming, tennis, and even judo. In my teenage years, I started competitively running in cross-country races and taking part in aerobic marathons.
   However, this was too much for my body and, ignoring the warnings my body was giving me to rest, I suffered a stress-fracture in my hip. That not only left me on crutches for months, but also extremely frustrated at not being able to do any physical exercise. At the time, I was doing a lot of Body Balance Classes on top of everything else, which were a combination of Yoga, Pilates and Tai Chi. I got my hands on a couple of Yoga books and DVDs as Yoga had always intrigued me. It seemed to offer the answer to helping rehabilitate my hip injury, and also to ease the asthma attacks that had been troubling me for years.
   At the age of 17, I moved to London to pursue my studies in Law, and I visited most of the Yoga centres in London...
  ...by the time I went home for Christmas, I had seen amazing improvement in my flexibility and my hip rehabilitation. It wasn’t long after that that I decided to do a Yoga Teacher Training course whilst studying for my masters in Criminal Justice. The reason I wanted to do teacher training was to learn more about Yoga and not actually to teach.
   During my teacher training with Elena Voyce of Teach Yoga, I found myself spending much more time practising or reading about Yoga, than focusing on my post-graduate degree. Elena Voyce, who also has a background in Law, was very encouraging from the beginning. Because of her background, she made me feel she could understand my situation. I remember telling her, “I am doing this to learn more about Yoga, for my own practice and not to teach”, and she replied, ‘All the students I come across who say this, turn out to be the best teachers’...”

This article from Anna Karides continues to cover how she became involved in AcroYoga, the benefits of this particular practice of Yoga and describes several of the asanas used in ‘partner flow, which is a creative sequence of mutually beneficial partner asanas and stretches.
 Further information on Anna’s classes can be found on her website at www.annakarides.com.