Begin with the breath.
Slow, classical yoga with Muskan Kapoor, live on Zoom from New Delhi.
Book a free first classWeekdays, 6 pm in Delhi, 8:30 am in Toronto.
Namaste (I join my hands, my left side meets my right, the sun meets the moon, and I bow as I greet your soul with mine),
My name is Muskan, and I have been teaching yoga for almost a decade: in parks, at schools, in my home and at universities, to five-year-olds, to young adults, to the middle-aged and to the old.
Our lives these days move very fast. There are always a hundred things to do, and someone or something is always pulling at us. We live in a flood of information, and the news pulls us in many directions at once. And, of course, we cannot ignore the existential threat that is AI. Nor can we ignore the fact that climate change might affect our future generations in ways we can’t even conceive of.
I can do very little about most of it. What yoga has given me is a way to meet each day without being swept along by it, and that is what I try to pass on. I teach with slowness, toward stability. We begin with the breath and stay with it, and the poses follow only as far as your body wants to go that day. If you are looking for a workout, this is not that. If you would like to end an hour steadier than you began it, you may find something here.
Alongside the poses there is meditation and time spent turning inward, mantra chanting and pranayama. My hope is to take you a step closer to the ananda within you.
Pillars of my teaching philosophy
अथ
atha (uh-tuh)
Now
The Yoga Sutras begin with one word, atha, now: atha yoganushasanam, now begins the practice of yoga. Not once you are fitter, or calmer, or less busy. You don’t need a level to begin, and you don’t need to be ready. Everything else I teach comes from three ideas, and each of them shapes what actually happens in an hour with me.
मैत्री
maitri (my-tree)
Kinship
There is a Mahakal temple in the middle of my university, and people hold it in great reverence. I spent more of my time there with the insects than with Mahadev. I followed their small journeys, wrote poems about them, tried to understand them, and I never once felt that he minded. On my happiest days I catch myself talking to trees. My joy is the same green as theirs. To me, maitri is that kind of friendship, with the ant and the tree as much as with the person beside you.
In class: our goal in yoga is to be one with everything, and my hope for these classes is that whenever you are outdoors, or anywhere off the mat, you feel one with the world around you.
अभ्यास
abhyasa (uh-byah-suh)
Practice
I have practised yoga every single day since 2017, and somewhere along the way yoga stopped being a part of my life and became the shape of it. I chose yoga, and I like to think it chose me too. What keeps it alive is coming back to it. There is a man in a park I walk in who runs slowly, soaked through, at the same pace whether I return after two days or twenty, and I want that steadiness in my own life. Patanjali asks for the same: practice over a long time, without a break, and with care.
In class: the group meets at the same hour five days a week, so that the practice can become part of your day the way it has become part of mine.
समत्वम्
samatvam (suh-mut-vum)
Equanimity
The Bhagavad Gita says samatvam yoga uchyate: evenness of mind is called yoga. Life gives all of us four days of sorrow and four days of joy. I have cried from happiness and I have cried from pain, and slowly I have learned that both pass. I try to meet them the same way, without being carried off by the good days or sunk by the bad ones, and with the people I love beside me through both.
In class: some days we’re restless, some we’re composed; some days the asanas are easier to hold, some not. We meet both the same way.
Classes
I teach group classes every weekday, morning and evening, Delhi time, live on Zoom, and one-to-one sessions by appointment. Your first group class is free. Details
Or write to muskan.yoga.kapoor@gmail.com