An attempt to explain Katonah Yoga

Katonah Yoga may sound mystical. However Katonah is a region in Upstate New York where the founder of this rich Yoga practice, Nevine Michaan, lives and where she created this syncretic Yoga framework.

Katonah Yoga is a Hatha Yoga practice that pulls from many fields, which influenced our teacher Nevine Michaan along her own Yoga journey.
Mysticism, sacred geometry, numerology and Daoism to mention only a few, are an integral parts of this Yoga framework that impresses us with "aha" moments or epiphanies over and over again.

When we direct our attention to our bodies we might get overwhelmed by this living, breathing thing, that we inhabit.
By utilizing metaphors like the body as a house, abode, map or car we can instantaneously make contact with our bodies that seemed overwhelming at first.
By doing so, we immediately awaken our mental abilities and tackle our neurology which again allow our bodies to be "unlocked" in the most potent way.
So words become gatekeepers, Asana become geometrical forms and then we succomb to an ongoing internal dialogue with our psychology along the way.

All Yoga is intelligent and beneficial, but Yoga will not fix us.
It is our job, as practitionars to de-code the information that surrounds and inhabits us, so we can use it for personal transformation and growth.

Thereby we manage to integrate mind, body and breath and become better adjusted, by the virtue of being inclusive, rather than radical.
The Daoist principles play a profound role in the teachings of Katonah Yoga as they reveal knowledge about polarities (Yin and Yang duality), pattern and the purpose of repetition.

When I first started with Katonah Yoga I was blown away by the intelligence of the practice mostly on an intellectual level. It took me many arduous moments of repeating poses again and again, until I could finally recognize the revolutions taking place in my own abode (body).

It is Nevine's saying, that we need to organize ourselves and become available, because Yoga is a self-empowerment practice, no one else will do it for you.
Hence this framework becomes a grid, a template in which we can make contact with our subconscious Self and the mundane world around us. We don't manipulate the circumstances to our advantage, but instead we change, we grow and we transmute in time and by that become a part of the universal interplay of all things.
Embracing our nature, finding harmony with great nature and embodying the archetypes of the universal Dao lie at the bottom of this alchemical practice.