RayneWatkin

Rayne Watkin came to stillness the long way around. An elite competitive rower with an athlete's drive, an osteopath with a fast and busy mind, she built a life on doing difficult things well. Then the practice she'd kept at the edge of that life quietly turned it inside out. Today her Yin and Yoga Nidra classes at Warrior One and Inndriya in Highett draw waiting lists, and there is nothing else in Melbourne quite like them, because what she teaches is not a style. It's her.

The quiet inheritance

Yoga was in the house before Rayne wanted anything to do with it. "My mother was a yogi at a time when yoga wasn't really a thing," she says. "And so, obviously, as she was my mother, I didn't want anything to do with it," she jokes. Nevertheless, it filtered in, and the spiritual dimension of life "was just an understood part of who I was from a very young age."

Practice proper began in her mid-teens, alongside a lot of sport, always quietly in the background. "Especially when I was in crisis, that's when it would find me." By her twenties she was diving deep, and never stopped. "It's such a vast ocean that's grabbed me. It's found me, and it's kept saving me when I was lost. It redirected me until I couldn't let it go."

For a long time, the athlete led the way. "I had a very athletic mindset, very goal-driven, very orientated towards achievement. It was really easy for me to do very difficult things. So it just seemed like this practice was a really physical one, until one day, it wasn't."

Waking up

What changed was a personal transformative event. "I had an experience where I woke up to myself. That experience is very intimate, I never really describe the details of it, because it's mine. But I saw myself, and I saw my whole life in a very different way. I started to see how sacred things were, and it touched me so deeply that I didn't want to forget."

What it left behind was not another achievement. "What I learned was that it doesn't matter," she says. "It's my keel to move through life, it's actually the foundation of who I am."

Teaching was never the plan. She attended a teacher training to keep a friend company on the course. People kept telling her to teach, though she was not drawn to it. "One of my fears is to stand out in front. I like to quietly lead." She did it anyway, and something unexpected was revealed in the role of the teacher. "It actually healed me to teach. It's a very humbling place, and to this day it teaches me a lot, to hold space, and truly what yoga is. When a practice goes deeper than the physical, you can feel it in the room. And that's everything for me."

Rayne makes it clear that as a teacher she is not playing a persona. "I'm not two different people. I don't put on my yoga pants and then just show up and become a yoga teacher. When I stand in front of people, it's just my heart."

Less is more

Yin was not her first port of call. An osteopath, deeply educated, quick-thinking, self-described as "a bit neuro-spicy", she initially found the stillness of the practice a challenge. "I have not forgotten how hard it was. What's the point of this? I could just do this at home and stretch myself. And then one day, something happened when I wasn't trying."

It was through Qigong, which she also teaches. "It was actually through Qigong that the truth of what yin yoga is started to show itself to me." From there the practice opened out in every direction she already loved. "I understand Chinese energetics, I'm passionate about it. I also understand myofascial and meridians. But I also understand the Tao. I also understand that less is more, that it's actually a space of stillness. It was kind of the perfect space and the perfect balance, for someone who is always driven, to all of a sudden be told: less."

Yoga Nidra runs even deeper. She has practised it since the late 90s, when it found her in North America, and it threads through everything she now offers. When Nova Rosaia, co-founder of Warrior One, asked her to teach at her studio, the request landed perfectly. "She said, Rayne, I don't want another vinyasa teacher. I'm like, thank God, because I'm not that person. I said, I'm really passionate about yin and yoga nidra, those two things can go together. And I think it's what people need. It's rest."

That was before yin yoga had become ubiquitous. "It's in the collective consciousness now, showing how important it is," says Rayne, reflecting on the strong growth in demand for the practice around the world.

Her classes sit deliberately outside the tidy definitions, and she has heard the objections, "that's not yoga nidra, that's not yin". She takes them as confirmation. "If you come into my class, you're there because something drew you there. Sometimes it's not what you think you need, and that's actually where the growth is."

That conviction, that a student's practice belongs to the student, now extends beyond her classes: she leads a Yin yoga teacher training at Warrior One, co-teaching this year's intake with Sarah Hammond, built on the same principle. "You shouldn't be reliant on your teacher. The teacher should push it right back onto you. You're your own guru."

Yoga Nidra

For Rayne, the practice of Yoga Nidra holds a special place. With Sarah Machado, she created The Space Between Yoga Nidra. Each year the pair offer a weekend immersion in Melbourne, covering the technique, the state, and a history that reaches back thousands of years, along with the neuroscience: the deep delta-brainwave states Yoga Nidra invites, the territory of the body's deepest rest and repair. "I've had the privilege of working with some of the best transmitters of the practice in the world," she says.

Together they also lead Sankalpa retreats, built around the heart's desire, "which is a bit different from what most people are offering." And there are bigger horizons forming. "We're actually cheekily thinking about going to Morocco next year. So watch this space."

So the athlete who could always master the hardest thing found the harder thing was stillness, and then found her life's work in helping others succeed without striving too. "Something happened when I wasn't trying," she says of the moment Yin finally opened. Her classes hold that door ajar for everyone who walks in.