ShelleyArmstrong

Shelley Armstrong has taught yoga for most of two decades, on two sides of the world, in almost every register the practice has. Bikram in a forty-degree room in North London. Ashtanga at dawn in Rishikesh. Twenty-five classes a week across a single city, until it stopped being possible.

Today she teaches at Grass Roots Yoga in St Kilda, and what she teaches is close to the opposite of where she began: slow movement, restorative shapes, meditation, and an account of the energetics running underneath them. The reversal was not a strategy. It was her body's decision, and she followed it.

A church hall, at fourteen

The first class was her mother's idea, in a town with no studios in it.

"I remember it clear as day. I was actually only about fourteen. There were no studios. Well, not where I grew up back then anyway. It was a church hall, and I was like, this is amazing, I love it."

Something in it stayed with her without being namable.

"I felt that there was something that I couldn't explain. There was a little bit of magic to it."

It did not become a constant straight away. That came in the early 2000s, when she moved to London.

Twenty-five classes a week

London gave her Ashtanga as a daily practice and Bikram as a conviction. The hot studios had just arrived, and she and her flatmate went down to one in North London, sometimes twice a day: ninety minutes, forty degrees, carpet on the floor, mat to mat.

"I thought that was what I wanted to do. I was like, I'm going to be a Bikram teacher one day." A pause. "I'm very happy I didn't."

What redirected her was a flyer. A Vinyasa teacher training in London, 2009, taken while she was working full time in fashion. "That was the one that was meant for me."

She quit the job. Nobody hired her. She rented a room in the middle of a park in North London and taught whoever turned up, which some weeks was nobody, and some weeks was one or two. The man renting her the room gave her the only advice that mattered.

"You show up next week. You show up the week after. You just keep showing up."

"And it was the best thing I ever did. It grew and it grew and it grew."

Then Rishikesh, and a 200-hour Ashtanga training at Tatva Yoga, chosen the way she thinks trainings should be chosen: by going and practising with the teacher first, returning to London, and knowing she had to go back.

"I loved the discipline of Ashtanga. It was like your mind has nowhere to go apart from being in that practice. Really early in the morning. I just loved it."

Back in London it compounded: Ashtanga and Vinyasa, north to south and east to west, kids' yoga in nursery schools, twenty-five classes a week. "There was just no room for anything else really in my life. That was what I was living and breathing."

By 2013 it had run out. "For a period of my life it was sustainable. And then it got to that point where, well, something gives. I can't teach twenty-five classes a week like that and maintain my practice."

Three months in Melbourne

She left London, travelled through India, and wrote to Melbourne studios from a small room in Thailand. The replies surprised her.

"In London, no one would reply to an email. And they're so friendly here. Yeah, we'd love to have you come."

She was teaching at Grass Roots about four days after she got off the plane. That was December 2013, and the plan was three months. Thirteen years later she is still here, and calls it the best decision she made. Within months she was co-facilitating a teacher training that ran for a couple of years.

Retreats had come first, though, right from the beginning, and for the plainest reason. "In London, right away, all I wanted to do was run retreats, because I love to travel so much." She found a place in Spain with a shala built into the side of a cave, learned a great deal from getting it wrong, and got the buzz. Italy and France followed. Then Cambodia, chosen as a midpoint her London students and her Melbourne students could both reach.

Children slowed that down. Now it is one overseas retreat a year, and smaller ones closer to home.

All my body wanted to do

The pandemic ended the version of teaching she had been doing.

"I was like, I don't think I want to teach anymore." What she knew, more precisely, was that she did not want to move her body dynamically any longer, and the practice she had spent fifteen years dismissing was the one that answered.

Alongside it she trained in energy work, following a question every training she had ever done had left her holding.

"I was always into the energetics of teacher trainings. Every training I've done, I was like: what is that, that you can't really see and describe? I want to learn that."

"Everything just slowed down. It became way less about the physical practice and more about, especially through the pandemic: how can I support myself through this, and those around me?"

How I live

What she teaches now is a specific thing, and she teaches it on Wednesday nights: slow movement and restorative shapes woven together with meditation, and an explanation of the energetics so that students understand what is happening to them.

"So people can have an understanding of: why do I feel that way when I slow down?"

"There's always a moment in that class where I can feel this shift in the room, where you know that everyone else is feeling that too. And it's like a transformation. People come in no matter what they've got going on through their days or their lives, and I really would hope that they leave feeling just more settled."

Asked what the shift did to her, she does not hesitate.

"I'm just more present. I would go from A to B and think, I didn't know how I got here. I was just rushing all the time."

"There's one thing to learn this stuff. And then there's another thing to be like: okay, well, my life's got to change now."

"I can be here, and I can stay with myself, and I can feel grounded. And if you can be that when you're teaching, then your students feel that too. You can tell when someone's grounded. I think it makes the students feel safer."

She is nearing fifty, and says so without ceremony. She is not going to be jumping around on her hands, and the practice she has instead is one she is grateful for.

"It's shape-shifted with me. From my younger twenties, when all I wanted to do was jump around on my hands, to now really being a part of my life. There's no separation from it, really. And that's not asana. That's, for me, how I live."