“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
In the Katonah Yoga cosmology, your body is the house and yoga is the housekeeping.
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You don’t have to travel very far in Paris to find a link between art and yoga—in the last few years, artists’ studios have literally been transformed into practice spaces where you can unroll your mat and contribute your own creative sparks.
While some of our favorite art/yoga studios are no longer open to the public (RIP Le Tigre Yoga Academie, shown above) there still remain places where you can channel or absorb the brilliance and wild freedom of Isadora Duncan and other creative luminaries who called Paris home:
We’ve talked a lot about yoga and art, but what of yoga and architecture? The yoga studio walls that surround us while we practice also affect how we feel and think. Neuroscientists have discovered that changing the size or color of a room can actually influence brain network communication i.e. the way different parts of the brain talk to each other. This kind of data has the potential to inform how architects make design decisions, using findings about the conscious and unconscious mind to create buildings that respond as much to users emotional and psychological needs as to their functional ones.
We don’t have to be architects or scientists to know in our bones that the built environment acts on our bodies, feelings and mind-set. Some spaces make us feel serene the minute we cross the threshold, more at ease in our breathing and in our minds. Even non-yoga-doing Winston Churchill understood the symbiotic relationship between people and architecture. Surveying the bombed out remains of London’s House of Commons in 1943, he said “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Your body is your first experience of architecture
The most intimate connection we have with architecture is through our own bodies. Our bodies are the first house we live in. Our parents mind it when we’re small and little by little, we learn to care for it ourselves: we wash it, we arrange and decorate inside and out, we tidy and maintain the health of the structure, its outer surfaces, its internal systems. Seen one way, our bones and muscles act as the foundation, our eyes the windows, our lungs and heart the doorways that allow in new energy. Or mapped another way: our feet and legs are the main structural beams, our hips and abdomen the ground floor, our torso the bedrooms, our heads the rooftop.
“The body as the house. Joy of living in, caring for it, using it.” —Nevine Michaan, founder of Katonah Yoga
If you’re a Katonah yogi, there’s yet another way to describe where you live. As the Katonah system incorporates elements from Taoism, Kabbalah and sacred geometry, you’ll find a Luoshu Square of nine sections used to transpose a house onto your body: nine rooms, an East wing, a West wing, a main frame, three floors and 10 doors. Yoga, in this metaphor of your body as abode, is important housekeeping.
An intense Hatha practice, Katonah Yoga guides you from physical space to interior architecture, through the basement (garage, boiler room, laundry room/utilities) through the main floor (office, shrine/living room, kitchen) all the way up to the top (attic, observatory, bedroom.) Folding, unfolding and refolding, chairs and blocks are used to open up the body; limbs overlap, extend or tuck in like origami; inhabitual hand orientations chart a new flow of energy.
“Inhabitual” is a great adjective, actually, to describe Katonah Yoga. It’s recognizable yet startling in its reframing of yoga positions, placements and movements. Highly recommend!
4 Hands Katonah Yoga Workshop
with Lisa Fraipont and Elizabeth Madoré
Katonah Yoga brings poetry to your practice. Through the prism of the seasons and the use of metaphor, by considering our bodies alternately as a house, an instrument or a channel, Katonah allows us to orient ourselves so that we occupy the center of our circumference.
The yoga practice then becomes richer and denser, and classes become an opportunity to play together, like an orchestra.
Join Lisa Fraipont and Elizabeth Madoré, Katonah Yoga teachers based in Brussels and Carnac respectively, for this 2-hour workshop which will be a chance to discover or deepen your knowledge of the practice.
The session will combine a postural practice with breathing techniques that are unique to Katonah. There will also be time to explore adjustments together.
With a pair teachers leading the session, expect twice as many adjustments. theory integrated into the practice, and a double dose of metaphors!
Sunday Feb. 4th, 2024
10h-13h
40€
at Caelo Yoga
KATONAH YOGA RECOMMENDATIONS
In Paris: Masha Kruglova
In Bordeaux: Alexandra Geyser
In Carnac + Quiberon: Elizabeth Madoré
In Brussels: Lisa Fraipont
In Stockholm + Basel: Dages Juvelier Keates
Online: Katonah Yoga, SkyTing TV, Fig Flix, The Studio
or click here to find a Katonah Yoga teacher near you