Sabbi Lall takes the discourse to a higher level.

Oct 25

I'm am so honored to be a Co-Chair of the Teacher Leadership Council and to be working alongside such inspiring and wise yogis. I love that we have co-created a new model for yoga based on our shared passion for teaching, students and the school. And I love that everyone feels a part of it.

There is a strong representation and women's voices that I love. We all care deeply about teaching yoga from a place of integrity and sharing this transforming practice with each other and the whole community.

I really take my role in formally elevating teachers' voices and ideas seriously. I've always felt like my voice was valued at Down Under Yoga, but the Teacher Leadership Council makes that relationship formal. Our regular meetings discuss issues of tremendous significance to the school: our dialogues on racial justice and welcoming people of all backgrounds to yoga was a perfect example of all ideas being welcomed to the table.

I'm most excited about the collaborative aspect of the Council, an ideal that has already played out in the process of how we wrote and ratified our new employment contract, as well as Codes of Conduct, to help forge a welcoming space. It was harmonious- it was super-hard work, there were so many ideas on the table, but the team worked together beautifully. It feels like I'm part of a team and that's empowering.

As the daughter of immigrants, I grew up in the UK surrounded by Eastern practices but not appreciating their potency. Later on, I realized my academic and scientific training couldn't answer fundamental questions about the nature of our mind and who we are. It was through contemplative and movement-based practices that I accessed that terrain.

I love how academia elevates logic/evidence-based knowledge in a bookish way. But just as reading about India is different to experiencing it directly, what I learned in science, philosophy and Indian history landed internally when I was on the mat. Asana and alignment can be a wonderful doorway but when the mind settles the practice comes to life. When you experience practice as a bodily domain not as a thought, that is yoga.

My classes center around being in touch with the body. I want to help students of all types to find ways to be present, whether I'm leading a Yoga Nidra class that prepares the body for a deep and restorative sleep or cultivating an awake clarity while holding a forearm plank in a Flow class. On the surface these are different kinds of steadiness but they distill down to being in the moment and mindful. Being in the body, staying there, and providing tools to find calm at center of the whirlwind is a very powerful thing. At the same time, I am no guru: I want diverse students to have agency over their practice so that it becomes part of their lives. Especially now, when so much of life that is sitting around on computers, bringing movement into your life is so important.

Dr. Sabbi Lall

Graduating from Down Under Yoga's 500 hour teacher training program under Natasha Rizopoulos, Sabbi found her focus early on in restorative yoga and has studied in Judith Hanson Lasater's Relax and Renew teacher trainings as well as in Nicole Clark's Power of Touch mentorship program.

A strong believer in beginner's mind and the power of self-study, she continues to study and be inspired by the history and philosophy underlying yoga. Graduating from the University of Oxford with a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, she also loves the understanding that modern science can contribute to movement and asana, from the molecular and cellular, through musculo-skeletal alignment and all the way to neurobiology and cognitive science.