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In The Spirit of Sharing

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Louise Shum believes the highest state of yoga is the spirit of sharing

When we first met with Louise Shum she had just finished teaching a yoga class and was brimming with good health and energy. Talking with this softly spoken, graceful teacher, it was hard to believe that she was once a karate athlete. She was also once a Tai Chi athlete and TV sports anchor; today she’s the core figure of some of the main yoga associations in Macau. Louise has been teaching yoga in the territory since 1996, nowadays she is especially dedicated to the training of new generations of yoga teachers.  

At the beginning Louise studied yoga for the purpose of healing sports injuries. After going to India she fell in love with it “perusing it for the inner reunification of the real one.” Further, she studied with K.B.S. Iyengar, the well-known Indian Yoga Master, and was accepted as the first Chinese Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher by Iyengar himself. 

The International New York Times credited Iyengar with bringing yoga to the Western world.  However, his true contribution was to make yoga a universal activity, accessible to everyone. He advocated positioning the body correctly to comply with its physiological structure and the function of muscles and bones. He also suggested doing the asana practice with correct poses and using certain yoga tools to help complete the practice. All that made yoga more accessible to beginners and to those with physical challenges.  

Iyengar yoga is famous for its strict, precise and scientific teaching principles. Its training and certification system of teachers is well recognized for that. Louise is one of Iyengar’s star protégés and was recommended as chairman of the Iyengar yoga Institute of China by Iyengar himself. She’s mainly in charge of the training and assessment of teachers in Macau and Mainland China. Louise explained that to be an Iyengar teacher, three-years of self-practice with 240 efficient study hours are required, and “that’s just for the first level.”

To Louise teaching and learning are synonymous. Though tasked with lots of teaching, assessment and administration affairs, and along with year-round non-stop shuttling from Macau to the Mainland and many other places, she will take at least three hours a day to do her own exercise and half an hour for reading. When asked how she manages to put aside that much time in her busy schedule, she smiles: “Easy, you just need to get up early.”

Louise believes the highest state of yoga is the spirit of sharing, including time, energy and experience. The sense of accomplishment used to be her incentive, “now it is love.” She admits that it hasn’t always been easy, but “the time that my family doesn’t require me to contribute, I’ll share it with outsiders.” 

 

 

Rita Gonçalves defines herself as a “scientist-yogi”

With a solid teaching reputation among the Portuguese community, Rita Gonçalves defines herself as a “scientist-yogi”, always learning and researching thanks to her inquisitive personality. Though she finished her first 200 training hours of traditional yoga at the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala, India, she considers yoga something that can be interpreted by science and modern knowledge. “Modern people have scientific knowledge, they know the mechanics and the body and have knowledge of anatomy, they can distinguish what is really useful and effective from what they’ve already known as traditional yoga knowledge.”

Rita is always updating her knowledge of yoga, especially Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. She does an online course every so often; for years she attended workshops with senior teachers from different places; and she also likes to read studies by other people, including academic theses. “That’s really exciting because it is very new!” Rita enthuses. 

With that entire theoretical basis, Rita thinks “practice is the best teacher.” Aside from teaching hours, she does her own practice for one to two hours daily. “You just need to repeat and repeat, and slowly your mind will start to understand the correct way.”

As an experienced teacher, Rita greatly enjoys the close connection and communication with students. To her, “being a teacher is something like a calling”. Unlike traditional yoga teachers who just let the students figure things out on their own, she likes to share her knowledge directly. 

Rita prefers to keep her classes small with 14 people maximum, so that she can attend to everyone, especially the beginners. She advises those starting out not to learn from videos, but to firstly find themselves a good teacher. “People easily get injured by doing movements they understand incorrectly. Once the basis is learned wrongly, it’s really hard to undo.”

Rita’s studio provides a trial package of three classes with different styles, to help the beginner figure out what they really like. “Even when you don’t feel like you quite enjoy the class, try another teacher or studio. Sometimes you may just not like the teacher,” she suggests.

“Yoga brought me so many good things,” Rita concludes. Aside from the gratification of connecting with people, yoga to her, like to many others, is also therapy against external chaos. “Whenever I start getting off track, yoga is my way of reconnecting to what I want within myself and to who I want to be in life. I want to be my shiny happy self, and yoga can get me on the right track.”

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