THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KATONAH AND VINYASA
with Alex Sharry

February 17th 2020

You know, it's hard to compare the two of them because they’re so vastly different. The whole experience is different. So I'll speak from my experience.

My experience was that I started my yoga career as a Vinyasa teacher. And for me, I didn't grow up with a ton of intellectual information around. I grew up embodied. I was an athlete. I knew how to move. I knew how to perform with my body.

So when I found Vinyasa, it just felt natural to me! And teaching it was just a natural progression. It blended in with my personality: to be charismatic, to use my voice, to use myself, to connect with others.

But eventually it got a little dull, and all I felt I was doing was teaching people how to step their foot here, lift their arm there, and what to be feeling. I was telling people what to feel and that felt really strange to me, but I didn't have the vocabulary to teach otherwise.

So when I stepped into Katonah yoga, my mind was blown and I couldn’t even put into words why — because even then I didn't have the language. It was just this experience. It was new words. A new language, a new way of embodying myself intellectually instead of just muscularly. It was moving my body from my mind, instead of my body from my body.

And so then eventually I learned a new language. It was literally like learning French and never hearing French before. I met these amazing teachers and amazing students. I dove into their community and I learned how to become an educator and to teach from my experience.

So the big difference between Vinyasa and the Katonah practice as a teacher for me has been: how do I take about 20 steps back, how do I really develop myself, and then how do I use myself to teach people to use their minds, to source from their histories, to use their vision, to manipulate and orient themselves, not just from a clunky way of placing their foot or turning their head, or seeing a picture and trying to mimic it, but truly from deep inside of themselves so that their physiology then begins to dialogue with their psychology so that the whole experience gets blown out and it feels like you're writing in this elegant script instead of just printing fast — which is what we say Vinyasa feels like. It’s this pose, to this pose, to this pose, to this pose. But the Katonah experience becomes very fluent because you really feel like you're deep in your interior.