One woman’s yoga DONNA FARHI INTERVIEW by Joseph Roberts and photos by Murray Irwin Joseph Roberts: How did you come to yoga? Donna Farhi: I was 16 and going to high school. My family had been in crisis since we moved to New Zealand from the States when I was 10. By the time I was 16 the family was pretty much disintegrating. JR: Why did your father move you? DF: I don’t really know. I think he had the idea that New Zealand was going to be a safe and good place to raise children. I think what was going on with the Vietnam war scared him a little bit. I don’t really know his reasons. He’s always had wanderlust, always moved all his life and of course we moved with him because children go where their parents go. But I don’t think he realized how dramatic a move it would be. It was essentially a foreign country. They might as well have been speaking a foreign language. It was like going back in time 20 years. At that time New Zealanders had a fairly strong anti-foreign or anti anything different sentiment. So, there I was, this 10-year-old very precocious little girl from the US with a voracious appetite for learning. I found myself in a school system that was essentially a follow-through from British colonialism. It was like something out of Oliver Twist really. I didn’t fit in, and my spirit, which was always very connected to movement and dancing and to all things poetic and lyrical, felt compressed from the moment I arrived. In everyday terms I felt frightened at school. I was ostracized, teased and by the time I was 16 I was pretty desperate. I’d say I was clinically depressed, though in those days we didn’t have those labels. A physical education teacher offered a yoga class and it was elective. Only the really weird kids went. About six of us showed up while the rest of them went
off ice-skating or whatever else there was offered for elective time. I was just mesmerized by the effect the class had on me. I felt safe and calm and it was the first time
I’d felt like I belonged to anything. Within a week or so I’d gone out and collected some yoga books, and within a few weeks theteacherstoppedteachingbecauseshe
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peacefulness inside me. I practised religiously, I think because I had to. I felt that every other aspect of my life was so out of my control, but this was something I did have control over. I took to it like a duck to water. JR: What happened next? DF: Fairly soon after I started practising yoga I became involved in theatre and realized quickly that the movement part was the axis which I wanted to explore. So I jumped in the deep end and started
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was heavily pregnant, so I asked permission to go into a tiny little concrete room off the main auditorium of the school and use my elective time to practise yoga. The principal thought this was some guise for truancy and a few weeks later I was pulled into the office and he sat there like the cat that had caught the mouse and just couldn’t believe a young girl was practising yoga by herself in a little concrete room with no windows.The teachers would come in and have a look occasion-
ally and there I’d be doing whatever, sitting meditation or breathing practices or asana practices. I just knew this was going to be something I would do all my life. I think the incredible imprint of that early experience was that even without knowing the philosophical backdrop upon which yoga sits, just through the simple practise of slowing my breath, sitting in simple movements and focusing my mind I could conjure up this place of
studying dance full time. That in itself was a journey. I think I wanted to study dance because I felt very connected to God when I danced. I felt that was the way I could express that connection, through my body, and it had always been that way when I was a child. I studied and got very technically proficient. I reached a point one day where I realized I was just a machine that could do clever things, could do double pirou-
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