“The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony.” – Yehudi Menuhin
On Wednesday 21 June, Live Music Now celebrates International Yoga Day and Make Music Day with a lunchtime yoga session for current and alumni musicians, staff and friends of the organisation.
Yoga for Musicians
Wednesday 21 June, 2023
1-1:45pm, Zoom
The session will be led by yoga instructor Hannah Lenton. Her teaching is focused on conscious breath, nourishing movement, and cultivating a sense of peace in the body and mind. The aim is for this session to bring us all together in celebration of the two amazing gifts of yoga and music with a creative and uplifting vinyasa-style sequence that allows plenty of space for exploration and play.
Email [email protected] if you’d like the zoom link.
Yoga & Yehudi Menuhin
In ‘9 Things you didn’t know about Yehudi Menuhin’, Clemency Burton-Hill writes how Yehudi Menuhin helped yoga guru BKS Iyengar introduce yoga to the west:
“As a kid, Menuhin had been captivated by the idea of people walking on their hands. In the early 1950s, while leafing through a pamphlet in a doctor’s waiting room, he read about something called hatha yoga and said, “it struck me with the force of revelation.” A few months later, he traveled to India where he met a guru named BKS Iyengar.
Despite Menuhin’s global fame, Iynegar had absolutely no idea who he was, a fact which probably delighted Menuhin. Iyengar became Menuhin’s guru and friend, and together they are often credited with bringing yoga to the West. Menuhin described yoga as his “yardstick to inner peace” and had a daily routine for the rest of his life, including a 20-minute headstand on his terrace each morning. A 1953 photo essay in Time magazine, “Yehudi’s Yoga”, in which he is pictured doing Simhasana (lion’s pose), so mortified his teenage daughter, Zamira, that she refused to go to school for three days.”
Iyengar Yoga London writes how “when mentoring young musicians Menuhin would advise them to incorporate yoga postures into their routine. Today yoga classes are still offered to the young musicians at the Yehudi Menuhin School.”
