About Lisa Walford

Lisa has been practising and teaching Iyengar Yoga for more than four decades. She studied with the Iyengar family in Pune, has trained and mentored teachers, and has long experience working therapeutically with students. What matters for this meeting is not the résumé. It is the perspective that comes from returning to the same questions, in the body and in the classroom, year after year.

This autumn Lisa has been teaching Light on Life through the kośas in her own community, through practice. She joins Yoga Readers while that work is still warm.

The session is free and open to the Yoga Readers community. You do not need to have read Light on Life beforehand. Bring the book if you already have it, and bring your questions.

What to Expect

Iyengar presents Light on Life as an inward journey through the layers of our being: from the physical body through energy, mind, intelligence and bliss, and then back into freedom. We are about to read that map chapter by chapter. Before we do, I want us to hear what the map looks like after many years of practice and teaching.

Practice over time. What happens when yoga accompanies someone for decades? How does the practice itself change — and how does our reading of Iyengar change with it?

The kośas as experience. Can these distinctions actually be felt, or do they remain a chart? What does it mean to move from stability to vitality to clarity, not as a syllabus, but as something that arrives in a life?

Sensitivity and intelligence. What does Iyengar mean when he asks us to bring intelligence into the body? How does sensitivity develop? How does something we first understand as an idea gradually become part of our experience?

Teaching and readiness. How does an experienced teacher know when a student is ready? What do we look for? How do we distinguish a student who can perform an action from one who has understood it? What happens when ambition and readiness do not coincide — in our students, and in ourselves?

Yoga in life. How does practice move off the mat into the ways we perceive, respond, and live? What does Light on Life ask of a householder’s week?

How to read the book? What would Lisa have us notice as we open Chapter 1? Which questions are worth carrying into the cycle, and which habits of reading get in the way?

I hope she will leave us with questions we can take into the book as we begin.