North Perth Yoga Room

I'm a new gardener, learning as I go, and Makuru — Perth's cold, wet season — is teaching me that the roots beneath the bare beds are doing the real work. Winter isn't a pause. It's where next spring is being built, out of sight.

Practice is the same. The winter weeks feel slow. Less reach in the pose, more layers on the way in, the body reluctant. It's easy to read that as going backwards.

You're not. The quiet season is when the deep work sets. The students who keep coming through the cold don't notice much at the time — then spring arrives and their bodies have changed underneath them, the way the garden does.

So if your mat has been rolled up lately, don't wait for it to warm up. Show up to the slow weeks. Let the room hold you while the winter does its work.

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room
northperthyogaroom.com.au

When did checking your blind spot become a whole-shoulder maneuver?

It creeps in. The neck turns a little less each year, so you swivel the trunk to compensate and never notice the range you've lost — until reversing the car makes the point for you.

The neck doesn't seize on its own. It pays for the shoulders and upper back. Round the shoulders all day at a screen, and the neck is left bracing a five-kilo head at the wrong angle.

Stretch it and you tug the symptom. Free the shoulders and the neck quietly gets its turn back.

That's the work of the Winter Weekend: structure first, then the precise Iyengar sequencing that opens it, props holding you while it happens.

Winter Weekend with Ann Dragon · 17–19 July · North Perth Yoga Room.
All levels.

Functional anatomy from a Sports Science background, 25 years of teaching experience in practice

Ten days out. Single session from $40, or the full weekend.
→ northperthyogaroom.com.au/workshops/p/winter

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

"I'm not flexible enough for yoga."

It's the most common thing I hear, and it's backwards. That's like saying you're too dirty to take a bath.

Stiffness isn't a reason to stay away. It's the reason to come. The tight hamstrings, the back that complains when getting out of the car, the shoulders that won't reach the seatbelt — that's the starting line, not a disqualification.

Did you know that Mr Iyengar began exactly here?

"My middle fingers could not even reach my knees when I bent forward," Iyengar wrote of his first lessons. "My body was stiff like a poker" That poker became the most photographed body in yoga history.

Iyengar yoga was built for exactly this. We work slowly, one instruction at a time, meeting you where your body actually is today. Nobody folds in half on day one. Nobody's meant to.

On Monday mornings at 9:30, see a class full of people who arrived convinced they couldn't.

Your first class is on us. Come stiff, come sceptical, come as you are. An hour later, you'll move a little easier, and you'll know it.

Booking link in the comments.
Quotes from Astadala-Yogamala V.1 17, 24.

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

One of my students has come for twenty years and still says she's working on her seated poses.

She's right. So am I.

This is the quiet secret of a long practice: you never finish. A pose you learned in your first month keeps opening, year after year — like a house you thought you knew turning out to have rooms you'd never entered.

So if your practice has felt slow lately, or if you've wondered whether you're getting anywhere, -the noticing is the progress. The student who feels their stiff hamstrings is further along than the one who feels nothing at all.

Tomorrow morning, 9:30, Mobility and Stability class. Familiar faces, steady work, and somewhere in the middle of it, a small moment of wonder if you're paying attention.

And if you've never set foot in the room, your first class is on us.
Book Now → https://share.hsforms.com/1Oqh2l_J7RGiSy2IYDeHxUwnr04u

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room
northperthyogaroom.com.au

"Turn your right thigh in. A little more. Stop."

To a newcomer it sounds like fuss. Why would a quarter-inch in the thigh change anything?

It changes everything downstream. That small turn sets the knee, which sets the ankle, which sets the arch of the foot — and a pose that ached is suddenly holding you up instead of wearing you down. The precision isn't pedantry. It's the whole point.

This is what Iyengar yoga is known for. We don't flow past the detail. We stop in it. We work one instruction until the body understands it, then build the next on top.

It's slower. It's also why people with sore knees and stiff backs can practise here for years without getting hurt — and why a pose you've done a thousand times can still surprise you.

Precision isn't the enemy of wonder. It's how you earn it.

Come and feel the difference a single correction makes.

northperthyogaroom.com.au

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Hashtags:

The yoga finishes at half past ten. The morning doesn't.

Most Saturdays, a few of us walk over the road for coffee after class. No agenda. A table, a flat white, and whoever feels like coming.

It started small. It's become a warming winter reason to make it to class. Here's something we don't say often enough: a lot of people come to yoga for the body and stay for the company. Especially if you've recently stopped work, or the week has gone quiet, or the people you used to see every day have scattered. A morning class and a coffee afterwards put two things back in the diary — movement, and a reason to sit with people.

You don't have to be good at yoga to belong here. You don't have to come to the coffee either. But the door's open on both.

If days have felt a little empty lately, come and fill one. Class at 9:30, coffee after for anyone who wants it.

First class is complimentary on us
"Book Now" → https://share.hsforms.com/1Oqh2l_J7RGiSy2IYDeHxUwnr04u

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room
northperthyogaroom.com.au