David Meloni: Every asana can teach you something

David Meloni, Advanced Senior level II Iyengar yoga teacher, is travelling around the world to share the teachings of BKS Iyengar.  For him, the key to connect with a new group of students is to build trust, and then he can start sharing.

It's October 2018, and David Meloni is having his fist workshop in Sweden, at the Iyengar yoga studio of Ingrid Engström in Björkekärr, on the east side of Gothenburg. The participants are curious to get to know the teacher who has the highest level of teaching certificate in the Iyengar yoga community.

After the workshop we took him for a walk to the nearby lake Härlanda Tjärn and got a chance to ask him about his life as a yoga teacher. It turns out that even though it is his first visit to Sweden he is quite familiar with the Nordic nature and mode, since his wife is Finnish and he has a history of several workshops in Helsinki. 

Born in Sardinia, Italy, David Meloni became dedicated to yoga as a teenager when he was practicing karate. He turned to yoga as a compliment to the martial arts but soon yoga became a core interest and David dedicated more and more time to yoga, following BKS Iyengar instructions in Light on Yoga. He did his teachers training in Florence and in 2003, he  started to regularly go to the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune, often for three months at a time.   

Since BKS Iyengar passed away in 2014, he finds it even more important to continue in the spirit of BKS Iyengar. He has great hope in Abhijata Iyengar, the granddaughter of BKS Iyengar, who now is responsible for the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune. “She studied for Guruji during 16 years and you can take from her what she absorbed from her grandfather, she brings freshness and is our hope”.

David Meloni on a autumn day at Härlanda tjärn.

David Meloni is concerned about the commercialisation of yoga in general and the tendency to create new styles, mixing it with other “strange movements” and using props in weird ways. “You have the creativity within the system of Iyengar yoga”, he declares.  Throughout the years he has learned to appreciate every asana and continue to explore them thoroughly. “Every asana can teach you something. If you keep your curiosity, there are thousand ways of getting to know for example Trikonasa, the Triangle Pose.”

As a teacher, David Meloni thinks that trust is a key component to reach the students so that they can start to listen to their own bodies. “You build trust through empathy and sensibility.  As a teacher, you also need to have strong didactics where you simplify and are effective in your instructions, not using so many words. First, you should know the matter of what you are teaching, then, you should be able to demonstrate. Once you are saying something and the body is doing it, is a very strong effect. Then the students are starting to trust you.”

This perspective comes straight from David Meloni visits to Pune where he noticed how BKS Iyengar always communicated through the experience of his own practice and he changed the way he explained, depending on the students in front of him.  “Everything came from his own experience, not so much from his teachers. That kind of teaching takes many years of practice. To try to understand the asana, feel the right actions and then translate it to effective words. ” That is also why David Meloni thinks you can’t copy the words of another teacher and shoot it out to students, you need to absorb the deeper understanding of the asanas and then find the different ways to explain it. “You should also be able to show with your body the mistakes that the students are doing, and show the correct one.

Favorite sutras

1.14 Sa tu dirghakala nairantarya satkara asivitah drdhabhumih

Long, uninterrupted, alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations

1.20 Sraddha virya smrti samadhiprajna purvakha itasaresam

Practice must be pursued with trust, confidence, vigour, keen memory and power of absorption to break the spiritual complacency.

(Qutes and translations from Light on Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by BKS Iyengar (1993) 

Favorite BKS Iyengar quote: “To  a yogi his body is a laboratory, a field for perpetual experiment and research.”

David Meloni is based in Florence, Italy. Read more about David Meloni on his website.

David Meloni was back in Sweden in november 2019 and he plans to come back in December 2020 to Iyengar yoga center in Björkekärr, Gothenburg

 

Text: Maria Edström

Photos:  Mari Lagerquist