Notes from Glasgow

Day One of the Iyengar Yoga UK Convention 2026

I am in Glasgow this weekend, at the 2026 Iyengar Yoga UK Convention where we are honoured to have Birjoo Mehta teaching us for 3 days.

The first Iyengar Yoga convention I attended was with Guruji himself, in 1993 at Crystal Palace — over a thousand people. What a baptism.

I went on to become a teacher, and was lucky enough to attend many UK and European conventions over the years with teachers including Birjoo, Faeq Biria, Corinne Biria, Jawahar Bangera, Rajiv & Swati Chanchani, as well as our own UK teachers — Judi Sweeting, Margaret Austin, Jayne Orton, Alan Brown and Francis Homewood, to name but a few. And then, gloriously, Geeta Iyengar at the IYUK Jubilee celebrations — an event I was part of the organising team for — and later, with Abhijata Iyengar and Raya Datta.

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To come together again after years of online and hybrid offerings feels significant. And to come to Glasgow — which might seem a long way from the south where I live — is a gift - we’ve been given a hugely warm welcome by the Convention team here and it’s such a beautiful and historic city to host our even in, not to mention high time that we take our convention to the north!

I would say to any new teacher, or any aspiring Iyengar Yoga student: come to the conventions. What you find there is a group of people from all walks of life, all different ages, all different backgrounds, bound by one common thread — the practice of Iyengar Yoga. What binds us together is the extraordinarily fortunate circumstance of Guruji having been alive in our lifetime, devoting his life to this work and passing it on to us through our first generation teachers. It’s a unique time when we can just be together and immerse ourselves in the practice as one big family. As a teacher of yoga, it can be a solitary endeavour, so to be able to get together with one’s peers, reconnect with friends and colleagues from all over the UK and Ireland is a real gift.

Quite a few people worry before coming that they won’t be able to keep up, that they’ll be pushed beyond their limits. In our first session of the Convention, Birjoo addressed this directly. He told us not to worry about keeping up, and said he was going to teach a little differently from what we might expect. And so began an exploration into the philosophical and deeper dimensions of yoga asana. A deeper dive into the more subtle aspects of the 8 limbs of yoga. And not what some people were expecting at all.

For the first three-hour session, he talked about how we don’t do yoga. It’s not about doing. It’s about being. It’s about feeling. It’s about building consciousness in the body, step by step.

As beginner practitioners in yoga, we get the basic instructions, we build the structure of asana in its simplest form — like in creating a building, it starts with laying foundations, erecting the basic framework. And then, when the other materials get added, when the walls go up, the character of the building reveals itself. Suddenly that framework becomes a home, or an office, or whatever it was always meant to be. It becomes something. And this is what the practice of asana is about. It’s about becoming. Once that framework is in place, you can go deeper — through the layers of awareness, through the koshas. Guruji believed that through the body, you find the spark of divinity within yourself.

There was, I noticed, some resistance at first to the philosophical teachings that Birjoo was offering us - people are used to working in certain ways, we all have our expectations, habits and desirable outcomes. So it was wonderful to watch people settle. To watch ourselves going through this process of “becoming”. The Svadyaya — the self-study, the philosophical inquiry — this is the practice too. And after a while, questions were flying around the room. People were engaging, working things out. The mic was being passed from hand to hand. And at the end of the session, when we broke, I was left with a profound quietness in my head — not the quietness of emptiness, but the quiet reflectiveness that comes from diving deeper into the layers behind the physical realm. More than philosophical, there was a tangible connection to something deeper - and many of us in that room felt it.

In the second session, I’ll admit I too expected more asana — and there was more, but we practised it with that same intention, that same quality of attention. Simple poses. Very slow. Great attention to detail. No sequence you could write down and take home to teach your beginners class — absolutely not. But afterwards I was talking with a friend, a wonderful thinker with a great depth of knowledge, and I said - if we wrote down what we did this afternoon, people would say that we hardly did any asanas at all, not even a proper sequence — but I feel like I’ve really worked hard! I can feel all my muscles as if I’d done so much more! He replied that it was because we went really deep, through the layers. Through to the consciousness.

This is why conventions are so special. They take you out of your normal routine — your practice, your family life, your work — and bring you into the moment, together, to discover something new. My first convention, with Guruji, changed my life. But that’s a story for another post.

In the evening, we had a ceilidh. I’ll be honest — I was resistant. I’m not a natural dancer. But I was persuaded onto the floor, and I’m glad I was. It broke the ice in ways that nothing else could have. It deepened that feeling of being with family, with friends. And Birjoo and Trupti were there, watching — with amusement, with warmth — as all of us, after a day of deep introspection, literally let our hair down.

What struck me during the evening, while I struggled with the dance routines, was that consciousness can be present in everything we do. It might be dormant — it was certainly dormant in me as I tried to work out the steps — but it’s there. And there was something in the image of Birjoo and Trupti, sitting quietly, watching with that calm and beautiful presence, while the rest of us flailed and laughed and got it wrong and then got it right. Strangers, friends, people I’ve known for years — all of us holding hands, swapping partners, making arches, running around the room. And somehow, eventually, the steps came. And the whole group of us flowed together in the reels.

What an amazing first day. More to come in my next post.