ABOUT THE TEACHER
Susan Allen
Susan Allen who is leading the retreat is the founder of Yoga Ground, yoga and meditation studios in Auckland and Wanaka, Aotearoa, New Zealand. She also owns The Yoga Transition, a yoga teacher mentor business and Entering The Stream, a world class online yoga and meditation platform.
Susan has been teaching yoga and meditation for the last 20 years. Following a career in Mechanical Engineering Susan came across these practices while travelling in India in 1999. Like many before her she felt a strong attraction to this transformative, investigative path. Depending on the retreat, Susan often has assistant guest teachers working with her, these vary with retreat.
Susan teaches an authentic meditation and yoga practice that has a creative, practical and intelligent approach.
Having practised meditation as a teenager, meditation has been a lifelong passion of Susans. She has been lucky enough to study under some of the great living meditation masters. These include Dr. Dan Brown, Tibetan Buddhist teacher as well as Harvard Medical clinical psychologist, Osho contemporary meditation teacher in Pune, India, as well as secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor. She has also explored Goenke’s vipassana practice and the contemporary mindfulness techniques of Jon Kabat-Zin.
Travelling to India in 1999, Susan was instantly drawn to the blend of the physical and mental that yoga offers. In 2002 she studied her first yoga teacher training in the Sivananda lineage in Uttarkashi, India. Rooted in traditional yoga, as opposed to the contemporary fitness yoga movement, this school offered a good foundation in the philosophy and cultural aspects of yoga. In years that followed she then studied extensively in the Anusara tradition with John Friend and the Krishnamacharya tradition with Gary Kraftsow and Vincent Bolletta. These two lineages offer a depth of knowledge in the asana branch of the practice with particular emphasis on personalising the practice for the individual.
In 2012 after experiencing a major shift in her health attending the Buteyko breathing course in Auckland, she subsequently trained to become a breathing practitioner. Buteyko is a sophisticated breathing re-training technique to normalise dysfunctional breathing patterns. This knowledge added depth and understanding to what she had previously learnt through the pranayama yogic practices.
Susan's meditation approach
Susan knows firsthand how meditation can transform one’s mental and emotional state at a foundational level. Meditation can be a never ending process of refinement; from working with hundreds of students over the years Susan understands how practitioners come to meditation from a wide spectrum of motivations.
These practices can be taught in a contemporary setting where many people are looking for relief from stress, busyness and reactivity. Meditation can also be taught as a central component on a spiritual path, where people are looking for something more than the consumerist, self-interested and divisive world that we are conditioned to. Susan has a skilful means of delivering these teachings so that one can take the practice off-the-cushion and into one’s everyday life. She is deeply motivated to share the path towards freedom that these age old teachings offer.
Susan has a particular skilfulness of language and is able to communicate sophisticated practices in succinct and varied ways. At the retreats there is plenty of opportunity for students to discuss their practice and to ask questions so they can refine their practice and continue to progress.
Susan's yoga approach
Retreats NZ, led by Susan Allen offers an authentic yoga and meditation practice that has a thoughtful, careful and intelligent approach. You will be invited to cultivate strength, mobility, awareness and thoughtfulness through the practices offered. We have little interest in doing yoga gymnastics. Our retreats will have plenty of challenging principles for you to work with, from developing your asana practice in a safe way, to cultivating self awareness of body and mind.
From many years of practicing and teaching Susan is constantly encouraging students to make the practice their own. Regular practice of Yoga, from asana to meditation to pranayama, is truly transformative when one decides on that course. As one practices more the division between practice and life starts to blur and yoga becomes a way of life as opposed to something you pay to go to a studio to do. It is this progression that Susan encourages her students towards.
Meditation is the foundation of Susan’s yoga practice. The skills learnt in meditation create a means for exploring body and breath in yoga asana – developing sensitivity, awareness and a spaciousness in the body. Unfortunately many yoga approaches have lost this context of the practice and are just teaching a fitness or a stretching practice. Susan is a proponent in this area encouraging and mentoring teachers to rediscover this broader, more transformative context for asana work.
Susan has spent the last 20 years running yoga studios, teacher trainings, extensive workshops, courses and retreats in NZ and abroad. She currently lives in Wanaka in the south island Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Give yourself a gift, an immersion retreat just for yourself
Susan Allen is the founder of Yoga Ground, studios in Auckland and Wanaka, New Zealand. She also owns Entering the Stream, a world class online yoga and meditation platform and The Yoga Transition, a yoga teacher mentorship business. Read more about Susan here.
Retreats NZ | susan@theyogatransition.com | +64-21-222-6550
Retreats NZ susan@theyogatransition.com
+64-21-222-6550