Yoga for Every Body: An Interview with Mark
The Heart of Yoga
What if real Yoga begins with feeling more alive, not just more flexible? Ari is a Yoga teacher from Korea on a mission to investigate the depth of the Yoga tradition. She discovered a passion to bring the teachings of Krishnamacharya to Korea, along with her dear friend Ray and friends from the Gabbi community. This is a community of young people from Korea who are dropping out of corporate life and patterned conformism, in favour of finding their own path in life. This conversation gets to the heart of the matter — what is Yoga, really? How can it be integrated into the lives of...
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The Tables Turned: David Interviews Mark
The Heart of Yoga
In this episode, David turns the tables and interviews Mark. We dive into the roots of Mark’s life, growing up in New Zealand’s church and school systems, confronting injustice early on, and stumbling into my body through sport and the natural world. David grills Mark on the long journey that led him to the heart of Yoga with his teachers Krishnamacharya and Desikachar. This is a very personal conversation, going into the sincere “teachers” (aka friends)who helped Mark see through the spiritual industrial complex, and the simple, traditional yoga practices that smoothed out all...
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Stop Looking, Start Living with David Fardi
The Heart of Yoga
What if the life you’re seeking is already unfolding beneath your feet? David Fardi's path from spiritual confusion to grounded clarity is a powerful reminder that real Yoga begins when we stop chasing and start participating in what is. A Yoga teacher and founder of the men’s fashion brand Le Nirvana, David shares how he moved through disillusionment in Europe and neo-tantric circles to find a deeply embodied practice in Bali. His story touches on healing generational wounds, living in rhythm with nature, and discovering how simple breath and movement can reshape a life. David now teaches...
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Yoga Sutras Talk Recorded at Bali Teacher Untraining
The Heart of Yoga
What does it mean to begin Yoga now—right here, in your breath and body, with your life exactly as it is? This talk, recorded during our teacher untraining in Bali, is a direct experience of the first four Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Together, we chanted, laughed, and explored what it means to practice Yoga in a way that’s grounded, personal, and alive. These Sutras are a living guide, not a doctrine. They point us to something we already are. Your life, your interests, your body in its natural context—this is where Yoga begins. Key Takeaways The Sutras Come Alive in Relationship – Their...
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Why Do We Gather in Bali?
The Heart of Yoga
What makes us leave home and come together in person to share Yoga? In this episode, Mark and Rosalind reflect on hosting Yoga gatherings in Bali. They speak about the deeper meaning of these meetings, the beauty of Balinese blessing culture, and what it really means to offer something useful in a spiritual tourist economy. Can travel be justified as Bali groans under the weight of tourism and the expansion of the concrete jungle? What are we doing here, and what are the potential They discuss how seeking makes us vulnerable to exploitation, the nature of real practice, and the...
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Walt Whitman was a Yogi | Dylan Giles
The Heart of Yoga
Imagine words so sincere, that the author appears as a close friend, speaking directly through time to the deepest part of who we are? This week, Dylan Giles joins Rosalind to share how reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in a time of personal drift opened a direct experience of connection. Dylan describes nights spent under the Californian moon, feeling Whitman’s words as a living presence, breaking him free of rigid traditions. In this episode I find out from Dylan about Whitman as mystic, and we use him to understand yogic ideas such as shaktipat, ishta, and guru...
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Healing from the Need to Heal: Ayurveda, Orthorexia & Yoga with Konstanze Weiser
The Heart of Yoga
What happens when healing becomes another form of harm? When the search for purity, wellness, and relief becomes a maze of restriction, shame, and exhaustion? In this quietly radical conversation, Konstanze Weiser joins us to speak not as an expert, but as someone who lived it from childhood illness to orthorexia, Panchakarma to spiritual burnout. We explore the parts of wellness culture we don’t often talk about: the obsession with food, the spiritualization of suffering, the silent shame around digestion and embodiment. Konstanze shares what it took to finally stop outsourcing authority,...
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Kali and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Heart of Yoga
What if our anger is sacred? What if the rage we feel in our bodies, in our culture, in our Earth, is not something to suppress, but something to honor? This week, Mariana Garcia Flores and I sit again in the Garden of the Moon to invoke the presence of Kali, the fierce face of the Divine Feminine, and the part of us that says no more. We speak into the places where softness meets strength, where grief becomes action, where Yoga becomes the healing of the rift between Shakti and Shiva, within us and in the world. This conversation is not sanitized. It’s raw, truthful, necessary. Kali is not...
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Shakti is Not a Concept - Rosalind Atkinson & Mariana Garcia Flores
The Heart of Yoga
What if everything you were taught to fear is actually sacred? In this intimate, resonant conversation, I sit down with Mariana, a dear friend and fellow teacher whose life story continues to unfold in powerful ways. Raised in a strict Catholic school environment in Mexico, Mariana shares how years of religious repression shaped her understanding of sexuality, embodiment, and spirituality and how the practices of Yoga, meditation, and humanistic psychotherapy helped her unravel those beliefs and come home to her own sacred aliveness. This episode is not a theoretical conversation. It is an...
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Alive as Life: An Interview with Mariana Garcia Flores
The Heart of Yoga
What if you are already everything you're looking for? What if the power of the cosmos is not out there, but pulsing through your breath, your body, your life right now? In this conversation, I welcome Mariana Garcia Flores, a radiant presence from Mexico City, and a Woman of the Americas in her full power. Mariana shares her story of transformation from counselor and seeker to embodied yogini and teacher. She speaks of the moment the search ended, when she realized: I am that. Not as an idea, but as a lived, undeniable reality. It is the story of Yoga as life itself, not a technique, not a...
info_outlineThis episode explores rekindling our innate connection to nature through yoga and sensing practices. Rosalind has an insightful conversation with her friend Henriette Geber, a yogini with a deep love of the mountains, plants and animals.
They discuss how yoga helps us become more sensitive, intuit nature's aliveness, and dissolve harmful ways of relating that assume separation. Henriette shares how yoga empowers her natural affinities, from studying art history to living with the German Alps.
We discuss removing overlays of ideology to intuitively relate directly with the living world.
Key Topics
- How yoga cultivates sensitivity to ourselves as nature
- Dissolving the illusion of separateness from nature ingrained by society
- Honoring the aliveness and subjectivity of all creatures and systems
- Henriette’s countercultural move from the mountains to the city and back again
- Following our natural talents and relationships that emerge through yoga
Insights
- Assumptions of nature as passive or dead prevent us from sensing its aliveness
- Rituals trying to "connect" can reinforce separation if that belief is still there
- Our bodies intuitively know which plants are healing if we relax our seeking mind
Quotes
"Yoga has given me this, that I trust what comes out of me. I think I was very outward oriented, like, how do you do certain things? How am I perceived? Always thinking like, oh, my perception might be really wrong or not even feeling how do I relate from the inside to this and giving me the sensitivity to actually feel how is my relationship to this, how is my sensing of this and then the strength to also act upon it and not be afraid."
"If you cannot feel your body, you cannot feel the natural world because ultimately it's the same thing. It's totally the same thing."
“It’s always there. It's there. You just need to listen.”
Resources
- Franz von Stuck's painting "Sin" that Henriette wrote her thesis on
- The Correction by Amy Mindell, a book referenced
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:01:00] Henriette's background in the mountains and move to Berlin
[00:05:00] How yoga enabled tuning into her needs
[00:10:00] Studies in art history and disconnect from life
[00:15:00] Henriette's return to the mountains from the city
[00:20:00] Painting of a woman and snake Henrietta was drawn to
[00:25:00] Positive symbolism of the snake across cultures
[00:30:00] Henriette's relationship with animals and plants
[00:35:00] Accessing intuitive knowledge about medicinal plants
[00:40:00] Story illustrating the ever-present relationship between humans and nature
[00:45:00] Rituals reinforcing separation versus assuming connection
[00:50:00] Being in relationship versus demanding feelings from nature
[00:55:00] Living creatures acknowledging Henriette
[01:00:00] Moving to farm not being the happily ever after
[01:03:00] Closing