Newsletters / Articles
Nicky Knoff, Master Yoga Teacher
By Sandy Hennessy R.Y.T.200
My knee is beginning to hurt a little, not exactly pain, but a signal from somewhere deep in the joint. “Maybe it is that old meniscus tear and the bone is pressing on bone. Where is Nicky? “(I sense she is somewhere in the back of the room adjusting another student)”. I hear the woman next to me give a deep audible sigh and I immediately feel empathy. Now my left foot is tingling and feeling a bit wooden at the same time. I tuck my tailbone more and send more energy out to my knees listening to her instructions for supta virasana (reclining hero pose) and working earnestly with my breath; we are evidently here for the long run.
“Never give up, no matter what is going on, never give up”. These are words from His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. His words of advice were meant for Americans who have spent more time developing the mind rather than the heart, and are the foundation of the teaching of one of the most inspiring and effective teachers in the yoga world today. Nicky Knoff is an avowed citizen of the world who has taught internationally for the past thirty plus years.
Studying with Nicky is a journey into yoga that both allows and forces the students to confront their bodies and the emotions that reside in them. Holding poses creates a situation for the students to meet blame and anger, resentment, sorrow and fear and simultaneously a way out of those thoughts and feelings. It is not uncommon to hear her say to a squirming student, “do you think you are the only one suffering?” Although her words are firm, her voice and face acknowledge that we all must struggle against our own resistance and that in steadfastness there is victory and joy!
Nicky’s students, who know of her reputation, expect to have their mettle tested. None are disappointed and no one leaves without having thoroughly explored their limits, both physically and emotionally. Her fierce intensity takes her students to new levels that expose their true character and leaves them with the essence of yoga that is born of experience from the “inside out”. Students learn through experience to reach deep inside themselves to find an inward place that is struggle free despite difficulty. There are many styles of teaching and ways of approaching yoga, but what makes this teacher extraordinary is the way she urges us to work in ways that make us better people off the mat. She has a tremendous drive to make her students see the whole picture. That is where the student is in their body and their mind. She is not teaching simply to be nice to us, but to create an opening for positive change.
To profile a teacher of this magnitude requires a look at her life, her background, and her philosophy. Nicky’s parents were Dutch and English who were raising their family in Indonesia before World War II when the Japanese invaded. The family was separated and Nicky and her mother and brother were placed in a Japanese concentration camp for nearly four years. At the age of three and a half the young Nicky learned a wisdom that was born of seeing the effects of making choices that could either save one’s life or put them in peril. Prisoners were stripped of the safety of a “normal” life and made to choose between persevering with dignity or giving up and dying. She saw many younger and stronger people succumb and older and less strong people with more life experience survive. She came to understand beyond her years that we all have the choice every day between the intensity of being totally alive or existing in a state of diluted mediocrity. Adversity created determination and courage in Nicky and provided the bedrock of her teaching. When she sees students who seem to want to give up in long held poses, she will exclaim “isn’t it good to be alive!” Or, while helping another student and prolonging a pose for the class, she will say, “instead of waiting to come out of this pose, think of how you are now able to build your character!” Long time students of Nicky have all heard these phrases and they have a serious message behind them. It is, “find the fortitude and courage to look deeper inside.”
Nicky began teaching in 1971 in Tokyo with Bikram Choudury (before hot yoga and before he came to the USA), after studying with him for nearly four years. He asked her to teach some of his classes while he was away sorting out problems with his visa. She was a housewife at the time and was only interested in practicing yoga, not teaching it. At this time she discovered B.K.S. Iyengar’s ‘Light on Yoga’ and was captivated by the precision and detail of his work. This became seminal in a relationship with the Iyengar teaching that ultimately led her to become one of his senior teachers with several trips to Pune, India (Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Institute) as well as studies with B.K.S., Geeta and Prashant Iyengar when they traveled to Australia.
The Nicky Knoff style of teaching is interwoven with the Iyengar way. From the exacting details and insistence on students to do what is asked, to her ability to see everyone in the class and what they are doing. When students stand in front of Nicky they know they will be seen and that nothing will go unnoticed. Students are challenged to preserve and work intelligently Nicky demands that all, “be in the present with what is, not with how you would have it be.” She gives us a choice between the nice world that we have set up in our heads and seeing how things really are. This “eagle eye” was sharpened when she worked with crippled children in Dunedin, New Zealand for four years and in Auckland for six years. Her first student was a young woman of nineteen years who was paralyzed on one side. Nicky was asked to work with her during a time when the physical therapists were not available. The results of their work together were so positive that the Crippled Children Center asked Nicky to continue teaching yoga there. She remembers one boy who remarked, “You treat us as if we were normal.” Nicky responded by asking rhetorically, “what is normal?’ There are many instances of people who have come to Nicky for specific help and benefited when other types of therapies have not worked.
“Nicky is the smartest woman I know! She can observe and know what you need to do. She’s gifted. Her mission in life is to help people.” Terrie Kloberdanz has had multiple sclerosis since she was sixteen years old. Now a mother of a grown son, she encountered Nicky and her husband, James Bryan, when they did a yoga presentation for a woman’s service group in Grand Junction, Colorado. She began private classes with them for her M.S. and has since worked through breast cancer, a lumpectomy and eventual mastectomy. Two days after the lumpectomy she returned to Nicky for a private. She was suffering from vertigo and brought her mother with her to hold her head upright. Nothing could stop her from coming back to the teacher who helped her find new awareness in her body. Through Nicky’s encouragement and assertions that she would improve, through her saying to Terrie, “keep thinking it is there and it will come,” she regained feeling in her feet and the fortitude to endure procedures that others could not. She has used pranayama to get through injections in her stomach for chemotherapy. One day when this procedure was about to be done at hospital the doctor in charge asked if other physicians and nurses might observe. They had never seen anyone allow this procedure without the aid of anesthetic. Terri says it takes about three long pranayama ujjayi breaths. She hears Nicky’s voice saying she can do it and says, “She is the reason I could get through everything.”
Students who work with Nicky find themselves in an active relationship requiring the utmost in participation with the potential of transformational results. Her philosophy is, “Here are the tools. I can show you how to use them and then we will work together.” Some may be surprised that this form of yoga is not easy and that they need to be ready to work in order to effect the change and see the good results. Ultimately they understand that they are not alone, and in the hands of a master teacher! Nicky believes that there is a joint karma between her and the students who come to her. Their relationship is not an accident and those who are ready to change will. She has said that sometimes a teacher must be, “cruel to be kind”. She means that a teacher who coddles her students is not able to take them beyond where they are and that they will never change or evolve without struggle to break the bonds of habituation that hold them.
Nicky believes that pain is often emotionally triggered. She does not allow students to abandon a posture when it becomes tough to hold or execute. Instead she demands perfect alignment; focus on the breath and an ever-expanding awareness of the pose’s essential requirements. She exhorts students to “travel through your body with your awareness - flood your body with your consciousness.” This perspective was refined when she studied and practiced Vipassana or insight meditation with S.N. Goenka in India. At Vipassana retreats practitioners are required to sit motionless for several hours daily at ten daylong retreats to learn steadfastness in the onslaught of a restless mind. Any student of Nicky’s has heard her say, “stay, stay, remain equanimous”. As with this form of meditation, long holdings in a posture may bring up emotions of sadness and anger. Her intent is not to create these feelings. Rather, they are inside of us and when pushed to new limits, we experience feelings associated with holding patterns buried within the body. If tears come, she accepts them as evidence of emotions surfacing and being released. All work with Nicky is a process along a continuum toward heightened self-awareness and personal growth. Resistance and release are part of the process. Students with bodies steeled against the pains of the world are asked to relax and soften. She tells them to “work hard softly”. Those with great flexibility, she asks to work with finding their limits and learning where they are in space. Hands pressed together in the “namaste” position are used to “hone your proprioception”. Muscular effort is used to enable students to find out where boundaries are going to serve them. Safety in yoga comes from knowing first where one’s limits are, then safely exploring new territory beyond them. At the same time, students know that when Nicky presses them on to go further and try more difficult poses that they can safely trust that she sees the real potential in their body and that they can believe in both the pose and that their teacher sees that they are indeed ready to execute it.
There is humor too! With the work comes laughter and smiles. Her gentle laugh and her voice saying, “what are you doing wild woman?” are an oasis. She walks through the class proclaiming, “firm your buttocks, don’t let them be like “Lammingtons (a type of cake)”, or for Americans, “Sara Lee cheesecake.” If students complain about a small pain, she may say, “it hurts because it’s never been used!” Nicky recalls a new student who was a comedian coming up to her after class and asking, “who writes your lines for you?”
Adaptability is part of flexibility and nothing Nicky asks of her students is anything she has not required of herself. After years of studying Iyengar yoga Nicky and her husband James were practicing sometimes 8 hours a day following the advanced series in the back of ‘Light on Yoga’. Yet, they were still finding that the strength needed to practice the more advanced arm balances was lacking and they began to look elsewhere for a practice that would accentuate strength as well as flexibility. They decided to go to Mysore and study with Pattabhi Jois to see what Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga might teach them. They both went on to advance to the Fourth Series in this practice and today their teachings and practice integrate both Iyengar and Ashtanga Yoga.
“We do what works!” Sounds simple enough, but there is much behind these words. They are the product of the amalgamation of the two styles of yoga taught from the perspective of a teacher who has studied both intensely. In a recent interview for an American magazine, Richard Freeman was quoted as saying that Iyengar yoga and Ashtanga Yoga have much to learn from each other. Nicky and James learned much from the study of both and have beautifully melded the two in their teachings. As a result of this, their students develop strength and flexibility and a deep understanding of alignment and precision. Students are asked to begin class with Surya Namaskar (sun salutations) because they have been found to have merit in warming the body. Pranayama is taught at the beginning of classes because they found that the effect of centering on the breath at first created focus and was a perfect transition between coming from a busy world into the studio and the inward perspective of practicing yoga. There have been recriminations for Nicky in making these choices, but she is not one to back away from friction and she stands up for what she believes. Her goal has always been to promote the learning of her students and to learn for herself before teaching them. Nicky and James show a high degree of humility and a freshness that keeps them searching and wanting to learn more.
In 2000 they moved from Australia to the United States with the express desire of studying with American teachers and learning more. They were willing to pull up stakes to do this to experience new forms of teaching and other ways of understanding yoga. They attended (2000, 2001, 2002, & 2003) the Estes Park Yoga Journal Conference and often sit quietly in the class of other teachers, sometimes their junior, in order to learn and explore the work of others. They traveled around the west coast and to New York to experience new forms of yoga and to bring the elements they found valuable into their own practice and their teaching.
Nicky walks to the front of the classroom and I know that we are ready to come out of the reclining hero pose. It has been a journey longer than the five minutes we have held the pose. I have come through my frustration and the glimmer of anger at staying so long. I do not feel discouraged by weakness or controlled by fear. Instead I feel revitalized. And I know, “we simply have work to do!”
Nicky Knoff and James Bryan can be reached at info@knoffyoga.com for information about Teacher Training. Nicky and James are now based in Cairns, Queensland, Australia and continue to travel internationally.
Sandy Hennessy has studied with Nicky the past two years (2001 & 2002)in Grand Junction, Colorado and is a graduate of her teacher training there as well as having graduated from the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco.
Knoff Yoga - Student Creed
I practice yoga to develop myself in a positive manner and avoid anything that will reduce my physical health, mental growth, or spiritual progress.
I practice yoga to develop self-discipline in order to bring out the best in myself and others.
I attend class regularly and use what I learn to energize my body, elevate my thinking and uplift my spirit.
Knoff Yoga - Intention For Practice
The practice of yoga is a special and sacred time I have created to be with myself, my teachers, and my brother and sister students.
It is a time to journey inward and discover all of who I am and realize my greatest capabilities.
This journey begins with my body. My body is a holy temple.
I come to honour and respect myself through my body.
I come to nourish, nurture, strengthen, and purify my body through the practices of asana and pranayama and still my mind through meditation.
I am not here to beat myself up or force my body into pain. I am not here to criticize or judge myself or anyone else.
I am here to learn and remember the ways of balance and harmony through the path of Yoga.
My intention is to use what I learn to serve myself and to serve others.
Coming into Beginners Mind I am open to receive all of what this time has to offer me.
With the sound of OM I let go of all thoughts, past and future.
