PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE AUTHORHow did you meet?
Margaret: we met through a mutual
friend who had told me to come to his
Iyengar class and Glenn and I met in
that class. At the end of ’85 Shandor
Remete passed the school on to us
and we ran it for about 20 years.What prompted you to leave
Melbourne?
Margaret: Having become a mother
and not being able to practice and not
being able to go to India and do the
things Glenn was able to do, I felt
deprived. Then we met a spiritual
teacher in Melbourne who was a
friend, a sister, everything. She taught
us the living example of spirituality as
unconditional love. She and her
family were an example to us. Having
contact on a personal level with
someone refi ned it into a very
practical way of living life and how to
bring up your kids. She showed me
you are not missing out, it is all here
but you have to bring it to the fore.
Even my ability to subsume a little bit
of my angst about feeling deprived,
that helped me see if I could view it
differently, I wouldn’t get personally
so disappointed or angry and I felt a
sense of fulfi lment a little bit more. I
know many people that practice allthe time but [unconditional love]is
not present in their lives, it’s not
present in their relationship or
with their children.
Glenn: That meeting (with the
spiritual teacher) was a huge
infl uence and it’s that which we
took to Uki with us. We wanted to
move away from the career stuff
and take some quiet time to imbibe
what we had been exposed to. We
went to Uki in 1997 and then came
to Sydney in 2005. We said let’s
pass the school in Melbourne on to
the students there and then we
didn’t fi nd the circumstances we
were looking for in Sydney in terms
of opening a yoga studio. In the
meantime I was accepting more
and more invites from overseas and
Margaret started teaching some
classes in Sydney.How do you manage now
with so much time apart?
Glenn: We sacrifi ce being together a
lot, a normal relationship wouldn’t
survive that. Relationships are part of
the big failure in society, people are
really struggling to hold onto a
relationship. For two months of the
year Margaret joins me overseas and
we get feedback that when we are
together there as a couple, people get
a lot out of seeing us together. People
see that there’s a relationship taking
place, that there’s a harmony in that
relationship.
Margaret: We’ve had 24/7 together at
times, like in Uki, and now we’ve had
this time when we are apart mostly.
We have this other spiritual
dimension that always pulls us
together. A lot of relationships are
based on a mutual dependency, where
you meet a need for me and you
become a substitute for something. I
feel very strongly that because we
spend a lot of time apart that we can
stand alone, but we are together.
What people don’t see in yoga is
couples, or families. They see us as
human beings, what they get is very
practical, very down to earth, its all
integrated in our lives. I had not
thought about that dimension, until
we got that feedback: we balance each
other out and students feel that in our
teaching.Margaret and Glenn Ceresoli are one
of Australia’s premier yoga teacher
couples. They began practicing yoga
in 1979 and started teaching together
in 1986 at the Action School of Yoga
in Melbourne. In Melbourne they
experienced a spiritual change and
moved to Uki for eight years before
making Sydney their base in 2005.
Today they spend most of the year
apart, Glenn teaching overseas and
Margaret teaching in Sydney. They say
people are curious about how they
can spend so much time apart yet still
have a strong relationship.
By Tamsin Angus-LeppanDistance
Education
98
august/september 2015yogajournal.com.auAYJ INTERVIEW
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