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april 2016yogajournal.com.auPHOTO: ARTERIUMDelamay Devi, 36, grew up in Byron
Bay as a dancer dabbling in yoga.
Driven by a curiosity for the world,
she started travelling at age 19 and
discovered the world outside Byron
Bay could be harsh, but then she
began connecting with the global
yoga community. She decided to
follow the sun and teach yoga,
providing inspiration and guidance
along the way. Delamay, who counts
international teacher Shiva Rea as her
mentor, offers an online program
for yoga teachers and is a featured
teacher at next month’s Byron Spirit
Festival in Mullumbimby.By Tamsin Angus-Leppan
Salutes to the Sun
How did you first find yoga?
Yoga has always been in my life.
Growing up in a very alternative
community, it wasn’t unusual for my
best friends’ parents to be yoga
teachers. We had yoga as a choice of
sport at Mullumbimby High School.
For me it was all about yoga and
dance ... embodied movement. That
was a way of self-expression, it was
a way of dealing with life’s ups and
downs. I can’t actually pinpoint the
exact time I started yoga, it’s just
always been there. I was teaching
dance from the age of 14 and I have
always had a curiosity for different
types of movement.What made you move away
from dance?
Dance is such an outward
expression—it’s visual and there are
expectations to meet and moves to
remember and people to please. The
audience comes first from a dancer’s
perspective. It was a natural shift
away from it. When I was teaching
dance quite a lot I would always
incorporate some sort of yoga to
warm up or warm down the body
and the more I got into yoga throughmy dance practice, the more I started
shifting away from the choreographed
sequences.What made you choose a
travelling lifestyle?
A sense of curiosity for the world,
wanderlust and wanting to connect. I
was based in Europe and the UK for 11
years. Because I grew up around an
accepting, diverse community, I never
actually experienced the emotion of
being self-conscious until I travelled to
the UK and I was trying to find a job. I
was 19 and very naive ... thinking that
the whole world was my Byron bubble
where, in actual fact, people judged you
pretty severely based on if you had
piercings or hair in dreadlocks or if you
wore colourful clothing. My self-
confidence was stripped away based on
trying to fit into a society that didn’t
support my way of being. Then,
through my travels and my studies and
my curiosity for the world, I was able
to connect with a global community,
the kind of community that I had when
I was growing up. It just seems that
they’re all movers and shakers and
yogis. For the last seven years it’s been a
lot of movement, a lot of travel and a
lot of change but ultimately it was an
informed choice about wanting to
follow the sun. I haven’t had a winter
in seven years. After being born and
raised in northern NSW, how could
you not want to feel the sun on your
skin, and be in a subtropical climate?
The body can be pushed in so many
directions but when we push it too
hard, too much, we can get sick. I’m a
Libran so I’m all about striving for
balance at all times.Apart from teaching yoga,
what are you excited about?
I have a mentorship program, created
from a need that I’ve been witnessing
over the years in terms of people
completing teacher training and not
really knowing which direction to take
and where they fit in the world. I work
with people online, people can connect
for a one-off call or sign up for a
program. Whether someone’s been
teaching for a while and they want to
branch out and do retreats or need
more inspiration and guidance,
I provide support.For more information about Delamay
Devi, visit http://www.delamaydevi.com.AYJ INTERVIEW
in ir ti n