33
october 2017yogajournal.com.authe Communists, and entered Australia
with his mother and brother as a
‘displaced person’.
Michael opened the Sydney Yoga
Centre in 1950, and about fi ve years
later, Melbourne followed. There the
main teacher was Margrit Segesman, a
Swiss émigré who had tuberculosis and
had been advised by Carl Jung to do
yoga, according to Dr Fay Woodhouse,
a historian at the University of
Melbourne. She lived as an ascetic in a
cave in Tibet, before being sent by her
teacher to spread yoga to the West. She
founded the Margaret Segesman School
of Yoga which, as the Gita School of
Yoga, remains to this day in Hoddle St,
Melbourne.
Housewives and office
workers: Making it
mainstream
In 1962, the Roma Blair Yoga and
Health Centre opened in Pitt St,
Sydney. Roma, known later as Swami
Nirmalananda, had studied in South
Africa with Swami Venkatesananda
Saraswati and Mani Finger, who was
in turn a student of both Paramahansa
Yogananda and Swami Sivananda.
Roma had led a life worthy of a novel,
including languishing in a Japanese
POW camp in Singapore for three
years and later becoming a well-
known model. She was a gifted speaker
and a natural publicist, able to bring
discrete groups and people together in
a common cause, and her efforts did
much to broaden yoga’s appeal. In the
early Sixties, Roma began an exercise
show on Channel Nine television,
Relaxing With Roma, which she
devised with uptight housewives in
mind, and an early-morning program
for offi ce workers, Wake Up and Live.
She contributed a regular column
for the Daily Telegraph and Daily
Mirror, and ran a busy class schedule
in her own studio and gyms across
Sydney, with her executive teacher Joy
McIntosh, who still teaches in Tuross
Head, NSW.
Yoga = Union
Roma, Margrit and Michael, who had
by then moved from Sydney to South
Australia, founded an International
Yoga Teachers Association, known as
the IYTA. The idea was to unify yoga
teachers across national boundaries
and across different lineages. Over
the next fi ve years, Roma’s own
teacher training evolved into the more
formalised training of the IYTA, at
fi rst just in NSW in 1971, but later in all
states and territories, and in disparate
centres across the globe ranging from
Singapore to Spain. International
conventions were also organised, and
over the years took place in South
Africa, Puerto Rico, Spain, Japan,
Switzerland, India, and in many
Australian locations including Jenolan
Caves and Uluru.
But then it was the Sixties, and
yoga’s popularity piggybacked on the
nascent self-awareness movement.
Women’s Lib was a hot topic, and
housewives and offi ce girls alike
fl ocked to this practice of yoga, which
promised freedom of movement and
dress, personal individuation, and
freedom of the mind, all in one. It’s
hard to imagine today, when anyone
can buy a ticket to India online and
join an ashram tour, what chutzpah it
would have taken Roma Blair, Margrit
Segesman and their many female
students, to travel solo or in small
groups to India and other countries and
live in a cave or an ashram.From West to East: The
influence of Western
culture on modern yoga
Yet those early Australian teachers
offered something to the Indian
teachers as well. Hatha Yoga as
we know it is a product of cross-
fertilisation between Indian traditions
and Western innovation and research,
as has been argued by Mark Singleton.
Australia was no exception. Joy
McIntosh tells the story of how Roma
and she developed a series of joint
limbering exercises, which later were
reinvented as the pavanamuktasana
series that appears in Asana,
Pranayama, Mudra, Bandha authored
by Satyananda in 1969. “The Swami
was teaching very advanced postures
which his students in India could
do. But our students needed extensive
limbering exercises before they
could attempt many of the asana,”
she explains. “When Satyananda
saw Roma and me teaching these he
took photos, and when we went to
Bihar in 1969 we saw him presenting
the photos as slides to new teachers.
Whenever anyone had a question
about them he would reply, ‘Ask the
Australians’!”