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may/june 2017yogajournal.com.auPHOTO: CHRIS GLEISNERPresence of mind
AYJ INTERVIEW
in ir ti n
MELBOURNE-BASED SAL FLYNN, 63, is a
leading yoga therapist, psychotherapist
and educator. Her training includes
formal qualifications in yoga therapy,
counselling and mindfulness-based
approaches, particularly those taught by
Jon Kabat-Zinn. Sal conducts a private
psychotherapy and yoga therapy
practice where she works mostly with
clients who are trauma survivors and
people with anxiety disorders. Sal
also mentors yoga therapists and
counsellors and will headline the 2017
Australian Yoga Therapy Conference
in Sydney. She says that during her
33 years of practice and training, her
primary interest has always been to findfunctional ways to weave traditional
yoga practices and Western traditions
together.How did you first come to yoga?
I was about eight years old and my
mum’s best friend, who I called Aunty
Peggy, practiced yoga. This was in about
1961, before anyone had really heard of
yoga. Fast forward to when I was in my
late 20s, and I had an opportunity to
get my dream job in the media, but
I realised it was going to be really
stressful and I thought, I need to look
after myself. I remembered from Aunty
Peggy that yoga was good for managing
stress. So, I hunted down a yoga school;Leading yoga therapist Sal Flynn embraced her
passion for finding a balance between Eastern
and Western philosophies through the practice
and teachings of yoga. She now helps people daily
in her work with trauma survivors and anxiety
sufferers. Interview by Tamsin Angus-Leppan
there weren’t many around in those
days (the early 1980s). I went to my
first yoga class and it was like a light
came on. I’d grown up Catholic and
had been exposed to one idea of
spirituality, and it suddenly became
apparent to me that I could practice my
spirituality in my body. As well as yoga
being exercise it was a way of making
contact with myself in a way that I’d
never done before. It was something
that made me come home to myself in a
way that I’d never experienced. I went
on to do that beginners course six times
because I was fascinated by the way it
made me feel. I then ventured out and
studied with other teachers. I used
yoga to manage myself in the job and,
had it not been for the practice, I
wouldn’t have been able to do that job.
I stayed in the job for 10 years and
had an absolute ball but became
increasingly interested in yoga, so I
decided to quit and start yoga teacher
training in Australia and India.How did you get interested in
yoga therapy?
Yoga is great but it comes to us in a
particular cultural context, and while
I enjoy that, it’s not something that
everyone has an appetite for. So the
question for me became, how can I
bring yoga to the people who will
benefit, without the cultural trappings
that they don’t want? I studied
counselling to try to understand the
mind from the Western perspective
because, all the way along, it’s been
apparent to me that yoga is enacted
through the body, but it’s about the
mind. When I was starting to teach
yoga in my late 30s, I was living in
Melbourne and I did a week-long
intensive training with TKV Desikachar
which was extraordinary because it
addressed my thirst for understanding
the mind of yoga. He was a beautiful
teacher. The training created a big
change for me because I started to look
into the therapeutic possibilities of
yoga. I studied yoga therapy with AG
Mohan and his wife. The way I started
to practice yoga therapy was by
accident; there was no such thing as
yoga therapy in the early 90s. I was
asked to teach the doctors, physios,
and all the medical practitioners at
a womens’ clinic and that led to an
opportunity for me to have a room
there and get referrals from the other
practitioners.