David held one of his early Ashtanga teacher trainings in a top floor studio of the old Whole Foods building. My wife and I took the training with about a dozen other yoga students, including a feisty Leo named Sharon Moon. At this point, we were teaching yoga in our home, both Hatha and Kundalini, and soon added one Ashtanga class a week to our offerings taught by my wife, Guru Karam (the first Yoga Yoga Ashtanga teacher!).

For some reason, Ashtanga Yoga just did not catch on in Austin at that time. David taught dwindling morning classes at the Whole Foods studio, arriving each day on his bicycle, to greet the dedicated Ashtangis who could not believe our good luck to take an intimate class with such a talented teacher.

Finally it got to the point that only four of us were showing up for the classes so David just invited us to come over to his apartment and practice with him in the morning. No air conditioning in his small Clarksville apartment made it seem like a mini-Mysore as David's breath filled the room and we tried to keep up. I remember leaving his apartment one morning and telling my wife, "Years from now, remember that we used to practice with David like this. Some day you won't believe it happened. One day soon he is going to go somewhere where a lot more people will really appreciate him."

When we decided to open our second location, Yoga Yoga North, we knew we had to do something else if we were to continue to make Ashtanga Yoga an important part of who we were. Sharon Moon, our classmate from David¹s training, had taken our Kundalini Yoga teacher training program with us and she had worked hard over the previous years to build an Ashtanga Yoga community in Austin. Renting spaces around town, losing money, and working other jobs, Sharon kept teaching with both heart and passion until she had a group of dedicated Ashtangis (including one of our long time Ashtanga teachers, Kisha at Yoga Yoga North).

We agreed that Sharon would move her classes to Yoga Yoga North and become responsible for helping us train teachers to teach Ashtanga. From her first training, we got such Ashtanga teachers as Rachel, Julie and Kewal (Chuck) who now teach Ashtanga at Yoga Yoga today. Sharon loved the students and the teachers that she trained and this helped us become one of the largest Ashtanga Yoga communities in this part of the country.

After several years, Sharon began her studies in India with Pattabhi Jois and eventually was offered a teaching job in Asia that took her away from Austin. Before she left, however, we began hosting more and more Ashtanga workshops and trainings with national teachers, including Manju Jois and our Yoga Yoga mentor, David Swenson.

What really got me thinking about my long-time affair with Ashtanga, however, was a class I had this week with our newest Ashtanga teacher, Mary Flinn. Mary was here last year as a guest teacher in November and December at Yoga Yoga Northwest and Yoga Yoga North. Everyone enjoyed her so much we invited her to come back to teach regularly. She just returned from Mysore, India where she had completed her studies with Pattabhi Jois. She is teaching Ashtanga Mysore yoga six days a week in the traditional and authentic style at Yoga Yoga Northwest.

So after too long an absence from practicing the full Primary Series (I had been coasting in some of Rachel's and Kewal's Ashtanga Star classes), I walked into Mary's first regular daytime class at Yoga Yoga North. Mary knew her stuff. She connected with the students, got the class off to a good pace, and assisted each person individually as needed. Her adjustments were firm but gentle. She seemed to know where each person in the room was at in their stage of the practice and met them there appropriately.

But the impressive thing was that Mary knew exactly when to take you a little farther than you normally go and at the same time respected your boundaries. She empowered each of us to discover something a little new about the practice and the result was that you felt like you learned something about the yoga and more importantly about your relationship to the yoga.