Yoga Teachers Talking Yoga
Hello and welcome to the Yoga Teachers Talking Yoga podcast!
Our new second 6-part series of interviews is now out, where we again talk to yoga teachers both established and emerging.
We find out what got each of them into yoga, why they became teachers and got started, the styles of practice that interest them, who are their inspirations were and plans are for the future.
Yoga Teachers Talking Yoga
YTTY7: Ruth Gent - Dru Australasia
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Welcome to the second series of the Yoga Teachers Talking Teaching Yoga podcast!
Today our guest is Ruth Gent, courses director with Dru Australasia, a not for profit yoga, meditation and Ayurveda teacher training organisation.
Referred to as yoga at heart, Dru is a gentle, flowing style of yoga accessible to everyone. Dru uses breath and visualisation to move subtle energy through the body and bring balance on all levels of your being.
Founded in the 70s in the UK, Dru has grown to hold a substantial community impact across Europe and here in Australia, comprised of teachers and practitioners specialising in the yoga of sound, kids yoga, Ayurveda, yoga dance, philosophy and the deeper dive into spirituality, breathwork, yoga nidra and yoga therapy.
Ruth has been practicing yoga for 37 years and has been involved with Dru since 2003. As the courses director she is involved in training teachers on the post graduate courses.
You can find more about Dru’s yoga teaching courses and various projects at:
And Link to their page introducing some of the various names mentioned in our interview:
https://teach.druyoga.com.au/meet-the-team
If you’d like to express an interest in being a guest in our next series, we can be contacted on: infoytty@gmail.com
Further related content and bonus material will be posted on our Facebook page:
Yoga Teachers Talking Yoga Podcast
Hello, and welcome to the Yoga Teachers Talking Yoga Podcast. Today my guest is Ruth Gent from Drew Australia, a not-for-profit yoga, meditation, and are your better teacher training organization. Referred to as yoga at heart, Drew Yoga is a gentle, flowing style of yoga accessible to everyone. Drew uses breath and visualization to move subtle energy through the body and bring balance on all levels of your being. Founded in the 70s in the UK, Drew has since grown to hold a substantial community impact across Europe and here in Australia, comprised of teachers and practitioners specializing in the yoga of sound, kids' yoga, are you better, yoga dance, philosophy, and the deeper dive into spirituality, breathwork, yoga nidra, and yoga therapy. Ruth herself has been practicing yoga for 37 years and has been involved with Drew since 2003. As the course's director, she's involved in training teachers on the postgraduate courses. Today, she joins me from her home in Canberra. Good afternoon, Ruth.
SPEAKER_01Good afternoon, Paul. So thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00Absolute pleasure and delight to have you on board and thanking Julian Sing, a guest from our first series, for introducing us together. Although we did meet each other briefly at Yoga Day here in Sydney, uh, which is part of the International Yoga Day events, I guess. And the Drew is uh quite visible at, I have to say.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we're there, we're there again this year. I'm not there this year, I was there the last two years. But we've got actually uh the lady that used to be our CEO, she's um a very senior, she's one of the uh founders or instigators of Drew in Australia, and she's going to be taking um there's a the Drew dance there and the philosophy behind the archetypal aspects that you dance in yoga dance.
SPEAKER_00That's quite impressive, and you know, just um our our formative discussions and meetings was one thing. Um preparing for today and hearing more about Drew, uh you have to be impressed with the the size and the magnitude of what Drew Yoga has become. So, where did the name Drew come from?
SPEAKER_01Ah, now that's interesting because it wasn't always called Drew Yoga, but the essence behind it was the same. And uh after a number of years, uh it was decided that we needed to have a bit of a brand because it didn't really have a significant branding as such, and uh it had a deep spiritual background. Uh, and somebody had come along from marketing and said, Well, you actually need a bit of a brand, and we talked about what was important uh in Drew, and what is behind a lot of our practices is what we call the still point, that point in which you go beyond uh this just life that is we think is just the limited part of our being, and that connection to the deepest stillness upon which the the foundations of the universe rest. Essentially, there's a story of a prince called Druvum, who and all stories start there once was a king. In the Vedic philosophy, there was always a king, and this king had two wives, and Druvum was born to the first wife, and when the second wife came along and had another child, Drevum was very upset, and his father didn't want anything to do with him. And he said to his mum, What can I do? I I don't really have a father anymore. I've um he doesn't seem to want me. And she said, Well, actually, the only um eternal and uh reliable father is the divine, and you have to go seeking uh that father, and so he went, like a lot of those yogi stories, just disappeared, young boy, just went wandering, and he was asking everybody, where do I find this eternal you know, being and he came across Narod Muni, who is one of the fantastic saints that rocks up in a lot of the ancient stories, and he usually just puts a little finger here and a finger there or a word here and sets people on their traject trajectory. And he said to Drew, you have to chant a particular mantra, and therefore you will find what you're seeking for. And Drew Drew had been running and running around everywhere, decided to stop and just chant the mantra, and said he chanted it for a thousand years until it felt like a thousand. We think our practice is just a little tricky when we have to do a mantra practice for half an hour, he had to do it for a thousand years. So um, after a thousand years, it said that the um Lord Vishnu became very impressed and actually came down and touched him on the cheek with a conch, and uh and he opened his eyes and there was Lord Vishnu in front of him. So uh it's taken from that thousand years of stillness. It said that he rested in the tree posture for a thousand years chanting, and uh, one of the very first postures we always do is the tree and finding the stillness to find that essential essence of who you are within. So that's where Drew comes from. It's also the name, the Hindu name of the pole star, Polaris or the North Star, the guiding star, the star that does not move in the sky, or apparently, according to where we are in the universe, it is the star by which you navigate because it's still. And so that is called the Drew star in uh from India. So that's where Drew comes from, that still point, that guiding light.
SPEAKER_00Unbelievable.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00Which, in a sense, is what anyone that you embarks on a yoga journey is aiming to do, really. And and having to explore that from within. And so you become very much a facilitary um agency for that, um, with all your students, I expect.
SPEAKER_01Yes, all traditions are uh take people towards that beautiful stillness inside. And they say that yoga was invented purely so that you could meditate and go into that stillness.
SPEAKER_00Drew began in the UK, you said, in the 70s, and then grew in the UK, came to Australia soon after, or uh a little bit later.
SPEAKER_01Um basically it came out of um four students at university, uh, one of whom had an Indian via Kenya background, and he was taught by his parents, and he took um he met three others, and the four of them went through intensive training with uh his parents who were actually had a lot to do with Gandhi. So there's a lot of Gandhian principles uh embedded throughout the Dru philosophy. So those people as university students um then decided to actually go ahead and and create um an organization from which they could start to do things, and they didn't always uh teach yoga either, there were lots of peace walks, um huge walks through the UK, through Europe, and as they walked, they met people along the way from all different traditions as well. So we have a huge tradition of peace walking in our um organization as well. But it came over here in the late 90s and really started to get established in the early 2000s, and we ran our first yoga teacher training uh around 2001, and that's when it started to take off here. They'd come and done certain workshops uh before that to sort of test the waters and see if anyone was interested. And uh, it was a beautiful lady called Patricia Brown uh here in Canberra, who had been a yoga teacher in many other traditions, but particularly Hatha tradition, and uh she very much said, I'll help you, you know, do whatever you want. What do you want me to do? And uh she is now uh coming up to she's just turned 79, she's she'll be 80 next year, and she's uh like the mother of Drew in in Australia, really. Um, and she's done amazing, amazing things to help uh get it going in terms of the World Peace Flame. We started off with yoga teacher training over many years, that was the only course we were running, along with workshops, of course, and then we brought in the meditation teacher training, and then gradually uh as people um got excited about particular aspects of Drew or developed their own aspect within Drew, then we branched out into a lot of the different specializations that we have today. So, Drew's philosophy is find who you are, go internal, find the absolute light and perfection of who you are, and then share it with the world. So there are some traditions uh that their role is to go into meditation, disappear up into the mountains and never be seen again, but have an amazing effect on the world. Uh, whereas Drew is considers it's a front-facing organization, that's its uh role in the world, to take what you have inside your yearning, uh your role in life, your purpose in life, and express that in your own unique way uh through the the mechanism of Drew World worldwide. So we've got a beautiful lady called Susanna Fell, for example. She was uh she's a teacher of children anyway, and so she developed Drew Kids Yoga, and she wrote the most beautiful book as well. So uh we've got a number of people that specialise in their area and they write books, like you had Julian. His his absolute passion was Sanskrit, and then he wrote a book. Susanna's absolute passion was kids teaching kids, and she wrote a beautiful kids' book, a yoga kids book as well. Uh, there are other people that got uh my background is uh more in the line of health and well-being and therapies. I've got a science and chemistry background and um therapies background, so I I went along that route as well. And we've got the most beautiful lady called Nolene Francis up in Queensland, and she was a singer, she was a performer before she came to Drew, and so she runs the yoga of sound courses, and oh, she's got the voice of an angel, you know. So her chanting, leading chanting has an amazing effect. So, yeah, Drew has this very much this idea that come on a let's say Drew Yoga Teacher training course isn't just about you're going to become a yoga teacher, you might, but actually, the course is a personal transformation course to express whatever you're supposed to do in the world because yoga isn't just on the mat. So, in Adelaide, for example, I've got beautiful graduates there, and um, one lady was head of the spinal repatriation unit, she was a doctor, amazing lady, and she brings being a yogi to every single person that she's in front of in her medical world. So it's very much about yeah, it's not just about yoga teaching because yoga is is far bigger than that, as you know.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely right, and you know, I'd uh welcome anyone listening to this to really check out Drew Yoga because it if you've got that um set of keys and master keys that unlocks potential, yoga means union, so bringing the easy and the hard together, unifying all sorts of things through through your effort to to realise what you're capable of doing, yes.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I love that you point that out, Paul, because a lot of people when they're younger and they think, oh, I've got to find my passion, and then everything will just go because I've work and be successful because I found my passion. But within, as you say, within every passion, there's the fun stuff. I love teaching, I love getting out there with a class in front of me and teaching, and yet you know, a large proportion of my time is sitting behind the computer and doing the standard administrative grind that you have to do. But if your why is big enough, if your purpose is big enough, it creates a motivation and a yearning, that yearning that we call Mamuksha Twan, that yearning to know yourself and unite with yourself in that yogic sense creates the energy and the motivation to get through the hard yards of all the challenges that come up and just the boring monotony of doing admin stuff.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. You mentioned the world peace flame. I'm just curious to know what that actually means and what that is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'll give a little bit of a summary and and I'd love um at some stage for you to have uh one of our people, uh, such as Angela Baker, as uh one of the specialists in the World Peace Flame. But I was very much uh excited when I first came to do yoga about the story of the World Peace Flame around the year 2000, when you know, just before 2000, um you and I can remember a lot of people might not have been born by then. Um, but around that time there was a lot of fear and worry about what does the turn of the millennium mean? And around the world there was kind of a lighter holding, holding, pe holding of the breath. And so Drew looks at you know what's happening and said, How can we add to the world? And so late one night in North Wales, which is where our international centre was, where they were brainstorming late into the early hours of the morning, somebody came up with the idea that why don't we get flames lit from around the world and get them flown over and all combined into one world peace flame, which was an awesome idea. Except that, do you know how long it takes for just the Olympic flames to travel? And it takes two years to get the permission to do that. And these guys wanted to do it in three months. The only way you can do that is to uh bring on board the military aircraft of the world. So that is why each and every story of every single flame, so there were seven flames from five continents brought together uh and lit at Bengal University in two in 2000 to create the World Peace Flame, and each story is amazing. The Australian flame was lit in a beautiful Aboriginal ceremony uh by an Aboriginal elder in combination with Patricia Brown and uh some of our Drew Yogis. And so, where possible they were lit in indigenous ceremonies. Each story is phenomenal. There's a whole book written about it. Um, but since then, that that peace flame has then been established in monuments, uh, like eternal flames in many different places around the world, including uh the World Peace Palace in The Hague, um, along the German Dutch border, uh, which was it was considered to have a healing effect around that area, and uh in the US and uh many different countries, including Australia. So from that they developed the education package, which was education for peace. It was a package that was um translated into many, many different languages and rolled out into schools. And we've got some beautiful yoga teachers that did our course and said, I've got a school. So, for example, in South Australia, I've I've got a beautiful lady that was in uh a school in Yorktown, and she said, Yep, we want a World Peace Flame there. And they're in big lamps these days, like minor lamp miners lamps, and they had a big one installed in the school, they had the package that where the students do a lot of um a lot of sort of activities around peace, uh, and then you know it sort of spreads out. And in that school, there was a couple of when when they're a little bit naughty, instead of they get sent to the principal's office, but the world peace flame's there, so it's like go and sit by the world peace flame. And in the end, a couple of kids that were quite misbehaving a lot, before they did anything, they'd say to their teacher, I just want to go and sit by the world peace flame. Like it must have had some sort of a calming effect that before they did anything, they asked to go and sit by it.
SPEAKER_00And I'm sure people can get access to that through the website and learn more about the World Peace Flame.
SPEAKER_01Yep, we've got a little section on the World Peace Flame. My first profession was the Defense Force, and I joined the Navy as a as a naval officer and loved it. And uh one of the things I loved doing was going and enjoying yoga classes. So when I left home and was in the services, I'd go and enjoy yoga classes and I'd do whatever yoga classes I could. So I'd had a number of years, loved Hatha classes, Ianga classes, ashtanga classes, Satchananda classes, any anything that I could try, I was really, let's try all the different types, as you do.
SPEAKER_02As you do, as you should do.
SPEAKER_01As you should do. It's fantastic. You know, beautiful teachers that I met. Um, I came I really started becoming more dedicated to yoga uh when I wanted to get um when I felt pregnant, and I thought I want to do pregnancy yoga to you know really help help this. And I think pregnancy yoga is is just the most beautiful thing you can do for your children because bringing yourself into a state in which you go through the sacred process of birth in a sacred internal environment in yourself, is just and be the conduit for another phenomenal consciousness being birthed, just has to be the most amazing thing. So that's what really got me um into yoga in a more regular way, which was fantastic. And uh I was we had a posting over in the UK actually, and it was the first time I met a Swami, and I can't remember this lady's name other than she was Swami G. She was a Hatha, you know, all in all in orange um outfit. And I used to go along there when the kids were, I'd had my I was pregnant with my second child, and um, I had the most incredible experiences in those classes with her, and it was the first time I'd met somebody with that incredible spiritual depth as a teacher, so she was quite amazing in that. And when I came back to Australia, um I kept going to different classes as I travelled around in the services. Uh, but when we settled in Canberra, uh I had a friend that said I'd been doing a yoga actually called Yogi Chigung by Grant Wolven because he combined uh the sort of acupuncture meridian system, which I know a number of yogas have done, but he came up with this yoga chigung, and I was really enjoying that slowing down in yoga because I'd done the young, you know, push it hard with Ashtanga and you know what can I get my body to do. And I was fascinated by that approach. And when I described it to a friend here, she said, That sounds like uh Drew Yoga that I do with Patricia Brown. Come to my class and meet Patricia, and that's where I met Patricia Brown, who was amazing, and I met half the team here because it was the base of Drew in Australia. So I met uh Genevieve Scharbau as well and Nolene Francis, they were amazing teachers. And uh when I started my teacher training, I also met Andrew Wells, who had come over from the UK to help build Drew in Australia, and so he remains one of my mentors. Um Genevieve Scharbell is one of my mentors. I have several mentors, and I think it's very important to have a mix of mentors. In fact, it's encouraged in Drew, you know, don't just have one teacher, um, have a few because they'll give you different perspectives. Yeah, and now I've been to the UK many, many times and part of the international leadership group. So I've had lots of trips to India and the UK and spent time in Wales, and I have loved meeting the depth of the team. He's is just every Drew person you come across. We say it's the yoga of the heart, and you can feel that that heart expressing itself in slightly different flavors. You know, the heart can be expressed through a very quiet, inward that's not me, you've probably guessed already. I'm not or it could be a joyful, like which is more my flavor. Yeah, there's different flavors, they're all all got the same root, but they're different flavours. But everyone that that comes in touch with generally a Drew teacher, they usually take them with it's very much a very Heart-based, and all our movements in Drew start at the heart and finish with the heart. So everything gets transformed at the heart. If you stir anything up from lower chakras, it's gonna get transformed at the heart. So it's very much titrated yoga. Like a lot of there's a lot of therapies out there that want to stir things up, and you want to shake and feel like you're letting go of stuff. That's kundalini can be quite dangerous and not so healthy. It's it's a very titrated um evolution of your consciousness. Or if you want to stay kundalini, you never feel like it's massively rising because if you do, then it's probably stirring things up too much. And you know, it takes extreme um deafness for somebody else to handle uh or help people in that situation. So we go, it's very safe, it's very careful. Everything gets very slowly, slowly does it, and allow things to be very potent in your transformation, but very, very safe and very, very each time you have a transformative experience, you allow it to settle, you allow it to embed, you allow things to um sort of just be integrated in your system. It's one of the reasons we we like to go slow in our teacher training as well, because what we do uh you know, it describes Drew Yoga as a very gentle, and and people think, oh, it's not a very strong yoga. Um, it's very actually very, very potent. And going slow is allows that integration over time. The the tendency these days for you know, and I think it's great that yoga is very, very accessible, and people can go away for a couple of weeks and have an intensive, but to come out after a couple of weeks and say, I'm a yoga teacher, is like you haven't had that time to experiment, explore, go deep, gradually do your own work, settle things down, do the hard, deep work, um, plumb the the deeper aspects of your soul very safely with guidance and to uh work out how that gets integrated into your life so that you're still very functional in life.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, because like you said before, there are there are traditions that go off to the caves and people will go to the caves, but generally the people that come out with the through these courses these days are going to remain present and contributing and involved in their community, absolutely and being a better part of that community or or being uh almost an enlightened being within it can be realized, but it takes time, you know, and and don't be in a rush. So many people want the takeaway now. It's a bit of a Western mindset. I want all right, I'm gonna do true yoga. What are my course objectives and what are my takeaways? And what am I getting? And here's my output. And then I can say, Oh look, yoga teacher, yeah, that's what I've got. Badge.
SPEAKER_01We've got such a huge suite of postgraduate courses, and you know, I've only listed half of them there. We have a whole series that um take people deeper. We actually don't do anything different physically. Like the the yoga the moves, the practices are the same. It's just we go, we come back to it on a different level. So we run a course we ran one last year called the subtle energetics of yoga. Everybody knows the practices, but you then let say, let's apply the lens, let's look at all these practices just looking at the chakras. And let's spend three months doing that. Now let's look at it through the lens of the koshas, the layers of our being, and spend a few months doing that. And then let's look at it through the the prana vayus, which aren't as well known, but the the the different vayas, the five vayus, and how those energies work in your body. Now let's apply that lens and see what happens. And so it's like I might have just been doing cat with all those different practices for hours and hours and hours, and I've got a different understanding of what happens in cat through all those different lenses. Every single one of our courses has a reflective journaling component, and uh every you know, you have to hand in quite a lot of reflective journals, which actually means that over the the years, I feel as a teacher and a teacher of teachers, I feel so incredibly blessed to have read and been on the journey that is a deep journey, a deep understanding, as reading things and and hearing and talking to people of their discoveries about who they really are and how they tick, is just one of the most amazingly. I'm so honoured and so blessed to be on every student that I've ever come across, their journey, and seeing them unfold. Like you you go on these longer journeys, and you you know, if if you did like a little quick two-week course and then off they've they've gone and you never see them again, you don't see the impact that they have for themselves and in the world, and yet we've seen the most amazing transformations in people and realizations, and you can see the the lighting up that happens. As I said, originally I I started my life as a teacher in the services. In the Navy, I was a train training systems person, and I also was a science teacher for a number of years. Um, so I've always been teaching and training, and I love doing in yoga because it's nice if you're in a science class to see students go, oh wow, that's that that chemical reaction is amazing. And I've got completely different colour out of two chemicals that I put together that were white. I've got something yellow now. Um that's beautiful, and it's lovely to see young people. But when a person undergoes such a deep transformative per journey over time, and you have the um the blessing to be the guide and hold that person's hand or just be there and hold the space. You don't have to hold the hand, you just hold the space. Um, it's amazing just to to watch that.
SPEAKER_00Drew sounds huge. So, how many how many teacher teachers or people working within the Australia?
SPEAKER_01On a we have a professional network, we've we've had around 200 or so people of active teachers. And as I say, a lot of people that go through our courses, um, quite often half of those don't necessarily become teachers, they they're becoming yogis off the mat in another way. So we've probably put through thousands of people through our our yoga teacher training here in Australia. We've got teachers in every state, yeah, every state, including Tasmania and in New Zealand as well. We've got a whole team in New Zealand with some beautiful teachers there as well. So, yes, we're we're all interconnected. Uh, I personally uh am part of the leadership team for Drew Australia, so I'm courses director for Drew Australia. I do have a second job in the corporate area. Uh I I do training there, leadership and management training as well. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So much going on, and um there's always a consistency in the structures of courses and delivering the offerings that I read about with your five pillars.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That informs all the way through.
SPEAKER_01Yes, pretty much. And you've probably recognized in the five pillars of Drew, inherently there are a lot of the the yogic philosophy. It does come back to that. You know, we've talked a lot about the depth and expertise over the last um however long we've been talking. You know, it's very much about honouring the the what the teachers that come before us. You know, that that is absolutely essential. The more you honour the education and training that's coming through to you, the more it actually embeds in you. And I think a lot of modern society has forgotten that. So in the yogic world, we do honour our teachers because in honouring our teachers, we actually embed um the the material more deeply within ourselves. So that's really in and it just means that you're teaching what really resonates and what is really alive within you. So that's very important. We do do a lot in terms of accessibility, so our yoga is anyone can do it, and it doesn't matter whether you're um a triathlete who's standing there with with lots of wonderful muscles and fitness, or you're right sitting right next to a person who's been wheelchair bound for 20 years. Both those people can be um accommodated within a class, so it's very much about accessibility. And if something doesn't work for you, it's not about here's the perfect posture, let's bend you to it. It's this is where we're aiming. Let's see how we can help you to achieve the same thing. So you might have two people doing two different postures, they might look very different because of their different bodies or their different capacities or incapacities, but what we do is help them align so that energetically they get the same effect, and that's a big key to what we do in terms of our adaptability and accessibility, and that's what we teach. We teach people to adapt to it's not about what it looks like necessarily, you know. You're not I love all the beautiful images out there of the people doing the perfect tree or the you know, the perfect um warrior pose or or you know, warrior three balanced on one leg. It's what can I do for my body that gets the same effect? One of the other you you were talking about the pillars of Drew. Um, we have touched on empowerment. You know, we're talking about people finding their own niche, what they want to really express. So empowerment's a big one, and and again we come back to Gandhian principles and we love that Gandhian quote: be the change you want to see in the world. Have you heard of that one?
SPEAKER_00Say it again.
SPEAKER_01Be the change you want to see in the world. Because we you have a lot of people saying, Oh, I'd love to see this in the world. Well, why not do it?
SPEAKER_00Go and start it.
SPEAKER_01Go and start it, yeah. We we had um one lovely lady in South Australia who came to the beginning of our course and she was a librarian. The tiniest, tiniest voice didn't get above a whisper. And you know, she wanted to be she so wanted to be able to teach and she so wanted to be able to project. And uh, luckily we were doing it. The the person running the course with me was the lady I was talking to about Nolene, who's got the voice of an angel, and she's yoga of sound, and so she did the course, but she used to see Nolene about working with all the yoga. There's amazing muscles in the face and the voice that you can do for yoga for sound to get everything, you know, freed up. And I've never seen such an amazing change in this lady by the end of three years when she graduated, and she was so you know, she was one of those people that never said boo to anyone, didn't engage in conversations, and then wow, at the end, she was like projecting her voice. The little mouse becomes a lion. It was it was so gorgeous. So that empowerment is what I love, absolutely love to see. Yeah, the other one is um friendship and community. Uh, as you've noticed, sometimes people find a little bit hard because Drew isn't doesn't have a figurehead, and just about most places, most organizations have like a a one-figure head that uh has a public profile that you can see and you can touch. Now, Drew is very much about it's it's the group, it's the community, the power is in the community, which is why sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to go pin put your finger on who's the face of Drew. Well, we don't actually have one face of Drew, we're all the face of Drew. Um, and so we work very much with friendship and community and teams and um doing things in a very connected way. In fact, if ever we try to do something just on our own, somebody will come and say, Who's working on that with you? Let's get another team and ask you a billion questions and really shake you up as to whether you think you're on the right track now. So um, yeah, it's a good way of working because in our Western society there is a tendency to do things in a very individual way that has a wonderful empowerment aspect. So we're balancing empowerment with doing things as a community and together as well. That's no easy thing because a lot of people see freedom and empowerment as something you do on your own. When actually things are done better, they might take longer, that you might have to go through a bit of the um tumultuous sort of things inside yourself, but ultimately you come out um a lot better at the end and able to do things together and achieve great things.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Empowered connectedness.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah, how cool is that.
SPEAKER_00Um, you must love just getting up in the morning to be part of it again.
SPEAKER_01Yes, uh, you know, and and there are the days when you know things don't go well and you don't feel so great getting out of bed.
SPEAKER_00That admin word that you went at the end there before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um and just coming back to, you know, I l I love this conversation we're having about empowerment and community because previously I talked about uh a number of people that were were pioneering or spearheading their little areas, and yet none of them have done it without the support of the rest of the community. So it's like when we go back to somebody like Susanna who who pioneered the Drew Kids and teens, yes, it was her baby, if you like, but she was able to do it because the community the Drew community came around and helped her do that. So it's like whoever wants to be empowered to do something and express themselves, then they get the support of the other people in the community to do that.
SPEAKER_00Down in the palm of his hand, I will lift you up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. That's lovely, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00You talk of mentors, are they sources of inspiration or were there others?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. There's so many. I think again, one of the great aspects of Drew is it's got a richness because it's such a community, you can find inspiration from just about everyone in the community in many ways. And and when we've been away together on some of our sort of trips where we get so, for example, we've gone to India and we've had people from New Zealand and Australia and Netherlands and all the different places, um, we'll differ be put into little groups to support each other with with where we want to go. So you'll you'll find yourself having a connection with someone perhaps for a for six months or a year, and then it might be somebody else the next time, and you might keep connected with that little group for a while. So you might find inspiration from changing groups and different people actually, but in general, to answer your question, because that doesn't have a name to it. Um definitely uh, as I said in my history, when I first came to Canberra and went to my first Drew Yoga class, the two people that inspired me there were Patricia Brown, um, you know, now uh coming close to 80 next year, uh, still going amazingly strong and still an amazing mentor and guide. And Genevieve Charbot as well, who's in her 60s. Um, she lives in Canberra as well, and she I see her as a mentor every month, so uh keeps me on the straight and narrow. I also connect with a couple of mentors over in the UK as well. Um, Andrew Wells was over here as a teacher living in Australia uh when I first came to Durham. I was going through a tricky divorce, young children, all sorts of things, and and he literally walked by my side, literally because we went for long walks. Um, you know, and and I think somebody that is able to just simply walk alongside you, literally and figuratively, is always going to inspire you to be able to lift yourself up of from the sludge that you're in and uh and and evolve uh and you know climb up the ladder out of that sludge. So um he in particular inspires me that way. There are some amazing teachers over in the UK, uh, the original founders of Drew. I talked about the four people, um, Dr. Mansuk Patel, absolutely amazing, very highly inspirational teacher. Uh Rita Goswami, who is just so beautiful. She's got an Indian background, and the philosophy that oozes out of her is absolutely amazing. Uh, John Jones, who um he he came over here to teach meditation, and I've never had such amazing, uh very quiet, very you know, we talked about some people have that flavor of being out and joyous. He's very quiet, very inward, and the depth of meditation is inspiring with him, and he holds that deep, deep space, even when he's outworking around uh the place as well. And then there's Chris Barrington, who is a physics teacher, one of the original founders of Drew, and he was very instrumental in putting together a lot of the curriculum for the yoga teacher training and a lot of our postgraduate courses. So, most of what we teach in Drew now, a lot of that that course material and curriculum has been informed by him. And also his sister, Sylvia Barrington, is my amazing uh inspirational mentor in the area of yoga therapy. So um, yeah, there's there's way too many actually. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what a what a team. Yeah, I think it's fantastic that um you've got such a such a sense of belonging and family. I think that's what's really come out of this discussion and how Drew's really sort of encapsular their spirits. Uh you talked a lot about empowerment, but um of transformation too. And so I'm I'm sure you even now in the work you're doing, you're seeing transformation within yourself.
SPEAKER_01And oh, it never stops, does it really? Never stops. Um sometimes you think, wow, I've done so much. Is there anything left to do? And you go, Oh, yeah, there definitely is. So and there are times, you know, you've probably noticed yourself, Paul, or or or observed other people. I I like the rhythms of transformation, coming back to what we were saying earlier that you know, this idea that you want to blow your kundalini and get enlightened, there's a rhythm to transformation, like any growth, like anything that you're learning. There's a steep learning curve, there's a pressure cooker effect sometimes where there's a period of intense transformation, and then there's a period of just allowing and letting things settle. And sometimes there's periods that seem to be quite stagnating, you know, for for maybe a few years, and you think, oh, was I ever actually transforming?
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_01That's right. There are seasons to be honored, I think. And you know, in all traditional, in all cultures with a with a great tradition, every culture in the world, they understand that there are seasons and rhythms and timings, and in our world at the moment, our tendency in the Western world to just keep a uh an ex a foot on the accelerator and never take it off is a very unfortunate and leading to a lot of burnout. And I think it would be lovely to recapture the connection to natural cycles and the honouring of those cycles, and particularly the honouring of the fallow cycle when nothing seems to be happening, and that's okay for a while. Um, and a lot of people say, Oh, I've had never heard of Drew. You know, it's not that we're really showy or out there that much, but people will find it if their heart is resonating to do that deeper work. And I think a lot of the traditions are like that as well. There's some beautiful ones out there in Australia and across the globe.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So going back to where we started, you talked about the very beginning. Drew, one of the core principles of Drew was the the space within the the the empty singularities and um sort of the the I thought of Turia in a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Um yes.
SPEAKER_00The conscious state between there's an aspect of that in Drew.
SPEAKER_01Yes, definitely. Um a lot of our practices in our postgraduate mod modules help shift towards that Turia state. Quite deliberately.
SPEAKER_00You did the yoga days, did you find that was uh worth doing for you for Drew?
SPEAKER_01Did you get a lot of um interest or new people coming in or in in those types of days where you've got very large numbers of people in short periods of time where you can't necessarily talk to people, they're on to the next thing. Uh, it's hard to gauge. We always think it's worth it. Um, like we've been doing the National Folk Festival for uh it's the first time this year, we haven't actually, uh, for over 25 years. And it's amazing again, you come back thinking, oh, I don't know if I we achieved anything there. And then three years down the track, you might get somebody that actually puts in an application and said, Yeah, I first came to a session at the National Folk Festival or the Sydney. We came, we had somebody recently, oh yes, I saw you at the Sydney Yoga Day. And yeah, you can come away going, I don't know whether we connect it with anyone or not. But I think you know it's it's one of those PR concepts. You've still got to get yourself out there and be seen and let people connect or feel or experience uh what you have to offer as much as possible.
SPEAKER_00There were so many at um so many coming along to these, and and I love the spread at the Sydney Yoga Day.
SPEAKER_01I love the um how Janie has um made it so accessible to so many different types and expressions. We're talking about you know having individual expression um from you know the more modern yogas that have evolved in the last few years, and people that's what people are looking for, to having someone like Drew or the um uh the Brahma Kumaris that have been there each year. And I love them because they are they are more that inward, they've just got it's such a simplicity, and they just they just stand there in their white and they don't you know collar people as they go past, there's no flashes or anything, and they just wait for people to come to them. And I think that's really beautiful, actually. Um, they're a lovely group of people. We used to run some of our courses at one of their um their centres up in uh the highlands, the southern highlands. Absolutely gorgeous people.
SPEAKER_00What's next for Ruth and Drew?
SPEAKER_01Is it is it more of the same, continuing to build, or is it um yeah, we um yes, on all those different levels, we've always looking at what we've got. As I say, I've got the back course and uh the back care and mental well-being course coming up, postgraduate course. Uh we are for the first time in years, we haven't done much with Drew Dance for a number of years, and one of the reasons is at the Sydney Yoga Day is we will be running some workshops for Drew Dance uh later this year, which is really cool. Um, we're gonna have a meditation teach training next year, which will really be fantastic. We're gonna do our breath coach level one next year. Uh, we've got something called the Bhakti Academy going at the moment, which is our more we've always got something more spiritual just humming along in the background. They're usually shorter, lower price point um than our bigger courses where we have to get the accreditation for um CPD, for example. Uh so we'll all we'll always be evolving those sorts of things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think I'll be looking up some of those myself, actually.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00So anyone listening to this that's been inspired, what was what they've heard of, really interested to know more about Drew. How can how can people connect with Drew or yourself or through the website, of course, but I'm sure, but um, in Sydney, for example?
SPEAKER_01Uh yes, so coming to the Sydney Yoga Day, we've got um our Sydney crew up there, Julie Banyan, along with Genevieve Shabot and uh Joanna Benke will be running the actual Drew Dance, uh, and Genevieve Shabot will be doing the philosophy, which would be really fantastic. And the other thing we've got that we always have twice a year now is um our retreats. So it's a lovely thing to do if you've never experienced Drew Yoga, is to come on one of our two retreats. And we usually have one in January that is more spiritually focused, and that at the moment is consistently being run in near Healesville in the uh near the Dandenons in Victoria on the Australia Day Long Weekend. Yep. And uh then we usually do something a bit different in around September each year. This year it's going to Bali for a beautiful seven-day retreat. That one's booked out, but we will have something in for next year as well. Uh, not necessarily Bali next year, but uh something luxurious where it's warm.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Good idea.
SPEAKER_01Retreats are a great way to just come and experience, yeah, Drew.
SPEAKER_00That's fantastic. Congratulations with everything that's Drew going and um your own journey within that framework is is clearly blossoming, and you're enjoying yourself immensely. So, congratulations on that. And um yeah, hope everyone enjoyed listening to this today. And uh, we do thank Ruth for her time.
SPEAKER_01And thank you, Paul. It's been a lovely conversation. Really enjoyed our time together.
SPEAKER_00We hope you enjoyed hearing about Ruth's yoga journey and hearing more about the incredible work being done at Drew Yoga. Our next interview will be with yoga teacher Muriel de Villiers, founder of Shining Sea Yoga. We look forward to seeing you then.