About Yogi Toby

I am deeply committed to the practice and teaching of IYENGAR® yoga. I have been practising IYENGAR® yoga for 18 years, and gained Introductory Teaching Certificate Level II in 2010. I have been teaching regular IYENGAR® yoga classes ever since. In 2015, 2016 and 2017 I qualified at Intermediate Junior Levels 1, 2 & 3 respectively. I am now training towards Senior Level qualifications.

Yoga is the most significant thing in my life. Every day starts with several hours of yoga practice, and this informs everything I do, including my yoga teaching. I have found the practice of yoga to be an ongoing process of finding a deeper and deeper stillness within, this inner peace inspiring one to look further into the stillness.

I know that some of my students do yoga for other reasons such as wanting to be flexible, wanting to lose weight, wanting to look young as they grow older, and wanting to prevent injury and improve performance in sports. I have certainly heard people report having experienced all of the above benefits from practicing yoga, I myself have greatly improved my rock climbing skills through my yoga practice. However, the main reason I practice yoga is to find inner peace, and although I am very happy for any benefits my students find from the practice, the main reason I teach asana and pranayama is to aid my students in finding within themselves a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, and a deeper sense of inner peace.

Outside of yoga, I am a keen rock climber, running a rock climbing coaching club for underprivileged children as a volunteer for a local primary school at Oxford Brookes University Climbing Wall. I also run an open mic night called The Furry Mic at the Mad Hatters every other Wednesday evening. I taught maths in secondary schools for ten years, before going full time with the yoga teaching, and I still enjoy doing a few hours of maths tuition within a system I founded called ethical tutors. We teach students to love and understand maths, manage their own learning, teach one another, and learn mindfulness, emotional intelligence and develop their ethical values along the way.