I haven’t yet finished sitting down and already we are in the midst of the first, of what will be many, controversial tirades. Petite, opinionated, passionate and well versed, I have come to meet the self-proclaimed Sharon Osbourne of the yoga world: Anne-Marie Newland. And I am anything but disappointed. “It is what everybody would expect from me,” she proclaims, “to speak my mind.” Even if it makes her unpopular in the process. Hot on her list today are ashtanga yoga, Gordon Ramsay and even BKS Iyengar himself (“he performed a sin on me”). Agree with her or not, the strange thing is you can’t help but warm to her for it. Maybe it derives from the self-assurance and experience of 25 years as a practitioner. Or maybe it is a combination of an eclectic bunch of life experiences that furnish one with the self-confidence to speak one’s mind with absolute conviction.
Iraqi by birth, she was brought up within a strict orthodox Christian church. It is a religion permeated with rich traditions and rituals. So it made yoga feel very natural when she first started to study. Candles, incense, silence, devotion, respect and introspection were already inherent within her.
It was in the early 1970s, during a rough patch in her personal life, that she first discovered yoga. At the time she had been working as a ballet and jazz dancer with the likes of Vangelis. From this she got into drumming, joining a band and playing her first gig as support for Dire Straits at the Rock Garden, in London.
Then she moved on to create her own fashion label, specialising in supplying last-minute outfits to bands for rock videos. Living every rock-and-roll cliché, she recalls how she partied all night and worked and smoked all day. It was the kind of excessive lifestyle that ran the full breadth of excess in every manner.
That was until one day when, as Anne-Marie recalls, “I was sitting in my shop, chatting to some people. And as I am talking I literally have a voice in my ear ’You must do yoga seriously’ in the middle of my conversation. What did that mean? Because I knew about yoga. But I didn’t know about the philosophy.
“So I put my cup of tea down, put out my cigarette and started flicking through Time Out and found at the back two listings for yoga. I phoned the first place and it didn’t feel right. So I phoned the next, the sivanda centre, and it just felt right. So I thought, I’m going. The teacher that walked through the door that night I married, and we had three amazingly beautiful kids together.
“When I walked in that night, though, I was frightened, as I knew I had to face the spiritual aspect of my life. And I had been trying to fill that hole for an awful long time. But there was no turning back and I had to accept I was on a spiritual path and I had taken my first step.”
Today, sitting in the North London Buddhist Centre surrounded by her own budding trainee teachers, it is a life that must seem a million miles away. Gathered here is an impressively large legion of people who have come to train with Anne-Marie, in a style of yoga she has fashioned herself: sun power yoga. Recently established - in the last five years - business looks like it is thriving, in part, I am sure, due to the larger-than-life personality of its founder.
As her teachers mill around in the background, Anne-Marie takes me through her own bibliography of teachers that she has studied with. It reads like an almanac of who’s who within the yoga community: BKS Iyengar, Derek Ireland, John Scott, Swami Vishnu Devananda. And that really is to name but a few.
She draws attention to the work of teachers like Beryl Bender Birch, Baron Baptiste and Bryan Kest for inspiring her with their fresh and contemporary style - a breath of fresh air for the 21st century. When fused with her background as a dancer, their work became a seed for her own sun power yoga series, waiting patiently to be given its own breath of life. |