Inner Body Flow
by Angela Farmer

Produced by: Tamzina Films

Filmed with a group of students from Angela Farmer’s annual retreat for women at Harbin Hot Springs, this 83 minute dvd was made as a practice tape. It works well as a flow class to watch and follow. My students felt opened, and charged with energy after viewing and practicing with it.

Divided into seven sections, including an introduction and warm up with breathing and belly work, the film blends footage of Angela demonstrating with individual students exploring a range of poses.

Victor Van Kooten is Angela’s husband and teaching partner. His paintings of metaphors central to their teaching are edited into this inspiring montage of yoginis and nature. We see painted images of the back opening like wings, the head rising in a sketch of a cobra superimposed on a student in cobra. We see Angela seated in a lotus pose merging into Victor’s painting of a woman seated inside a mountain.

Her commentary is direct: “All that matters is that you can soften and release.” She says, “The purpose of this work is to go inside and feel. In yoga, we don’t go anywhere, we unfold where we are.”

Angela’s path in yoga has evolved from a strict focus on alignment to finding freedom of movement through the inner body. Her teaching guides us to nourish breathing and vocal energy in areas of blockage and conjestion.

In viewing this dvd, we get a sense of the power of images in Angela teaching. She believes that images from nature help us to free up old holding patterns and draws us back to an ancient part of our experience. If you want to experience a class with Angela Farmer, this dvd is an ideal introduction.

Charlotte Holtzermann - www.hands-on-health.info
Charlotte Holtzermann  M.F.A .offers classes in Alexander Technique, Aquarobics, Chi Gong, Watsu and Yoga  at Loyola Marymount University and Santa Monica College in Los Angeles. She is a contributing writer for LA Yoga Magazine. You can email her at Charlotteholtz@yahoo.com

The Feminine Unfolding
with Angela Farmer

Produced by: Hands on Health

The Feminine Unfolding offers 48 vivid minutes of Angela Farmer’s exploratory approach to yoga. Filmed at Harbin Hot Springs in northern California, we hear Angela discuss her journey of discovering the inner, organ body against a background of sun lit ferns, big rocks, quivering leaves and a rippling stream.

A buoyant score of flute and double bass echoes the images of women rooting down through their legs and spiraling their bellies in twists and backbends.

Angela describes the round, full forms of women in temple statues of India and recounts how she recognized them as early yoginis and realized that she had been practicing yoga like a man in a ladder of patriarchs. An early disciple of Iyengar yoga, she wanted to feel more comfortable in her life and in her yoga practice.

She wants to foster in others what she discovered for herself: that yoga is a path of self discovery of our inner freedom and that we seek to find where our urges to move originate. That we listen to where we are not enlivened. That we let our practice be about opening ourselves up and letting our inner power out. In her demonstration of unfolding from down dog to up dog, we can see the shudder of ecstatic movement.

This dvd is a fine blend of individual students moving like growing plants into bow pose, like underwater plants moving from a backbend to standing. Angela’s core teaching of learning to release our inner power, is evident in these images of her students evolving in slow motion from one pose to another.

Angela feels our society is dominated by a desire to move upward, outward and forward. This portrait of practice in the woods with bird song in nature, reveals a kula of feminine contentment; women exploring how to roll their backs and allow their bellies to move out of the house of the pelvis. In this film, she invites us to watch what the body asks for and to slowly unravel it in the ground of our poses.

Charlotte Holtzermann - www.hands-on-health.info
Charlotte Holtzermann M.F.A.offers classes in Alexander Technique, Aquarobics, Chi Gong, Watsu and Yoga at Loyola Marymount University and Santa Monica College in Los Angeles. She is a contributing writer for LA Yoga Magazine. You can email her at Charlotteholtz@yahoo.com

The Feminine Unfolding with Angela Farmer
As published in Yoga Journal

Farmer's remarkable spiritual autobiography describes her journey as a yogini.

By Richard Rosen

Not a formal instruction video, The Feminine Unfolding is Angela Farmer's remarkable spiritual autobiography. The story itself unfolds in a series of short talks, interspersed with scenes from her public classes and beautifully choreographed asana performances (by Farmer and several of her students). She begins by describing her discontent with her years of traditional yoga training—its reliance on external authority, what she calls its "one-pointed striving," and its relatively static, cookie-cutter postures. Suspecting that such an approach, which she characterizes as predominantly "masculine," is in essence incomplete, she sets out to discover what's lacking. She finds it one day, when she wanders into an Indian temple and is suddenly surrounded by the carved figures of voluptuous Hindu goddesses. She realizes that these female icons, brimming with divine potency, represent yogis too, and their supple, flowing contours embody the natural counterpoint to the "fixed positions" of body-mind.

Farmer returns to her practice inspired by this epiphany, determined to express her own feminine identity, and committed to translating the goddesses' example into a new approach to practice. She "unfolds" the familiar still-as-a-statue shapes of the asanas in a spontaneous sensual "dance" with the feminine power (shakti) that lives and breathes in each of us, and so affirms and validates, much as the Indian Tantrikas did 1,500 years ago, the inherent intelligence of the human body-mind. This frees us from external instructions and manipulations (verbal and otherwise).

Farmer acknowledges that there is a form to the asanas; but within those limits, she gives students more or less free rein to experiment, to find their own relationship to a pose, to settle into a rendition of a pose that is most expressive of who the individual student is. In doing so, she challenges the time-honored relationship of a teacher (guru) and her student (shishya). After all, if each of us is a locus of ultimate knowledge (jnana), then no external "authority" can possibly take final precedence over the prompting of our own inner "voice" (which Patanjali aptly named the "Lord," ishvara). The teacher then becomes simply a partner in our practice, one who helps us learn to trust and love ourselves; and the responsibility for our salvation is shifted squarely onto our own shoulders, where it should be.

Farmer is a great joy to watch. She's that rare personality (T.K.V. Desikachar and Lilias Folan are others who come to mind) who can reach right through the TV screen and touch your soul. I don't usually get too excited over the videos I review, but this one is special, and it gets my highest recommendation.