Katonah Yoga: A 30-Hour Immersion
February 20 – 23, 2025
£850
Join New York City’s teacher of teachers Abbie Galvin, assisted by Marion Pearce, for this 4-day, 30-hour immersion into Katonah Yoga theory. You can also practise with Abbie in a Katonah Masterclass or a longer Deep Dive.
Katonah Yoga is a practice hugely popular in the city that never sleeps and is known for its intelligence incorporating classical Hatha Yoga techniques with Taoist theory, geometry, magic, mythology, metaphor and imagination. You’ll come away with maybe a whole new vocabulary when it comes to teaching and practising yoga – the body is a house, a backbend is the bridge between the past and the future, yoga is origami for the body.
This immersion will touch on all aspects of the Katonah Yoga method including adjustments, prop work, pranayama, body reading, home practice, working with injuries, and restorative work.
This immersion is open to anyone, including:
• Teachers looking to refresh old skills and learn new ones,
• Students looking to deepen their practice,
• Seasoned practitioners dealing with an injury, and
• New practitioners seeking fresh ways to integrate yoga into your life.
Thursday February 20th: 9.30am-12.00pm
£75 for individual Masterclass
The Katonah practice is designed to awaken pieces of ourselves from the slumber of unconscious habits in order to access our sentient self. The use of technique rather than our personal impulses affords better function. Thus, it is technique that propositions us to change. We use measure rather than feelings to create a stable structure and as we do, we discover that our body was designed to fit itself. In this masterclass we will move through the fundamentals of the Katonah Yoga asana practice.
Thursday February 20th: 1.00-6.00pm
£150 for individual Deep Dive class
Developing your own vision is the key to learning how to adjust well. The goal of an adjustment is to change someone’s frame of reference. For the most part, since personal style summons one’s unconscious habits, adjusting another practitioner’s pose offers a reorientation in order to open up a portal of experience impossible on one’s own. In this intensive we will work pragmatically as well as theoretically, moving through asanas in order to discover how best to approach an adjustment, move a body and address injuries, enhancing our ability to see more dimensionally in order to enrich another person’s vision.
Friday February 21st: 9.30am-12.00pm
£75 for individual Masterclass
A home practice addresses the vision and virtue of personal health, wellbeing and long life. Engaging in a home practice is a way of addressing the manner in which one personally organizes one’s self. The integration of a home practice is a continuous act of self-cultivation, a process that is never over. It is recreated and redirected with every experience one encounters through their life, making the Home Practice the ultimate refuge and space for insight. In this masterclass we will discuss the virtue of developing your own home practice and move through several practices you can do at home.
Friday February 21st: 1.00-6.00pm
£150 for individual Deep Dive class
The biggest metaphor of the Katonah practice is the body as a house. Each floor of the house expresses different parts of the whole, while housing unique information, functions and efficiencies. The first floor, the lower body, substantiates us, housing our first nature, our ancestry, our stability, our sense of belonging. The second floor, the upper body, potentiates us, housing our second nature, our capacity, our competency, how we participate in the world. The third floor, the head, liberates us, housing our vision, our imagination, our antenna, giving us the ability to see and plan for the future. In this intensive we will introduce the magic square, the Katonah map to navigating personal potential. We will follow its route like a treasure map through the body, use it to reconcile real life dilemmas and experience the power of breath work to open up territory in our bodies for our spirit to move through it.
Saturday February 22nd: 9.30am-12.00pm
£75 for individual Masterclass
The goal of the practice is to become spherical, a sphere of influence on and off the mat. Once we set up the linear aspects of the practice, once we establish measure, the goal then becomes to become round. In this masterclass we will explore the myriad backbend postures that make up the Katonah practice. A backbend is an arch and an arch is a bridge between the past and the future. A backbend is a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of our potential and every pose should have a backbend in it because this practice is a practice of potential.
Saturday February 22nd: 1.00-6.00pm
£150 for individual Deep Dive class
Reading a body, assessing a pose, interpreting where one is heading, is the art of seeing. Poses show propensities of behavior and how personal habits are articulated in the practice. When we look at a yoga pose, we reference the ideal form of it so that we have a template, a map, a criteria to look for. In this intensive we will set up the body on a grid to be deciphered as a map, read the feet as a fractal of the whole narrative, learn how to unearth chronic and acute physical issues and explore what to do with the information we discover in our body readings.
Sunday February 23rd: 9.30am-12.00pm
£75 for individual Masterclass
Yoga is origami for the body. Similar to paper folding in origami, the more we fold in our joint spaces, like a paper crease, the more energy flows through these joint spaces. In this masterclass we will move through warrior sequences and the classic Katonah sun and moon salutations to fold and unfold ourselves for optimal function.
Sunday February 23rd: 1.00-6.00pm
£150 for individual Deep Dive class
Restoration is the work of returning something to its former state and relaxation is the state of freedom from tension or anxiety, our goal is reformation: the act of improving or making changes for the better. The technique of restorative yoga is to embody formal forms (asanas) whose geometry over time allows for a therapeutic experience. The Katonah approach to restorative yoga is meant to reshape a stressed out, uninformed or broken body, which helps to set up the conditions to redirect a life. This intensive is for both teachers looking to assimilate restorative theory into their teaching, as well as students interested in immersing themselves in a restorative experience to profit from it more deeply.
Abbie Galvin is the owner of The Studio, a NYC based yoga studio, teaching Katonah Yoga. She has been honing this practice for the past 25 years and has a strong student-base from all around the world.
Abbie’s instruction is informed by her own creative process as a filmmaker and from her exploration of the therapeutic process as a psychoanalyst. She has learned over and over that truly participating in any formal process of self-exploration leads to transformation whether it be physical, psychological or intellectual. Her goal is to engage students of yoga in the dialogue between their conscious and their unconscious selves because it is through that effort that we potentiate ourselves.
It is her intention as a teacher to cajole each student in that most rigorous effort to be grounded, to grow upwards, and to participate in the creation of their best self.
