North Perth Yoga Room

Three of these students had been told inversions weren't for them.

Look at the photo. Bodies hanging upside down, heads free, nothing pressing on a neck. Nobody in that frame is strong in a way they weren't a year ago. What changed is the order the work was done in.

That's the whole argument for the Djilba weekend. Going overhead isn't courage. It's sequence.

Djilba Weekend Workshop with Ann Dragon, 18 – 20 September (Shoulders Pt. 2)

*Friday 18th, 5.30–7pm — restorative, preparing the shoulders

*Saturday 19th, 7.30–9.30am — strength and stability for the shoulder girdle

**Saturday 19th, 3.30–5.30pm — inversion anatomy: the neck and shoulders in head and shoulder stands

*Sunday 20th, 7.30–9.30am — into the inversions

$130 for the weekend. Twenty places, priority to full-weekend bookings. Three weeks from today.

You don't need to have done Part 1. You need a working practice and some curiosity about what happens when the ground moves to the top of your head.

Book from the workshops page. If you're unsure whether your shoulders are up to it, message me —

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Nobody has ever relaxed because they were told to relax.

That instruction fails for a simple reason. A busy mind doesn't want less to do. It wants something better to do. Tell it to switch off and it will spend the next twenty minutes reviewing your inbox.

So we don't ask it to switch off. We give it a job it can't do while it's worrying — where exactly the heel is placed, whether the right side of the ribcage is as long as the left, what the breath does when the chest opens. Precise, unglamorous, entirely absorbing. Ninety minutes later people walk out and say they feel clear, and they usually can't say why.

Look at the photo. A full room, reclining, belts around the feet, late-afternoon light through the blinds. Nothing dramatic is happening. That's the point. The work is finished and the nervous system has caught up with it.

This is why Iyengar yoga suits people who think for a living. It gives your attention somewhere precise to go.

Come after work. Your first class is complimentary — link in the first comment.

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Yoga tip / Iyengar principle — balance, and the two-minute habit that trains it.

Stand on one leg while you clean your teeth. That's it. That's the whole tip.

Balance is a skill, not a gift, and it fades faster than strength does.
Most people lose it quietly from their fifties on and never notice until the day they trip on a kerb and can't correct it. What follows a fall is rarely just the injury. It's the caution afterwards, the shrinking of where you're willing to go.

Here's what the photo shows. Bare feet on mats, standing. No pose worth photographing. But that's where balance gets built — in the ankles, the arches, the small muscles nobody trains at a gym.

In Iyengar yoga we spend real time in standing poses for exactly this reason. Where the weight sits in the foot changes the knee, hip, spine, and head. Get the foundation honest, and the rest follows.

So: one leg, near a bench, while the toothbrush does its work. Thirty seconds each side, twice a day. Close your eyes when it gets easy and watch how quickly it isn't.

Small, dull, repeatable. That's most of what keeps people upright into their eighties. Try a complimentary first class here, https://share.hsforms.com/1Oqh2l_J7RGiSy2IYDeHxUwnr04u

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room
https://www.northperthyogaroom.com.au

In July we freed the shoulders. In September we turn them upside down.

Djilba Weekend Workshop, 18 to 20 September. Shoulders Part 2.

Part 1 opened tight shoulders and necks. Part 2 takes that new range and makes it hold weight — strength and stability through the shoulder girdle, then into the inversions. Salamba Sarvangasana. Sirsasana. Their variations. Built step by step, with props, in the order the body can actually take.

Most people who avoid inversions aren't avoiding the pose. They're avoiding a neck that has never been prepared for one. That preparation is the whole weekend.

Four sessions:
Friday 18th, 5.30–7pm — restorative, preparing the shoulders
Saturday 19th, 7.30–9.30am — strength and stability for the shoulder girdle
Saturday 19th, 3.30–5.30pm — inversion anatomy: neck and shoulders in Sarvangasana and Sirsasana
Sunday 20th, 7.30–9.30am — into the inversions or their alternatives

Twenty places. Priority to those booking the full weekend. $110 at the current rate, down from $130, and a $33 deposit holds a spot.

You don't need Part 1 to take Part 2. You need a working practice and some curiosity about what's below your head.

Book the workshop → https://www.northperthyogaroom.com.au/workshops/p/spring-2026.

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Same pose you'd do any day of the week at NPYR. Different window. Bali 2027 is open: 1 to 9 September 2027, Hidden Paradise, Amed. Twenty places.

Who is a retreat for? It isn't only for 'advanced' students. It's for anyone with a working practice who wants nine days where the practice comes first, and everything else waits its turn.

The shape of it: class at 7.30am, two-ish hours of asana and pranayama. Brunch. Then the day is yours — the water at Amed is right there. Restorative 4:30 to 6. Sunday off entirely.

Eight nights, welcome dinner, airport transfers, every class included.

Thirteen months away, and that's the point.
It's a year of today's away to build the practice you'll take with you.

A retreat gives back most to the body that's been turning up all along.

From $1,500. A $300 deposit holds your place.
Details and booking: northperthyogaroom.com.au/workshops/p/bali-2027

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Yoga Retreat Bali Indonesia 1 - 9 September 2027 | NPYR | North Perth Yoga Room Join Ann Dragon in Bali for Yoga September 2027

Early on, you're taught what to see and correct — the gross mistakes, the obvious ones.

Develop a practice, and the teaching turns inward. You start to feel what's happening before it shows.

That's when we stop just doing the pose and start investigating it.

Mr Iyengar put it plainly:
"Reposing is meditation. Posing is action. Then you have to reflect: what has come, what has not come." source -A Talk to Teachers, published in Astadala Yogamala, Volume 3, p.207. Photo - RIYMI, Pune

Each pose gets done again and again, and each time you ask those same two questions. Not a beginner's question. The one that never stops being useful.

That's where the regular students I mentioned in an earlier post are now — Kerry, Lisa, Clare, Judy — not chasing harder poses, doing the same ones with sharper eyes.

Available to anyone willing to keep showing up long enough to start asking.

New to it all?
Start at the foundation — your first class is free.
https://share.hsforms.com/1Oqh2l_J7RGiSy2IYDeHxUwnr04u

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room

Open to ideas ....love to hear yours - this Fri, 430pm.

We want to transform the harsh built environment around Blake and Little Walcott / Mable St into a greener walkway by slowing down traffic, improving street lighting, installing street art and murals.

The Blake Street Corner Collective have received a Streets Alive grant to pilot and trial a few initial ideas. We're planning a native garden planting in early Sept, more on that soon.

We'd love to hear from you, whether you live close by or within our NP wider community. Please join us this Friday, 4.30pm, 5a Blake St.

North Perth Community Garden
Transition Town Vincent
North Perth Local

Clare. Kerry, Ruth ... some of the steadiest shoulders in that workshop room belonged to people who've been turning up on a Tuesday, a Friday, a Sunday morning, for years.

That's not an accident. It's the whole method. A weekend intensive can open something in three days that a single class can't touch — but what makes it stick is the unglamorous part: same mat, same time, week after week, long before and long after the workshop poster comes down.

New faces are doing exactly the same thing, on day one of the rhythm instead of year five. Roy. Rowena. Katie. Sara. Different starting points, same decision — show up again next week.

Twenty-five years of teaching this method have taught me the shoulder doesn't change in one class, and neither does anything else worth changing. It changes in the hundredth class, built on the first.

If year five looks like Clare and Judy, day one looks like a complimentary first class — same door, same room, same steady work ahead of you.

Booking link in the comments.

Ann
North Perth Yoga Room
www.northperthyogaroom.com.au