I spent a couple of days with Swami J, and by couple of days I mean a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening for a couple of days. I'm going to go back in a couple more days and spend a couple of days as I just described :)
It was refreshing to be with a teacher who obviously knows his stuff, but it is able to impart it in a way that is soothing rather than jarring. Sometime I hear new stuff and I have to filter it and convert it to my internal language, but for most of the time I was with him, it was easy to listen to and fit in with what I already understand. I learned new things as well, but mainly it was new ways of describing things I've learned before, like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, for instance.
He's really low-key and the ashram is his townhouse, which is a small place near a small mall in a small town in northern Florida, also known as LA (Lower Alabama). He's also all about yoga is not just asana, which is something I appreciate, and that without meditation, we're really not practising. And trying to separate them is untrue, as the term yoga includes meditation, but the way it gets practised in the West at a lot of places, people are basically doing asana classes without the other aspects of yoga.
He offers online classes/conversations to anyone who wants to join in. I haven't tuned in yet, but I plan to when I'm back in Ottawa.
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