Angela Farmer

Angela Farmer (born c. 1939) is a teacher of modern yoga, described as "eccentric" and an "iconoclast". She is known also as the creator of the first yoga mat.

Early life

Farmer grew up near London, her father Richard Farmer being English, her mother American. She studied physical education and dance. In her teens, she had surgery to cut several nerves, leaving her with reduced sensitivity to touch and "intense and chronic pain". After college, she practised Sufism.

In 1967, working as a schoolteacher, she attended her first yoga class. Six months later, she met B. K. S. Iyengar and studied under him for the following ten years, in London and in his yoga institute in Pune, India, becoming an Iyengar Yoga teacher. In the late 1970s she switched from that strictly disciplined style of teaching to a freestyle yoga, losing most of her students in the process.

Teaching

Farmer teaches yoga in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in California, in other parts of America, and in other countries. Each summer she and her partner Victor Van Kooten teach yoga in their studio in the Eftalou valley in Lesbos in Greece. They began teaching together in 1984 and have continued to do so for over 25 years. They lead immersive courses in yoga on Lesbos lasting two to three weeks, four times a year.

Farmer and Van Kooten call their approach "yoga from the inside out". Farmer uses imagery, intentionally fluid movements and conscious breathing to explore the prana energy that in her view animates and guides the body.

Reception

Claudia Cummins, in Yoga Journal writes: "Ask devoted students to describe Angela Farmer's teaching, and they'll offer words like freedom, empowerment, surrender, and transformation. They'll describe her approach as soft, fluid, internal, feminine, open, and playful". The "superstar" yoga teacher Donna Farhi studied under Farmer, and like her eventually switched to a freestyle form.

Carolyn Brown, in Yogi Times, writes that a yoga class by Farmer and Van Kooten gives no clue to their training under Iyengar, as their style has evolved away from his strictness into a "more organic, self-expressive and self-healing way of practicing".

Farmer is featured as one of the "yoga experts" on the 2011 film Yogawoman.

John Friend, the creator of Anusara Yoga, credits Farmer with creating the original yoga mat, stating that in 1982, while teaching yoga in Germany, she used carpet underlay cut to towel size during yoga classes; later she returned home to London with the material. Angela's father contacted the German padding manufacturer and became the first retailer of "sticky mats".

Anne Cushman, in her 2014 book Moving into Meditation, calls Farmer an "extraordinary" yoga teacher, and credits her with shaping Cushman's "exploratory, sensate approach to asana practice."

Sources

• Gates, Janice (2006). Yogini: Women Visionaries of the Yoga World. Mandala. pp. 53–58. ISBN 978-1932771886.