Instructors & Staff / Rocky Delaplaine
Rocky Delaplaine
Teacher
I came to Iyengar yoga in the mid-1980’s because of chronic back problems and got more than I bargained for. I left my first class feeling pain relief and a sense of serenity. Iyengar yoga has given me an invaluable toolbox for strengthening what’s weak, stretching what’s tight, and balancing what’s out of balance in body, mind and spirit.
Why I Practice
To give back to the community a small portion of that which I have received from my teachers; to share the joy (and rigor) of this practice with others; to intensify my practice of ahimsa (non-violence), the first ethical precept of Patanjali’s 8-limbed yoga system; to be touched and taught by my students.
Why I Teach
I studied and apprenticed with John Schumacher at Unity Woods in the 1980's and was certified to teach Iyengar Yoga in 1994. I was certified to teach Yoga For Scoliosis in 2014 by Elise Browning Miller. I studied at the Iyengar Yoga Teacher Training Institute in San Francisco for one year in 1990, and studied with the Iyengar family in Pune, India in 1993 and 1997, attending the Women’s Intensive with Mr. Iyengar’s daughter Geeta. I’m grateful to my teachers at Unity Woods Yoga Center: Stan Andrzejewski, Jill Cahn, Carol Cavanaugh, Esther Geiger, Liz Marx, and John Schumacher. Others who have influenced my teaching and practice, through workshops and classes at Unity Woods, IYISF, and elsewhere include Kofi Busia, Mary Dunn, Gabriela Giubilaro, Felicity Green, Donna Holleman, Arthur Kilmurray, Judith Lasater, Janet MacLeod, Ramanad Patel, George Purvis, Lois Steinberg, Patricia Walden; as well as Barbara Benagh, Angela Farmer, and Victor Van Kooten. I continue to study weekly with John Schumacher and when possible with Victoria Austin in San Francisco. I’m thankful to Diana Tokaji for the ways dance and poetry inform her yoga practice and teaching, and to my friend and colleague Carolyn Bluemle with whom I taught the Yoga for Two workshop at Unity Woods for many years before she moved to California. My mother Esther Delaplaine introduced me to Ghandian non-violent social action fighting Jim Crow segregation laws in the early Sixties, and I was supervised in sirsasana/headstand from a very early age by my father John Delaplaine.